KnowsAboutMath

As the title says, my mother's only phone is a landline with service provided by Verizon. About a week ago, the phone started having one-way audio: When she calls someone or someone calls her, they can hear her, but she can't hear them. I haven't been able to get past the AI when I call any of the Verizon customer support numbers. It keeps asking for the number over and over. When I give it my mother's phone number, it says that that number doesn't match their records. When I choose the option indicating that I'm calling about a "home phone," the phone tree hangs up on me. I checked the line using a different phone and had the same issue, so the problem is the service rather than her phone.

Edit: Based on this scene, it turned out to be 2004's Garden State.

That's all the description I can get. She's doesn't know actors and isn't really a movie person, so "late 90s to early 2000s" is fuzzy. She thinks she saw it on video during a time which would have been around 1999-2003, so it would have been made then or sometime before.

Also, her memory of movie things in general is blurry, so "bus in a forest" may actually be an airplane in a desert. Or a unicycle on a space station. And "someone else on the bus" could mean they had a cat or an extra shirt.

I know it's not much to go on, but we have these conversations all the time, and

Kenmore Gas (LP) Oven

Model #: 790.75752100

Kenmore oven won't heat up. This is the regular oven, not the broiler. The burners on top and the display work fine. When the problem began there was occasionally a smell of gas, but we could usually get the oven to light by banging the oven door shut a few times or shaking the oven back and forth. Then it would light right up. After a while that stopped working, and the only heat in the oven was coming from the igniter.

I turned to the internet. Everyone says that the igniter is the problem 99.9% of the time. One guy on a forum even said: "If it's working correctly, the igniter should be really bright. So bright you can't look at it. Like the

I genuinely do not know what that means. What are "bindings"?

I've been working on a large computational physics program for several years now in C++. It uses MPI and it seems to work just fine. However I've been told (and read online) several times: "Uh oh, watch out! The C++ bindings are deprecated."

What does that mean? Does it mean you can no longer use MPI in C++ programs, and that I must re-write my project in plain C?

Thanks!

Edited to add:

"MPI" is Message Passing Interface, by the way, a library for performing parallel calculations on multiple processors.

A strange dream. I can't remember all of it now, but it was so elaborate and weird that I have to share it:

My family and I are living in a college town in a snowy, Alpine region. A thick manila envelope arrives filled with letters and memos and documents. It has my name on it but no return address. The first sheet of paper says something like this:

Dear Mr. [Name]:

In the absence of our usual Rabbi, you have been selected to deliver the midnight Shabbat service at Temple Beth Israel. Date: [Today]. Time: Midnight to 3AM. Place: [Address]. Black suit and tie required. We look forward to your sermon.

Signed, The Elders

What?! How can this be? Someone has clearly made a ter

I'm not a car guy. I am 95% ignorant about cars. I have a vague sense that cars contain oil, and that too much or too little is bad. I have also been given to believe that one checks the oil level using the oil dipstick.

Question: I have a 2007 Toyota Camry Hybrid. For as long as I can remember, the dipstick has been useless. There are two little dots on it that (I suppose) the oil level is meant to stay between. I pull it out, wipe it off with a napkin, slide it back in and then out again. Every time, the entire thing is coated all the way from top to bottom with oil, making it impossible to gauge the oil level. It doesn't matter if the car is hot or cold, level or tilted, before an oil c

Our AirBnB rental house is in a rural area. Mapping apps such as Google Maps frequently do not recognize rural addresses, because it is often the case that these addresses do not "officially exist." Our house has a street address, but the street name and house numbers were never registered with the county or any other governmental authority when the subdivision was created decades ago. This is very common in rural areas.

There are two methods that I use to tell guests how to find our house on something like Google Maps:

(1) The latitude and longitude. On Google maps, this pair of numbers points exactly at our house.

(2) A detailed set of instructions involving distances from various n

It doesn't have to be the latest thing. It could be from 1994 and it would be brand new to me. I possess no hardware besides an old laptop.

(Do people even still use the term "video games"? Or is it just "games" now?)

Honestly not trolling, and there is a question at the end of this.

I'm 42 years old and I've never owned a smart phone. I've never sent or received a text. I've never had accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. I'm not against these things. I don't think they're "immoral". I'm sure people get a lot of enjoyment and use out of all them, and that's fine. I'm not "anti-tech" either. I'm a computational physicist. I write code for a living. It's just that I've never seen any utility in these things for me.

I've had the same flip phone for years, and as far as I can tell it's a miracle. I can both make and receive telephone calls on a small object in my pocket! What more could I