I was just looking up at my ceiling, wondering why nothing is showing up in my outline of my newly imported into Eclipse jython project and I noticed the faint outlines of six stars in a row. Are those for me? Stars for finally installing the JyDT plug-in for Eclipse and getting something to run? The stars are all over my ceiling. Those glow-in-the-dark ones but I would not have noticed them at night because they have been painted over.

Question: if a glow-in-the-dark sticker is painted over, does it still glow?

I’m guessing no because the phosphors cannot be energized by anything.

Today is a day of discovery and realization. Before reading this BoingBoing post, it had never occurred to me that skill testing questions are not normal and that they do not exist outside of Canada. I thought it was just the thing to do when you win a contest. Just one last hurdle to the prize.

Why do we really have them? From wikipedia:

The combined effect of Sections 197 to 206 of the Canadian Criminal Code bans for-profit gaming or betting, with exceptions made for provincial lotteries, licensed casinos, and charity events. (…) These organizations take advantage of the fact that the law does allow prizes to be given for games of skill, or mixed games of skill and chance. In order to make the chance-based contests legal, such games generally have mathematical skill-testing questions incorporated.

I think I remember having an argument with my older brother when I was really really young. We were using the skill-testing-question as as measure of our intelligence and I claimed that my answer, different from his, was right thus I must be more intelligent.

My dad had to break the news that I was wrong and I just couldn’t figure out why. The question was so simple. But this was before learning about the use of parenthesis and order of operations. Actually, after writing that, I got this vague memory of a 5-10 minute period where dad said my answer was right, even though it was not.

I also remember feeling anxiety answering skill-testing questions. Like, everything to win could fall into place but if I got this wrong (shakes fist at self)…