Free Republic

In a time of hybrid work, employers are extra-focused on making sure their staffers are being productive. Now come employees with work hacks to keep the bosses off their tails. Mr. Abbas wrapped the cord of his computer mouse around a rotating desk fan. Its motion kept the mouse moving and prevented his computer from shutting down. “I logged on, went to the gym,” he says. For workers who aren’t as handy, mouse jigglers are for sale on Amazon. “Push the button when you’re getting up from your desk and the cursor travels randomly around the screen—for hours, if needed!”...

Railroad Tracks The U.S. Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates designed the U.S. Railroads. Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used. Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tram ways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons,...

Mainstream media have been trumpeting a lot of the polls being for Joe Biden.We’ve pointed out the problems of some of those polls and how there are the other polls, like the Democracy Institute poll, that find President Donald Trump ahead because they’re measuring likely voters not registered voters and they aren’t oversampling Democrats. Most are also not measuring things like the shy Trump voter or that the youth vote is again unlikely to come out in greater numbers. But what’s missing in a lot of the discourse is that the measures apart from MSM national polls by which you...

Dear JimRob and JohnRob: It would be extremely helpful to have a new feature in-thread to provide us with the ability to examine some of the following metrics-like data for a single thread. - the number of unique freepers commenting to the thread. - a list of the top three to five freepers who posted on the thread, measured by # of posts. - an easy link to retrieve the comments posted in-thread by a user-specified freeper. For those threads with a large number of comments, it is sometimes tedious and difficult to calculate such metrics on one's own. Such...

The statistics showing when accident and emergency departments discharge or admit patients should worry everyone. What they clearly illustrate is the extent to which healthcare professional’s clinical decision making is tied into the 4 hour A&E target looming over them. This can lead to the complete and utter distortion of clinical care decisions. Often, diagnosis and decision making in medicine is a waiting game. You order tests, you record vital signs. For some patients the decision to be kept in or sent home might be the same regardless of when you were seen. But the huge spike in decision making...

Convert any unit to another (Book Mark)

"Bush Boom Continues" trilled the headline over the Lawrence Kudlow column, as George W. Bush closed out his seventh year in office. "You can call it Goldilocks 2.0," purred Kudlow. Yes, you could. But what a difference 12 months can make. Final returns are now in on the eight years of George Bush. Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services has crunched the numbers. And, pace Kudlow, the only relevant comparison is to Herbert Hoover. From January 2008, right after Kudlow's column ran, through January 2009, the U.S. economy lost 3.5 million jobs. The private sector loss of 3.65 million jobs...

How has Moslem opinion and support of Terrorism changed since the WOT began? I ask this question because I think it has the greatest bearing on whether we are winning or not. Let me explain, I remember Rumsfeld saying at the beginning of the war in Iraq that we needed better metrics in order to find a better strategy in Iraq, which we were losing at the time, he never did find them. It was eventually Gen. Petreus that developed the winning strategy, but a strategy that’s working in one theater of the War, doesn’t answer the real question of...

NORWICH, Conn. - Brent Maynard says he weighs 74 kilograms and is 169 centimeters tall. And if you ask him for directions, he'll give them in kilometers. Maynard, a chemistry professor at Three Rivers Community College, is a champion for the metric system, a man who helped erect distance and speed signs in kilometers and whose goal in life is to see America ditch the standard system. But in a country that's hooked on pounds, gallons and miles, it is a lonely cause. Last October during National Metric Week he sat alone in front of Norwich City Hall wearing a...