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EppsNet Archive: Facebook
Do We Still Have to Lean In?
Sheryl [Sandberg] has made her husband, Dave, the role model for the perfect husband. She has said many times that the most important factor in her success was the husband she chose. And as late a week ago, she was saying that men need to do more, they are not doing enough, they need to take more responsibility. And, again, she held up her husband as an example. . . . So then, I would like to know why was he on vacation in Mexico without Sheryl and without the kids? What was it a vacation from? Who was he with? Why was Sheryl in DC instead of going to get the body? Why was Sheryl in DC instead of home with her kids? Why does Dave take a vacation when Sheryl is scheduled to be gone? I wouldn’t ask so many questions except that Sheryl keeps telling me to… Read more →
More People I’m Sick Unto Death Of
People who post love letters to their spouse on Facebook: I’m a fairly smart guy. I’ve done smart things and dumb things. But by far, the smartest thing I ever did was 32 years ago today: I married [wife’s name]. I knew she was beautiful, smart, fun, and kind. And pregnant. You left out “pregnant.” And that she has a father with a Sicilian code of ethics who was not going to let his daughter give birth out of wedlock. What I’ve learned over the years is that she is all those and so much more. My wife is loyal, strong, persistent, faithful, courageous, generous . . . Congratulations, you married a Boy Scout! . . . and a person of great integrity. Additionally, she’s a gifted musician. Oh come on, everyone knows that’s not true. She’s not even as good as me and I’m a complete phony. At 24,… Read more →
See You in Hell, O Ye of Little Faith
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] Greetings from the underworld! I was catching up on Facebook this morning and saw that a woman is going in for brain surgery and her family and friends are asking for prayers for her recovery. Isn’t that overkill — prayer and brain surgery? Why not just pray for her recovery and if she doesn’t make it, you chalk it up to God’s will? Some “true believer” religions, e.g., the Christian Science church, do that. They believe more in prayer than in medicine. They decline medical care because they believe that God can heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons, etc. as he did in the Bible. These are the folks you hear about when they come up on criminal charges after refusing medical care for their seriously ill children and the… Read more →
More People I’m Sick Unto Death Of: Hobby Lobby Boycotters
“Don’t tell me what to do” and “Do what I say” – these are not compatible admonitions. — James M. Buchanan I just saw this Boycott Hobby Lobby group on Facebook . . . There’s a longstanding liberal maxim — Keep Government Out of the Bedroom — i.e., “Don’t tell me what to do,” which has gone out the window on the Hobby Lobby case, where the liberal position is “Do what I say,” i.e., that a law requiring everyone to buy certain bedroom supplies whether they want to or not is not only a really great thing, it’s a moral imperative. Individual liberty is a two-way street, folks . . . Read more →
Killed by Prayer
A woman on Facebook a couple of days ago asked everyone to pray for her seriously ill father. Today, he died. Go figure. Had he made a miraculous recovery, we would have said that prayer “worked” . . . but what does it mean when you pray for someone to live and he dies? I had a college professor . . . his exams were graded by a graduate assistant, but students had the option of appealing grades to the professor. That’s not unusual, but most professors will either raise the grade or leave it as is. This guy, however, would either raise the grade, leave it as is or lower it. Risky! Maybe God operates on the same principle. When you put someone’s fate in his hands, he retains the option of saying “toodle-oo.” Read more →
Dying at the Right Time
Paul McCartney has 5,700,000 Likes on Facebook. John Lennon has 15,000,000 Likes, despite being dead for more than 30 years. As Nietzsche used to say, “One must discontinue being feasted upon when one tasteth best; that is known by those who want to be long loved.” Read more →
Now We Can All Feel Good About Ourselves
Sheryl [Sandburg] wrote the homage or essay or ass-kissing-memo or whatever we are calling the Time 100 writings, about Beyonce. Sheryl talks about how Beyonce has changed the music industry. She’s a leader in song and dance and performance. But there’s exactly nothing surprising until Sheryl adds, “Beyonce does all this while being a full-time mother.” In that little sentence, Sandberg does something very big. Sandberg declares that you can have a full-time job and be a full-time mother. This is convenient. Because now Sandberg is a full-time mom who spends some days away from the kids signing autographs. And running Facebook. And Beyonce is a full-time mom who spends some days away from her daughter on billion-dollar concert tours. So basically anyone who gave birth is a full-time mom regardless of how much of their time is spent on kids. Now we can all feel good about ourselves regardless… Read more →
Neil Young in LA
Neil Young is playing a couple of solo acoustic shows next month at the Dolby Theatre. Tickets went on sale Monday morning, but somehow I missed the fact that they’d been available via “pre-sale” since last Friday and were all gone by Monday morning. What a heartbreaker. Fortunately, thanks to the wonders of technology and social networks, Mr. Young and his team were able to inform me via Facebook that a third show had been added and I was able to log in and get tickets for that one. The sold-out shows are on a Saturday and Sunday. The new show is on a Tuesday. Am I looking forward to driving in to LA and back on a Tuesday? No, but on a list of solo acoustic shows for which I’d be most willing to knock over my own mother to get a ticket, Neil Young would be second, behind… Read more →
Friends Are Inconvenient
Fast Work
A junior high school math teacher posted this on Facebook: That makes perfect sense to me. Work gets done a lot faster if the results don’t have to be correct. Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
Marilyn Monroe Was a Size 12 and Einstein Was a Moron
I saw this photo today on Facebook with a comment added by the poster: “She was a size 12.” I’m an empiricist. Maybe “empiricist” is a polite word for what I am. I hate things that don’t make sense. Marilyn Monroe being a size 12 is one of those bits of misinformation that lives forever because a lot of people would like for it to be true. And yet, anyone who’s ever seen Marilyn Monroe — her full figure — in a movie or photo would notice that she had a very small waist and was obviously NOT a size 12. So I commented that while Marilyn’s point is well taken, on her worst day she was not a size 12. The original poster replied, “Of course none of this is verifiable at this point, but your comment does not help empower those who are inspired by this ‘fact,’ no matter… Read more →
Pictures of Food
Years ago, if you wanted to show your friends a picture of your food, you’d have to break out the palette and the easel and paint one. Time-consuming! Nowadays, with the likes of Facebook and Instagram, it’s just point and click! Another way life gets better and better thanks to computers . . . Read more →
Doing What He Loved
From a corporate alumni group on Facebook: We lost another good guy last night. [Name redacted] fell off his boat crabbing in the Chesapeake. He died doing what he loved. He loved falling off boats? That’s unusual. It’s too bad he didn’t love swimming. Or wearing life vests. Read more →
See You in Hell, Game of Thrones Fans
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] The Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles had a telescope pointed at Saturn this week. Anyone who wanted to could stop by and have a look. “It looks like I thought it would look,” one observer remarked. HA! He wasn’t impressed AT ALL by the fact that better men than himself built a device that lets him see things a BILLION miles away. This same idiot later pronounced himself “blown away” by the deaths of several make-believe characters on a TV show called Game of Thrones. If your Facebook and Twitter feeds look anything like mine this morning, you know that unfortunately this is just one idiot out of many. One of the reasons America is circling the drain is people’s inability to distinguish fantasy from reality until reality hits them like a pitchfork in the guts.… Read more →
Visualizing Social Networks
I’m taking a Social Network Analysis class on Coursera. These weren’t assignments for the class (well, the Facebook one sort of was), just some experiments I wanted to share. Facebook You can use netvizz to download a gdf file of your Facebook network, i.e., all of your Facebook friends and all of the connections between them. You can then use your favorite graph analysis software (I used Gephi, which is open-source and free) to look for patterns. My Facebook network is in the image below. Of the four main clusters, two consist of co-workers, one is family and one is people I know from roller hockey. Twitter This is the network of people I follow on Twitter. I used NodeXL (a free, open-source template for Excel) to download and lay out the data. I labeled the nodes in this one. With a few exceptions, the light blue nodes are people… Read more →
Parents of the Year
If my offspring ever had a conversation like this on Facebook, I hope to God someone would stick their thumbs in my eyeballs and kick me in the groin . . . Read more →
Living in the Digital World
A 2011 study by telecommunications giant Ericsson found that 35% of iPhone and Android users check their email or Facebook account before getting out of bed in the morning. Read more →
Northwood 2011 College Decisions
Unlike highly recruited athletes, kids who are highly recruited academically don’t get to go on TV and turn over hats so everyone knows what college they’re going to. Northwood doesn’t have highly recruited athletes, so there’s a Facebook site where they can check in and state their college choice. Also unlike athletes, who are evaluated on a 5-star scale, Northwood students are evaluated on a 3-star scale, according to the commencement program that I have right here in front of me: *** = Highest honors (4.3 GPA or above) ** = High honors (4.0 or above, but below 4.3) * = Honors (Not sure; close to a 4.0 but not quite there) It looks like Cal got the best recruiting class this year with three 3-star prospects and no one lower than 2 stars. USC and Stanford each got one 3-star recruit, as did Harvard and Yale. To the kids… Read more →
Not Exactly Romeo and Juliet
A Facebook friend asks to me to vote for her friends Riq and Chantelle to win their dream wedding. Clicking through on this invitation, I learn that Chantelle is a teacher and Riq is a “tattoo’r.” From the provided photo, I’d say they’re both in their mid to late 20s. The reason they can’t afford to pay for their own wedding? They have five kids. I post a comment: they already have five kids?!?! Response: Previous marriages no judging! Just vote 🙂 Then this follow-up comment from someone I don’t know: By the way that was excellent advise [sic], we should indeed never prejudge, because people who prejudge only assume things and don’t get the facts straight. OK, this guy needs to get his shit together and calm down. I’m not “prejudging” anybody; I’m evaluating people’s mental stability (or lack thereof) based on their accumulated number of kids, spouses and… Read more →