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Intentionally Blank Page

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70 pointsdiggan33 comments

Funny story - when I was in high school, my physics teacher used to get on my case about not printing my lab reports double-sided, and how I was wasting paper. The next time I handed one in, I printed double-sided, but I put "This page was intentionally left blank." on every other page.

I have a story from my high school physics teacher as well. Before he was a teacher, he worked at Kodak on digital imaging. His group had made a discovery, and after clearing it with management, they submitted a paper to a scientific journal. It was accepted, but just before the issue went to print, government censors decided that the idea had military applications and the paper was classified.* The issue had already been typeset and there was no time to make a new layout, so the journal published the issue with nine 'intentionally left blank' pages in the middle without explanation. He had the issue on his bookshelf and would show it off every year as the most significant achievement in his career. It was still classified at the time, so he couldn't say anything more about it.

* Kodak worked on spy satellites for the DoD, among other things, so the work could have been funded by the military as well.

Maybe I'm a bit out of the loop, but for every printer I've owned until my latest one has only printed on one side. I of course could print odds and then flip the pages over and print the evens, but when I would type up my homework in high school (which was most of the time because my handwriting is completely illegible), teachers never expected me to use both pages. It didn't even really occur to me to do anything else.

ETA: My current printer is a nearly 20 year old, gigantic office printer, and it does indeed print two sides, but I think that printer cost on the order of $4,000 when it was new. Definitely was not considered "consumer grade". Happily, the generic Postscript driver and Bonjour on MacOS work fine with it, so I suspect it'll still serve its purpose as a printer for many years to come.

OP was in high school ~8 years ago, printers capable of doing both sides automatically were definitely commonly available in 2016 for well under four grand.

Plus it could've been a school printer in any case.

Heh... did you look me up? (EDIT: I forgot I recently commented about my highschool tenure until now. Hah!)

Yeah, this was 2015-2016. Yes, the school printer and my home printer supported it, I was just forgetful and a bit of a smartass :)

What printer, if you don't mind my asking? I currently make book blocks on an M203dw that's held up surprisingly well thus far, but eventually I expect it to fail; given how I use it, an old battlewagon with a duplexer is likely a much better replacement than another low-end SOHO model.

An HP P4515x.

Tough to find accurate information on the actual price and release date, BUT this is what ChatGPT said (take with a grain of salt):

> me: when was the HP P4515x released? Roughly how much did it cost?

> ChatGPT: The HP LaserJet P4515x printer was released in 2008. It was designed for businesses with high-volume printing needs. At launch, the price of the HP LaserJet P4515x was around $1,800 to $2,000, although prices could vary based on the retailer and any additional features or accessories purchased with the printer. Keep in mind that the cost for such a printer model would likely decrease over time due to the introduction of new models and advancements in technology.

So I was mistaken, it wasn't $4000 new, it was closer to $2000, and it's closer to 15-16 years old. That's what I get for writing stuff without double checking.

I didn't pay anywhere near that, I bought it in 2020 used for like $150. The UberXL I had to take to get it back to my house was like another $80.

ETA: I should point out that if you decide to buy one, make sure you buy a RAM upgrade as well. It comes with too small of memory for modern documents; when it prints even moderately sized PDFs you just get an out of memory error. I bought the 512MB RAM expansion for very little (I'm having trouble finding the listing that I bought from, but I think it was on the order of $25 on eBay with shipping). Once I did the upgrade, it's been a perfectly decent printer; it doesn't do color but I almost never need color; all I ever print are documents, generally created with LaTeX, and it works fine.

Also, if you decide to buy this specific model, email me about the firmware upgrade process. HP's documentation on doing it is actually wrong and I had to figure it out myself, and the trial and error process cost me an entire ream of paper!

Thanks! Yeah, I'd expect to install a RAM upgrade and a wireless JetDirect, for something of this vintage. I appreciate the offer of info on the upgrade, too - I might take you up on that, if I decide to go ahead and source a used one to have on the shelf for when I need it.

Actually, while not wireless, it did work out of the box plugging an Ethernet cable into a gigabit switch for me, and a 10 gigabit switch now. You could probably get away with one of those Ethernet WiFi adapters, though I have not tried it.

That's the sort I have in mind, yeah.

Ethernet's a bit of a problem in this house, at least till I bite the bullet and put in the work of running drops. In the meantime, mesh networking is surprisingly good, enough so that needing to add a switch and a mesh node to my print farm would be an annoying complication - that said, HP does make external wireless adapters for their printers also under the JetDirect line, and that's what I have in mind here. (At least I think that's the line. I had one in a parts bin once, ten years and two moves ago...)

Is the joke that you were then wasting both time and paper?

The joke is that I got to be a bit of a smartass and say "you asked me to print double-sided, well here you go!"

I was a much different person then in terms of what I considered to be acceptable (who wasn't, at 16?), but I still find the story amusing.

I have the strong feeling that he must have been a German high school teacher...

Got any stories to share with the class?

super appreciate this humor

Wikipedia's blank page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BlankPage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_blank_page

I created ready to print pdfs for the books I have self-published [1], and I intentionally left blank pages so that all chapters start on a right hand page for consistency.

Super easy to do with LaTeX

  \documentclass[11pt,twoside,openright]{book}

[1] http://theroadchoseme.com/how-i-self-published-a-professiona...

Once a page has "This page was intentionally left blank" printed on it, it is no longer blank.

I'm pretty sure the phrase can be intepreted as describing a fully completed action?

- "Benjamin C. Pierce's category theory textbook contains a page with the sentence "This Page Intentionally No Longer Blank""

The secure email protocol prototype (mixes ideas from SMTP and Tor) draft that was oddly ignored and swept under the bed had a single page for "Known Vulnerabilities", and it was, succinctly:

"This page is intentionally blank"

Goosebumps, especially the implicit chilling effect that we aren't using it.

Since I read the journal anecdote jetrink shared elsewhere in the thread before this, my first thought is "has security vulnerabilites that are classified."

In any case, it's not the known vulnerabilities you need to worry about for security.

In 10+ years of corporate transactional experience as an attorney I used [Intentionally left blank] daily.

About as often when an enumerated provision was struck from a legal agreement [Intentionally omitted] was added to the provision in lieu of striking provision in its entirety. The idea is to maintain continuity of the agreement as other provisions might cross-reference one another.

Pro tip: if you strike an entire provision from an agreement, then you might want to review the entire agreement to any cross-references maintain their continuity. And if your attorney doesn’t use [Intentionally omitted], then you probably got billed for the attorney to re-review and modify the entire agreement, in which case you might want take a closer look at your attorney’s billables.

If you have an unused domain that you'd like to be a page intentionally left blank you can use defunct.net[1] via DNS:

1. Point your domain to `a.defunct.website` or `34.36.101.120`

2. Add a TXT record containing `defunct.theme=intentionally-blank`

Voila, you have an intentionally blank page, e.g: https://theme-blank.examples.dfnct.net

[1] https://defunct.net (my service)

This is probably apocryphal: I heard about a manual, made by technical writers for whom English was a second language, that labeled intentionally blank pages depending on whether they fell on the left or right side of the book: "This page left intentionally blank" and "This page right intentionally blank".

Edit: Some search-engining confirms this is actually true.

Broadcom's Common Firmware Environment (CFE) had this on page 2 of their Functional Specification[1]:

> This page is supposed to be blank.

> (of course, we’ve gone and put stuff on it, so it isn’t really blank now is it?)

[1]: Seems to be long gone from Broadcom's own web site, but can be found mirrored in a few locations:

* https://github.com/kevbroch/cfe/blob/master/docs/cfe.pdf

* https://xinu.cs.mu.edu/images/3/39/Cfe-broadcom.pdf

* https://web.archive.org/web/20201029221656/http://melbourne....

I ran into this in Zork before seeing it in real life. I feel seen that it's mentioned in the article.

A bit disappointed that the wiki article makes no mention of the (apparent?) paradox of the message itself making the page no longer be blank!

Another penguin for my iceberg.

This comment was intentionally left blank.

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