A few years back I went into an electrical supply store and had this conversation with the dude behind the counter:

Tommy:	Do you have any solder?
dude:	What's solder?
Tommy:	It's an alloy of tin and lead.
dude:	What does it look like?
Tommy:	It looks like silvery wire on a spool.
dude:	What do you do with it?
Tommy:	You melt it to make electrical connections.
dude:	So it's a liquid?

The next day, at a musical instrument dealer, a conversation with the dude in the percussion department started like this:

Tommy:	Do you have any marimbas?
dude:	Refresh my memory-- what's a marimba?

The Nietzsche Family Circus. Another Republican family man (well, divorced--but that's par for the course) with a not-so-gay-friendly voting record may turn out to be into dudes (and was busted for DUI, with blood alcohol reported at 0.14%).

That alone would be unremarkable. I bring it up only because this one is the state senator for my district. PDF documents can be encrypted so as to require a password in order to make sense of them. Not long ago, PDF only supported 40 bit encryption keys (US law at the time restricted the export of strong encryption software).

There are 1,099,511,627,776 different 40-bit keys, few enough that a program can try them all before you're dead. It was trivial to tell when you hit pay dirt; each encrypted PDF file contained a 32-byte string that would yield 28 bf 4e 5e 4e 75 8a 41 64 00 4e 56 ff fa 01 08 2e 2e 00 b6 d0 68 3e 80 2f 0c a9 fe 64 53 69 7a when decrypted with the proper key. It's as if Adobe put the string in PDF files to make cracking the encryption more pleasant.

In April 2001, I had three CPUs at work trying all the possible keys to decrypt a certain PDF document. The full search would take several weeks. For fun, I asked a friend to guess which day the correct key would be found on.

After about a week, one of the CPUs found the right key. Whether or not my friend guessed right depends on how you reckon what day it was. His guess was correct in his time zone but not in mine; the key was found shortly after midnight his time.

Coincidentally, the date of Easter that year also depended on a what-day-is-it-where issue. In April 2001, the moon was full at a moment that was Saturday in California and Sunday in Vatican City and Jerusalem. (The latter point of view prevailed.)

This has been a roundabout way to introduce this panel from Monday's Dinosaur Comics:
Yet another guessing game. This quote

We are so damned biased, even those of us who spend all our lives attempting not to be biased. Just the mere fact that when we like the taste of something, we tend to eat it more than we should.

is from which of the following:

• an author of computer programs that compose music
• the discoverer of a new mathematical symmetry group
• a lawyer
• an architect

?

As usual, please try to guess before searching the web. The original owners of my house (who thought they'd be here for a long time but only lasted two years) evidently thought it would be too hot without shade. I have no other explanation for why they planted dense, fast-growing trees right next to the house.

The contractor who'd built the house told me I ought to take the trees out, lest they damage the house's foundation. I compromised: I took out one tree (of a type known for having obstreporous roots) right away and took my chances with the rest.

Two of the remaining trees recently commenced to die, which led me to read up about the species (Cupressocyparis leylandii). They have a law named after them! Part VIII of the UK's Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003, nicknamed the leylandii law, was introduced after numerous confrontations over tall hedges. Llandis Burdon of Wales was shot dead in 2001 "after an alleged dispute over a leylandii hedge".

"People are misusing it," said David Williams of the Wales garden where the species was first hybridized. "It’s the same with aeroplanes or guns or anything--it’s not the thing itself, it’s what we use it for." That is to say, cypresses don't block light, people do.

But back to my trees. Rather than taking them out when I moved in, I continued irrigating them for twelve years so they'd be bigger and thus even more work to take out when they finally took ill, as Cupressocyparis specimens tend to do in hot-summer climates.

I now have two fewer trees. The larger one was about eight meters tall and made a cool sound when it fell. I saved a few pieces for lumber, gave a neighbor a bunch of firewood, and carted the rest away today.

If I were landscaping this place from scratch, I'd only plant stuff that didn't need irrigation.