The Pliss Constant....

Every so often, someone or something from my past will pop into my head for no apparent reason.

Today it was "the Pliss constant". It was devised by someone at my high school -- I think it was Joe Pliss -- who used it as an elegant "fudge factor" on a physics exam. The word spread about it. Someone else, who was in the same class, later tried to use it in a college-level physics course, and got full credit for the problem. One of the explanations I've heard was "It's so new it's not in the most recent CRC Handbook of Chemistry & Physics."

Leafing through the CRC book -- this book is huge! -- I came across something called Beer's Law. After snickering for a few seconds, I read what it was. It has something to do with absorption of light in a liquid. Here's what the Wikipedia has to say about it.

Giving OpenOffice a test drive......

Several months ago, I downloaded OpenOffice 2.0.1 for Windows and burned it onto a CD. Tonight, I found the disk and installed it on tardis (my laptop). I also installed a copy onto the system that I'm building and giving away to the person in need, as previously mentioned on my LJ.

Pros and cons so far: It ran fine on the desktop. However, it's a little slow on the laptop. But what I lose in performance I gain in functionality; I can use it to open recent Word and Excel documents. That's going to be very helpful down the line, since Office 95 doesn't open documents created by newer versions of Office.