I was so totally not aware that people didn’t know that being sorted into Houses was a real thing in UK schools. It’s not something made up just for the Harry Potter world, it’s a real schooling system, I was in the St George House at my school and everyone had the same attitude to Prefects as everyone in the HP world did to Percy Weasley I can assure you.
“Episode 4 saw the words Bad Wolf appear for the first time. I just made it up on a whim, cos I liked the idea of the TARDIS being graffiti’d. But then I spent the rest of the episode idly wondering who that kid was, why he wrote those odd words. And, having dismissed notions of Evil Super Villain Kid, a plan began to form, in mid-production. Knowing that Rose would become the Time Goddess at the end of the series, I wondered if a Time Goddess would imprint herself on the universe, creating things in her image, like the face of Jesus in a bagel. Better still, these signs would actually summon her into existence. That’s the sort of thing you think about in this job, late at night. And then I worked backwards, inserting Bad Wolf references into almost every script. Funnily enough, I never told anyone what I was doing, in case it didn’t work, but the design department picked up on it—they didn’t even ask what it meant, they just offered to stencil it on Captain Jack’s bomb, in German. The idea spread without anyone knowing what it meant. Which is very Bad Wolf in itself.”
— Russell T Davies, Doctor Who: The Shooting Scripts (via timelordsandladies)
Johns Hopkins Computer Science prof Professor Peter Fröhlich grades his
students on a curve: the highest score on the final gets an A and
everyone else is graded accordingly.
Clever students in Fröhlich’s “Intermediate Programming”, “Computer
System Fundamentals,” and “Introduction to Programming for Scientists
and Engineers” figured out that this meant that if they all boycotted
the exam, they’d all get As.
So they organized a boycott, milling around the hall outside the class
where the exams were being sat, sternly reminding each other that if no
one sat the exam they’d all get straight As, ignoring Fröhlich’s pleas
to come and sit the exam.
Fröhlich praised his students’ solidarity: “The students learned that by
coming together, they can achieve something that individually they
could never have done. At a school that is known (perhaps unjustly) for
competitiveness I didn’t expect that reaching such an agreement was
possible.”
my friend who is training to be a 911 operator just told me that they are having to restrain themself whenever responding to training calls from saying “that’s illegal people can’t do that” and I find that so fucking funny
