Over Thanksgiving dinner, my dad is explaining how he’s trying to count up all his assets and figure out if he’s got enough to retire. “But,” he says, “you know what’s missing from all this retirement planning? The one thing you really need to know but you don’t know?” Read more →
November 2005
Happy Birthday, E = mc2
E = mc2, the world’s most famous equation, is 100 years old. According to this BBC article: Einstein showed in a handful of lines that as you accelerate an object, it not only gets faster, it also gets heavier. That in turn makes further pushing less fruitful so that eventually nothing can be accelerated beyond the speed of light. Read more →
Are People Getting Fatter?
My wife’s car has preference settings for each driver. When I drive it, I get in, push a button, and the seat moves into position automatically — no manual effort required. “In the future, people are going to be really fat,” my son says. “People are pretty fat now,” I point out. “They’re going to be fatter because they don’t have to do anything.” “George Jetson isn’t fat.” “He’s kind of fat.” “He’s not fat.” “Maybe I’m thinking of Fred Flintstone.” “Fred Flintstone is fat, but he’s from the past — which kind of discredits your theory, if you think about it.” Read more →
Profiles in Management: The Liar
My boss’s boss resigned yesterday. If I had to sum him up in one sentence, I would say — and I think he would take this as a compliment — that he made Machiavelli look like a goddamn amateur . . . Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →