This is a total meta-post, so just skip it unless you’re bored.
My previous post made me think of two things:
Where did that thing in the subject come from? Least pessimum? I’ve just remembered it’s an adaptation from The Story of Mel, an excellent and rather long programming anecdote. Excerpt:
Mel never wrote time-delay loops, either, even when the balky Flexowriter required a delay between output characters to work right. He just located instructions on the drum so each successive one was just *past* the read head when it was needed; the drum had to execute another complete revolution to find the next instruction. He coined an unforgettable term for this procedure. Although “optimum” is an absolute term, like “unique”, it became common verbal practice to make it relative: “not quite optimum” or “less optimum” or “not very optimum”. Mel called the maximum time-delay locations the “most pessimum”.
The other thing was that optimism bias made me think of sexual strategies, which made me think of the best spam email I ever received. It advertised, among other things, the best combination of sex drugs ever: NYMPHOMAX and SUREGASM. I mean, that could be straight out of The Simpsons.
Also: the subject “line” of this post is the subject of a spam message I received this morning.
