Wednesday, November 24, 2010

heuristic \hyoo-RIS-tik\, adjective:

1. Serving to indicate or point out; stimulating interest as a means of furthering investigation.

2. Encouraging a person to learn, discover, understand, or solve problems on his or her own, as by experimenting, evaluating possible answers or solutions, or by trial and error.

3. Of, pertaining to, or based on experimentation, evaluation, or trial-and-error methods.

4. Denoting a rule of thumb for solving a problem without the exhaustive application of an algorithm.

Heuristic stems from the Greek heur-, "to discover."

Redneck First Class

• When you are flying in the coach section of an airplane and one or both of the other two seats are unoccupied giving you more room, to stretch, lean or lie down.

The middle seat was unoccupied on my recent flight home so I got to sit in Redneck First Class

Trivia

What is the tallest bird native to North America?

• The whooping crane, which is about five feet tall.

History

• Tasmania: southeast Australian island was first seen by Dutchman Abel Tasman, for whom it was later named (1642)
• The Origin of Species: naturalist Charles Darwin published his book explaining evolution (1859)
• Lee Harvey Oswald: JFK assassin was shot to death by Jack Ruby (1963)
• Lucy: Australopithecus skeleton was found in Ethiopia; she was about 3 foot 7 (109 cm.) and 3 million years old (1974)

Birthdays

• Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677): rationalist philosopher, Ethics
• Zachary Taylor (1784-1850): 12th US president; he died of a gastrointestinal disease 16 months into his term; also, Israel's second president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (1884-1963)
• Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924): playwright and novelist, The Secret Garden; plus writers Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), Dale Carnegie (1888-1955) and William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008)
• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901): post-Impressionist painter, famous for his depictions of Montmartre life
• Scott Joplin (1868-1917): king of ragtime; also, rocker Pete Best (69)
• Katherine Heigl (32): Izzie on Grey's Anatomy; also, actors Billy Connolly (68), Ruben Santiago-Hudson (54), Brad Sherwood (47), Stephen Merchant (36), Colin Hanks (33) and Sarah Hyland (20)

Read more: http://www.answers.com/main/todays_highlights.jsp#ixzz16CzmrkSf