ha ha

The Negotiator

true'dat

xkcd nails it.

Unhappy Hipster is the new Stuff White People Like

They are absolutely killing:

• No time to marvel at his sheer luck; Larry just ran.
• Their relationship was based on preparing absurdly complicated recipes using overpriced ingredients.
• The emotional distance was immeasurable.

Being a man

Scott Adams keeps a tally of his Man Points through a day.  Apparently it's a lot more complicated than I thought.

perspective

DC is not Siberia. (Which will be very apparent come August). [via]

It's only February but

...the 2010 Award for rambling yet oddly-captivating article about elevators is pretty much a lock: Up and Then Down. Congratulations to our winner, Nick Paumgarten - your check is in the mail.

Well that explains a lot

In Which Things Didn't Quite Work Out

McSweeney's: A Former Investment Banker Analyst Falls Back On Plan B.

1. Explain why you want to attend law school.

I want to attend law school because I want to make a difference in the world. My desire to attend law school has nothing to do with the fact that I was recently fired from my job as an analyst at an investment bank, where I worked in the mergers and acquisitions group. Since January, I've worked on approximately one merger, zero acquisitions, have played Spider Solitaire 434 times and updated my Facebook status, on average, five times a day. My 401K is down 45 percent. All three of my roommates — Teddy, Whit, and Dan (The Man) McGregor — have lost their jobs and are moving back home with their parents. (I feel most sorry for Whit, who's from Cleveland.) I have $350 in savings, which may seem strange because I've been making, with bonus, at least $100,000 a year since graduating from college four years ago (in "Boston." OK ... Harvard.). But New York is expensive. Drinks cost $15. My Hamptons summer share (which was a valuable networking tool) put me back $15,000 last year. This is a long way of saying that law is a tool to promote equality, and to help create a just society. These have always been my goals in life.

Tangentially related, The $700 billion man.  And no, it's not Lee Majors.  Or that chick from the short-lived reboot.  Here's the lead:

     It all began as it ended, abruptly. Kashkari was a 35-year-old business school graduate from a suburb of Akron, Ohio, who had gone to Washington in 2006 to learn how government worked. Then came the recession, and through a freakish set of circumstances, mixing pluck, cataclysm and luck, he was appointed by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson as the federal bailout chief.
     Suddenly, he was in charge of $700 billion.
     Congress savaged him. Wall Street Journal editorials doubted him. His home-town buddies urged him to use the money to buy the Cleveland Browns and fire the coaches. His wife spoke to him so rarely, she described them as "dead to each other." He lost sleep, gained weight and saw a close adviser, Don Hammond, suffer a heart attack at his Treasury desk. On May 1, after serving seven months under Presidents Bush and Obama, he resigned.
     Within a week, Kashkari and his wife put their belongings into "indefinite storage." They moved to a cabin near the Truckee River in Northern California. "Off the map," he told his friends. He threw away his business cards, and made a list of the things he wanted to do:
   1. build shed
   2. chop wood
   3. lose 20 pounds
   4. help with Hank's book
He called his four-step program "Washington detox."

through the gateless gate

Bill Sullivan - More Turns

Fascinating.

Uncoolography

Oh my:



Iron-clad Rule: Never dress like a comedian. Also, let's be honest, it's not the heavy clutch and limited trunk space that keeps people out of the Ferrari's. It's the fact that you're going to pay the purchase price in maintenance every year or two. Or so I've inferred.

inevitable

BizzaroBlog

Science marches on...

Funny cause it's true*: How to publish a scientific comment.

As Prof. Trebino points out therein, the scientific review system is broken on several intersecting levels. Not to say that the whole, messy, squalorous pile doesn't still slowly slide down an entropy gradient towards the inevitable Better and Brighter; Nor does this imply that there are still things which are well-known established "facts" and other things which are widelt known not to be such - that we're trapped in some post-modernist goo of mushy personal "truths." Mostly**. But, all that caveat in place, Moms - don't let your kids grow up to be research professors.

I'd like to note that Prof. Trebino is well-respected in the field of ultrafast pulse measurement, and that if this can happen to one of the big dogs, so to speak, imagine what it's like if you're a graduate student or a post-doc? Fun! Fun fun fun! That's what.

It's also worth noting that, as far as I infer, he's talking about ultrafast pulse measurement, which even the non-expert may surmise isn't exactly the most contentious or politicized topic ever. A couple of such topics spring to mind, but they're neither here nor there. What is here is that you should keep Trebino's tragicomic transcript in mind when someone talks about scientific consensus and points to published papers. This is how those bits of sausage get made.

*Also, I laughed till I cried! You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps! Etc., etc.

** I liked bubblegum pop music - is that wrong?

Starters vs Finishers...

Science!

Real, but rather funny, science paper abstracts: NCBI ROFL. (National Center for Biotechnology Information)

The worst thing I've just watched all of

The Guild.

beautiful

From the Department of Awful Statistics

Previously, correlation does imply correlation.

The entirety of Dilbert condensed into a single sentence

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.

Putt's Law

America's Fattiest Fat Fat*

This is why you're fat. Featured is one of the infamous Rochester "garbage plates.'

*my sister's nick-name for a certain popular weight-loss themed television show

Coming to the next vampire movie near you

Coffin Couches.

Somewhere for Marilyn Manson to crash when he's playing at the central Florida state fair.

Good luck with that

Best of craigslist: I have a huge bathroom (for rent).