Notes
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The Chinese zodiac runs on sixty, not twelve Twelve animals and five elements combine into a cycle that repeats every sixty years, which is why a sixtieth birthday is the significant one. Dealing rather than drawing Shuffle once and deal round-robin. Picking a random person for each job produces wildly uneven loads and nobody notices why. The moon takes 29 and a half days, not 27 It orbits in 27.3 and takes 29.5 to return to the same phase, because the Earth has moved on in the meantime. There is one more negative number than positive An eight-bit signed value runs from −128 to 127. Zero takes a slot on the positive side, and that asymmetry is a real source of bugs. Why 12 volts needs such fat cable The same appliance draws twenty times the current at 12 volts as at 240. Everything awkward about a low-voltage system follows from that. A readability score measures two things Sentence length and word length. That is the whole input, which is why chopping sentences improves the score without improving the writing. A hash is not encryption Encryption is reversible with a key. Hashing is not reversible at all, and that is the entire point of it. A fifth of your logo is outside the circle A circular crop of a square keeps 79 per cent of it. Whatever was in the corners is gone, and it is usually the corners that were doing something. Whose Q1 are you talking about A quarter has no fixed months. A company with an April year start calls April to June its first quarter, and its Q1 numbers are not yours. A screenshot of text should never be a JPEG Photographs and flat graphics want opposite things from a compressor. Choosing the wrong format costs either quality or size, every time. One ratio, and every type size follows Pick a multiplier and each step is the last one times it. A larger ratio gives more drama and fewer usable sizes. Length beats cleverness Twenty random lowercase letters are far stronger than eight characters of mixed case, digits and punctuation.
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