Do NOT put your phone on permanently silent so that phone calls don't ring.

Disable most notifications altogether, especially: email and any form of group messages (like WhatsApp group).

For 1-on-1 instant messages / SMS, display a silent notification.

For specific email, create a special notify tag and sparingly assign it to urgent threads and some sent messages. You can also use filters to assign the tag automatically.

Deny notifications for most apps.

All calls should ring. It may be something urgent even if you don't recognize the number. It may be someone close to you calling with a hospital phone before heading out to emergency surgery. It may be the police. This is why you don't want to default to blocking hidden numbers unless you really have to.

You don't _need_ the competition, either. Just pretend it's 2005 and acquire food some other way.

You should update your CV accordingly: "Likely to pass several technical interviews (as assessed by the North Korean Reconnaissance General Bureau)."

I thought it was a coherent story with a lot of short pauses for comedic effect rather.

In the context of documents, the lack of font choice regarding Times New Roman could be partly attributed to the fact that it was the default font on Microsoft Word until 2007. The irony is, of course, that it was replaced by none other than Calibri.

Beware of the racist under construction progress bar.

Nice problem! I wonder if there is a generic way of testing such a problem with different board arrangements. For example, could you apply knot theory or another concept?

Dominoes on mutilated chessboards are matchings in a bipartite graph, a well studied problem for which an efficient algorithm exists.

I haven’t seen this representation before—I suppose the vertices of the graph are the chessboard squares, the edges are adjacency (white squares can only be adjacent to black squares and vice versa, which gives the bipartite-ness), and covering two squares corresponds to removing those two vertices from the graph?

Yes, and this is a generalisation of the trick from the problem described in the article.

The chessboard in the article is a bipartite graph with different number of vertices in the two groups, so it cannot have a perfect matching.

Well, upon a closer look, one notices that the chessboard coloring is not necessary for the problem statement. It's kind of a hint actually as you could equally well just consider a blank 8x8 board and realize that this coloring arugment works. I just feel the problem is unreasonably difficult that way.

The coloring is kind of additional structure that is applied on the object you are working with. And I think this idea of "applying structure" is a very generic. You can solve similar combinatorial arrangement problems that way, but it goes beyond that.

I think that a nice, classic (and significantly more advanced) example is showing that plane and punctured plane (a plane with one missing point) are topologically different. The fundamental (homotopy) groups of these spaces are different, and hence the spaces cannot be continuously deformed to each other.

Somehow the spirit is the same, I feel. In this topology proof it's not a grid you are working with, but a topological space. And the structure you apply is not a coloring, but something quite abstract (a homotopy group). The idea in both cases is similar, though: You apply structure and this structure reveals something that's not easy to see directly.

The magic part is figuring out the structure that produces the data you need.

I'd personally want to hear new voices, not more of the same. I wonder if products like this take away from the opportunity for new talent to arise.

They have hundreds of new voices in their library

Of varying quality; I am not at all convinced by their "Boston" or "Yorkshire" accents.

It's important to note that there's geographic variability in guidelines. Also, the article doesn't give enough information about the author's other risk factors. For a similar patient (based on the initial lab results), treated by a doctor adhering to the European guidelines, at least the following items would have been considered:

- Lipid lowering drugs

- ApoB testing

- Coronary CT (if the pre-test likelihood of obstructive coronary artery disease was estimated to be > 5%)

- Diabetes tests

- Kidney tests

There are numerous other options for supporting smoking cessation that do not risk lung injury.

Counter-point: For someone who's used to smoking or vaping, the craving to "take a puff" can be a very strong, maybe stronger than the chemical dependence on nicotine itself.

I noticed that in myself when I was trying to quit, vaping nicotine-free liquids helped my cravings more than nicotine itself. It didn't help the physical withdrawal symptoms but it mysteriously stopped the cravings for a while.

Sure, and removing one appealing option that many people like still means some people will keep smoking who would have quit.