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Cake day: 2024年3月16日

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  • I’m pretty much the same, but for the games of chance; As long as the prize isn’t monetary, I tend to do really good. Coin flip because two people asked the day off and only one can take it? Sorry for the other guy.

    Another thing that I’m really good at is pushing a button. If for some reason something doesn’t work after pushing a button (either computers or machinery), just complain to me it isn’t working. I’ll ask if I can try, and somehow it always works. Actually a very usefull skill when I worked as an operator in various chemical plants. Coworkers had mixed feelings about it tough.













  • Long story, but TL;DR: These are the factory settings for most older combination locks.

    Feynman in one of his books explained that he picked locks as a hobby during and after WW2. So he knew how to pick locks, but his method for combination locks was not practical, basically a guessing game. At some point, a safe (I think installed on special orders by some overseer of the Manhattan project) was locked and no one knew the combination. So someone sent for a locksmith to open it. Feynman was hoping to find this locksmith, so he could ask him how to open such a safe. But, when he came to the room with the safe, the safe was open and the locksmith gone.

    So he did what any sane person would do; he found out the name of the locksmith, started following him around for a bit and ultimately bought him a drink in a bar. When he introduced himself the locksmith recognized his name, Feynman being notorious for his shenigans including lockpicking. So he asks the locksmith how to open this kind of safe, and the locksmith responds “no idea”. So Feynman asks if he had no idea, why did he take the job and how did he open it. Then the locksmith explains that he was just going to show up, make some noise and all that, and then explain that he couldn’t crack the safe, here’s my bill thank you very much. But since he knew that these safes were all deliverd from the factory with either the standard combinations 0-25-0 or 25-50-25, he tried those first and that’s how he opened the safe.

    Feynman found it baffling that someone had a big heavy safe custom installed for him, but was then too lazy to change the combination. He also went around the labs (where a lot of files realting to the Manhattan project were kept), and found out that quite a few combination locks on the file cabinets were still set to default.