Saturday, June 9, 2012

Quiet the restlessness of the mind...

English is an inconsistent language with a dubious history but, like democracy, it's the best thing we've got. As for whether English is a global language, like it or not it is but don't infer too much else from that. (One could argue that all modern languages, English included, evolved in the same way the human animal did whereas bastard tongues like Esperanto are the result of politicization of language, calling to mind the adage "A camel is a horse designed by Congress.")

Know yer tweets using Tweet Sentiment Visualization. Enter any keyword and this website graphs tweets about that topic and maps them from pleasant to unpleasant and subdued to active and everything in between.

This is an interesting take on interviewing for a job. There are only three basic interview questions.
  1. Can you do the job?
  2. Will you love the job?
  3. Can we tolerate working with you?
This War Film Alphabet (see if you know them all) is one of the latest of the weekly Friday Projects from the creatives at Wildish & Co.
Science asks the important questions of our time: why are white Americans' heads getting bigger?

Naptime. Face facts: you too would've bought this when you had young kids. This video is worth watching if only for the phrase "wallet-draining crap factories." More facts: If you watch this you're going to hell with me.

Wife Insurance - for common faults, malfunction, and wear.
Repeat after me: neither your nor I are electable to public office.

Does Facebook wreck marriages? More than one third of divorce filings included the word "Facebook" last year. An author of a book on the topic is quoted as saying "It [Facebook] puts temptation in the path of people who would never in a million years risk having an affair." When are people going to stop externalizing blame and realize that people wreck marriages? Temptation lies within the heart of a person, not in some piece of software.

Sir Peter Blake reworked the iconic cover of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 45 years after he created the original (which is shown at the link for you youngsters).
Gaydar is 4 realz. When shown facial photographs for 50 milliseconds test subjects were able to correctly guess the person's sexual orientation 60% of the time with slightly better and slightly worse results for guessing gay women versus gay men, respectively.  Huzzah, science!

What are the seven traits of successful entrepreneurs? (For a bonus eighth, the author draws on Clayton Christensen's concept of disruption.)
  1. Grit. Be willing to fail and recover quickly from those failures.
  2. Storytelling.  Tell and sell a personal and emotionally story that resonates with your stakeholders.
  3. Salesmanship. Be willing and able to powerfully sell your ideas.
  4. Balance conviction and advice seeking. Develop the ability to know when it's OK to stick with the ideas you've got or seek advice from someone else.
  5. Find the best partners. Attract the best partners to your business and don't micromanage them.
  6. Resourcefulness. Having limited resources is a true blessing.
  7. Be both "harbor" and "ship." In a gender-based spin on hunters vs. gatherers, learn to be both the ship moving forward with goals and the harbor for safe and secure nurturing.
Photo proof that bacon does indeed go with everything.

Please welcome to the periodic table Flerovium (114) and Livermorium (116).
Babe Master School will help you with flirting, teasing, charisma, turning a friend into a lover, and everything else a man needs to woo a woman.

Academy Award winning director Brad Bird spoke at the Walt Disney Family Museum about Walt's storytelling prowess.
  • The coolest thing about the opening to Snow White is revealing that the Evil Queen is slave to her own image.
  • He considers Pinocchio to be the greatest animated film in history.
  • Walt revealed a lot about his relationship with his own father (a workaholic) in Mary Poppins.
  • Cinderella is the most bulletproof film adaptation of a story.
Science is on a roll this week: proof that old people smell different.

I do not question why you'd slice a Formula 1 car in half. I'm curious about why it took 2 years.

The hacking of LinkedIn passwords this week has security on everyone's mind again. The world's worst password requirements blog post makes infamous the Texas Attorney General's site for Child Support. Having used this website myself on numerous occasions I can vouch for its horribleness. Furthermore, the site tends to forget your password every once in a while and getting it reset takes days.

Watch this 3-minute video history of video games with a soundtrack make entirely from the games themselves.

Don't soil yourself, Trekkies. This is the first time all five Star Trek Captains have appeared together.
Europe, the Euro, Germany, Greece, blah, blah, blah. But when you (or the Pew Research Center) poll all these people you get one hilarious result. The English, French, Germans, Spanish, Italians, Poles, and Czechs all believe Germans are the hardest working people. Except for the Greeks who think they're the hardest working. Hope you like them drachmas.

Scientists got themselves a whodunnit. Between 774 and 775 mucho radiation from outer space inundated the northern hemisphere. But there's no evidence of supernova or solar flares at that time, the only sources of such radiation. Where did it come from?

Not the usual Downfall parody, but here's Hitler being informed that Eduard Khil has died. What? You don't know Eduard Khil, the Trololo guy? Dem Soviets really knew their tunez.

Before your next visit to the U.S.of.A you might want to checkout a travel guide or two where you'll find these nuggets of wisdom. (I perhaps have taken a little bit of liberty with the advice.)
  • Don't discuss immigration. Keep your tourist visa handy so they'll know you're going home soon.
  • Watch out for Texas.
  • Don't give your dinner host cash or perfume.
  • Don't plop down in an empty seat at someone else's table in a restaurant.
  • Avoid the ghetto.
  • Keep your distance.
Starry night indeed. A NASA astronaut took these long exposure star trail photos from the ISS.
Only computer science nerds need read about how to shoot yourself in the foot in any programming language.

Some parts of this ten simple rules series of articles are more interesting (starting a company) than others (teaching bioinformatics at the high school level) but still worth a quick perusal. There's Starting a Company (#5 Get professional business help early.) and Graduate Students (#9 Build confidence and a thick skin.).

...only then will you witness everything unfolding from emptiness. ~Lao Tzu

3 comments:

Jim said...

The wiki travel section on the US was fascinating reading.

Re: Password requirements - I also find it irksome when a site doesn't tell you the maximum length it'll accept until you've already blown past it.

John said...

I like the site that said the password had to be at least 8 characters when in fact it had to be exactly 8.

Jim said...

Technically it's accurate. Useless, but accurate.