Tobias Mayer: How to Write an Agile Job Ad
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. — Joseph Chilton Pearce
You’ll Never Take Me Alive
Ex-con who reportedly vowed not to be taken alive shot to death — LA Daily News
To live outside the law you must be honest, as Bob Dylan has rightly pointed out. He may have been a violent, drug-addled thief, but he was a man of his word, and that’s important.
Cat and Dog
They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. — Andy Warhol
The World’s Greatest University
It’s move-in weekend at UC Berkeley, the world’s greatest university . . .
Saul Perlmutter, who just won the Nobel Prize in Physics, is teaching an undergraduate seminar on physics and music this year.
How many schools even have Nobel Laureates on the faculty? Of those that do, how many of them teach small classes for freshmen and sophomores?
Ivy League schools, with the exception of Harvard, are coasting on their reputations. When’s the last time you heard of an enterpreneur from Dartmouth or Brown or Yale?
Stanford is great in engineering and business but limited in other areas. Also, top professors at private schools would rather piss on a spark plug than traffic with undergrads.
That said, the University of Southern California football season starts Sept. 1 against Hawaii. The Men of Troy!
FIGHT ON FOR OLD ‘SC! OUR MEN FIGHT ON TO VICTORY!
Welcome to Bakersfield
There’s a bunch of Cub Scouts here at the Taco Bell in Bakersfield. I don’t know . . . aren’t you supposed to take Cub Scouts to the woods so they can cook things over a campfire?
I think I could score some hot chicks in Bakersfield. I’m sizing up my competition here — nothing but fat guys with enormous heads.
Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any hot chicks in Bakersfield — just fat guys, fat women and fat, dopey Cub Scouts.
As a Man Sows
Our body in Kali Yuga is a field of action: As a man sows, so is his reward. Nothing by empty talk is determined: Anyone swallowing poison must die. Brother! Behold the Creator’s justice: As are a man’s actions, so is his recompense.
More People I’m Sick Unto Death Of
I’m going to savagely murder the next person I hear use the word “spend” as a noun, as in “leveraging our spend.”
Spend is a verb. Spending is a noun, e.g., “leveraging our spending.” I would still have to maim you for saying “leveraging” though, so try “getting the most for our money.”
You can also avoid death by saying “How much does it cost?” instead of “What is our spend?”
You have been warned.
Things to Do in Cincinnati When You’re Bored
Cops: Teens beat man because ‘they were just bored’ — NBCNews.com
Strange piece of “journalism” from NBC News . . . basically just a rewrite of a story in the Cincinnati Enquirer in which a 45-year-old man named Pat Mahaney received a senseless, brutal beating from six boys, ages 13 and 14:
Mahaney was taken to Mercy Mount Airy Hospital, where he was treated for four days before being released Tuesday. Police said doctors had to insert a tube down his throat to remove all of the blood from his stomach.
A tube remained in his right nostril as blood continued to seep out of his head, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported, and his left eye is heavily blackened.
Police said the teens admitted that Mahaney had done nothing to provoke being kicked and punched repeatedly in the face while he lay helpless on the ground. One of the boys allegedly told police they only stopped assaulting Mahaney when a neighbor began yelling at them and said he was calling police.
The strange thing about the NBC article, though, is that it deletes information about the race of the kids, which is in the Enquirer article:
“It was a heinous crime but it was not a hate crime,” said North College Hill Police Chief Gary Foust of the teens, who are all black.
He said several residents have called police inquiring if Mahaney was specifically targeted because he is white. He was not, the chief stressed.
Two questions:
- If the boys were white and the victim black, would NBC have deleted that information?
- Do the boys look like President Obama’s son would look if he had one?
Aside
Aside
Emma Coats: The 22 rules of storytelling, according to Pixar
Gore Vidal, Lifelong Bachelor
The Economic Times here in Bangalore has a great obituary of Gore Vidal.
It includes an anecdote in which Vidal skewers Saul Bellow and his multiple wives, followed by the sentence
Never married himself, Gore . . .
Probably, like Liberace, just never found the right girl.
Sandeep Hornblower
Even in an entire city full of motorists honking at one another, our driver this afternoon distinguished himself as the greatest horn blower since Horatio.
We were stopped in traffic at red lights, and he’d still sound the horn a couple of times just to stay limbered up . . .
Aside
When the world says “Give up,” hope whispers “Try it one more time.”
Milton Friedman Would Be 100 Years Old Today
What the market does is to reduce greatly the range of issues that must be decided through political means, and thereby to minimize the extent to which government need participate directly in the game. The characteristic feature of action through political channels is that it tends to require or enforce substantial conformity. The great advantage of the market, on the other hand, is that it permits wide diversity. It is, in political terms, a system of proportional representation. Each man can vote, as it were, for the color of tie he wants and get it; he does not have to see what color-the majority wants and then, if he is in the minority, submit.
It is this feature of the market that we refer to when we say that the market provides economic freedom. But this characteristic also has implications that go far beyond the narrowly economic. Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated – a system of checks and balances. By removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates this source of coercive power. It enables economic strength to be a check to political power rather than a reinforcement.
Riding in Cabs in Bangalore
The cab drivers here are either highly motivated to get you to your destination or completely insane. Or possibly both.
“Roads” and “lanes” aren’t well-defined. A lane is any relatively flat piece of ground, paved or unpaved, that you can take possession of and defend with headlight flashing, horn honking and aggressive refusal to yield.
Thoughts I’ve had more than once:
- Is this part of the road?
- Isn’t that a sidewalk?
Crossing Streets in Bangalore aka Human Frogger
Increase Code Coverage by One Percent
Don’t kill yourself striving for 100% coverage of code with automated unit tests. But take a few minutes to increase your coverage by 1%.
Most likely, that means going from 0% to 1%. And that’s the biggest improvement of all.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. / I learn by going where I have to go. — Theodore Roethke