Interesting Links for 14-02-2014

[andrewducker]

• Modern Microprocessors - A 90 Minute Guide!
  (tags: programming hardware systems technology processor design cpu )
• The brain reacts to beautiful mathematics in the same way as great art
  (tags: brains beauty mathematics )
• New gender options for Facebook users
  (tags: facebook gender )
• On the Origin of "Fuck"
  (tags: fuck language english history )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

I guy I worked with ran such completely separate books from his wife that they would buy their own loo roll.

[andrewducker]

Julie and I have a joint account for all of the household stuff, council tax, etc. When she had an income, we split our payments in there in the same proportion of our income. Meals out, etc. also tended to come out of there.

She wanted to keep a separate bank account for personal spending money, so that she felt less guilty. I don't really care either way, as I have a very relaxed attitude towards money (which I cope with on the larger scale by arranging all of the big bills so that they come out on payday).

[drdoug]

Finances are a really big thing - for my money (sorry!) the important thing is that whatever system people use works for them.

I always like to mention two systems that have worked well for me in different circumstances:

VIRTUAL KITTY
This works for people who want to pay for some common things but have separate finances - i.e. no joint account, and not even a tin for petty cash. It's worked for me in shared houses. Instead of all paying an amount in to the kitty, people just buy the collective goods or pay collective bills and note down what they've spent. On a piece of paper, in a shared spreadsheet, or whatever. Then periodically you just net everything and the net debtor(s) pay the net creditor(s). (Sum all expenditure, divide it by N, then for each person take that away from the sum of their purchases. Negative means you owe that amount, positive means you are owed that amount - I suspect working out who should pay whom is NP-complete (it smells like the knapsack problem) but in practice for N<7 it's trivial.) If your incomes

[andrewducker]

Basically, my feeling is "Why would I want a chunk of my relationship time to be spent working out how much we owe each other? That's the epitome of anti-fun."

[del_c]

I like that the fuck article includes a fifteenth century version of ROT13.