Thank you for sharing. This seems so obvious, and yet, it has helped me and works wonderfully. I've been able to get started and quite far along the way already (in just a day or so) writing reports that were due months ago and I couldn't have brought myself to work on them even though I find the topic interesting.

Just took it.

About the probability questions: I thought you were supposed to answer them instantly for your intuitive stance at the moment, without additional research, though I see some of responders apparently did research. Perhaps it should be better specified what is meant.

drawing an analogy between my social networking behaviour and annealing

Could you elaborate on that?

Would you be interested in writing up the results of your investigations? A structured article on tested useful drugs, if only with a terse summary of what each of them is good for, would be an interesting starting point for studying this topic further. Most such resources on the Internet seem to focus mainly on illegal drugs, which makes their use somewhat problematic.

Same in Poland; although many people do tip in restaurants. I'm always a little bit confused by the American tipping rituals whenever I see it in a movie or whatever.

How about the rest of Europe?

We can only hope that this was an artful stroke made from the shadows by some great master of the Dark Arts, and not a mere snowballing of an ignorant question.

Actually, I'd hope quite the opposite. Perhaps it'd be a sad conclusion, but yours strikes me as potentially more dangerous.

Did he? I thought he just meant 'odds' when he said 'probability'.

Try and do that with Rudy Rucker, I dare you. I only endured first thirty or so pages of his "Postsingular" before all that was left of my suspension of disbelief were sad ashes and smoke started to come out of my ears.

EDIT: Although, to be fair, I haven't tried his other books. I hear the 'ware' trilogy is quite good. I can't shake off the distaste after trying "Postsingular", though.

Thanks for the explanation, wouldn't have thought about it from this angle without it. It's pretty good when read in this way. Upvoted.

Ouch. Comic Sans.

Good cookbook, though.