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The Mindset of the Incoming College Freshmen
Beloit College has come out with its annual Mindset List of what the incoming class (of 2013) has always known and has never known. "For these students, ... the Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables. They have never used a card catalog to find a book. ... Tattoos have always been very chic and highly visible. ... Rap music has always been mainstream. ... Except for the present incumbent, the President has never inhaled. ... Amateur radio operators have never needed to know Morse code."
'The European Union has always existed'.
...I just told my Electronics 1001 students about the tube testers they used to have at Seven-Eleven. I'll have a 12AU6 and a Slurpee, please. rj
I find it hard to believe that there aren't still a lot of school libraries out there that still use card catalogues. But what do I know.
I think there's at least a 10-year delay between birth and awareness of international politics; the first UK PM I remember John Major
I do remember the excitement we all felt when Salsa was officially the fastest-growing condiment in North America. Heady days, those.
This is interesting. Wiki tells me the first web pages went up in December 1990. Those early days of the web have really moved into the realm of history, albeit recent history.
I don't recall it ever being socially unaccebtable, though I do know it was considered - and is, if you ask me - a stupid thing to do, up there with jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.
Since when is RSVP out of our lexicon? I never got that memo.
Well, the European Community has existed since the 50s; this one's more of a technicality.
And Tianammen Square happened before they were born! Yikes.
I imagine this has been true since the 60s, at least.
As opposed to what? The GNP?
And I bet there's someone on Slashdot who cares! :)
I don't think there were any flat-screen TVs in 1991 - unless you count those flat-glass CRTs, which don't really count.
Hah! I doubt that happens very often.
Quayle had power? Biden has power?
That only became blase in the late 90s, as far as I'm concerned
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Soon they will also be people who only remember when Fermat's Last Theorem was a solved problem, not one of the great mysteries told to young kids interested in mathematics. I've worked for a few years teaching number theory to highschool students and it came as a shock when I realized that I was teaching some students who had actually been born after Andrew Wiles had proved Fermat's Last Theorem. The proof of FLT was one of the defining moments in my mathematical childhold. And in a year or two, those kids will in college. There really isn't any simple problem that has the same wonderful history to rope kids into doing math by looking really easy and yet having such a convoluted and romantic history. Even the oldest two unsolved problems in mathematics (whether there are any odd perfect numbers and whether there are infinitely many even perfect numbers) don't have the same sort of romance to them: No one ever claimed they had a beautiful proof of these. Ok, someone now go ahead and mark this an off-topic ramble by an old-codger...
Although certainly the original reason for ++ was so that a very stupid compiler could still produce the optimal code, it also serves some purposes that are important:
(complicated_expression)++ is much easier to read than complicate_expression = complicated_expression+1. In the second case it is often difficult to tell that it is the same variable. The only "modern" way to express this is with references, such as reference a = reference(complicated_expression); a = a+1.
Also postfix ++ returns the previous value, this is often very useful, though confusing. It can be worked around again with a temporary variable.