I’m currently taking an evening off from former-house cleaning to sit and chill with my busted shoulder. An old, old injury reared its head when we moved, and my left arm can’t raise more than about 20 degrees from straight down without quite a bit of pain. Lifting is a no-go. I’m very lucky that my right shoulder (also generally wonky) didn’t give way, too.
Ze Frank himself describes this as "both terrifying and fascinating", which says something. I’m surprised the people in the park didn’t react more strongly.
Me: Do you know if it’s possible for my husband to get his name changed here [at the Social Security Administration] like I’m getting mine changed. Officer: He’s changing his name? Me: Yes, he’s changing his name. We’ve heard he might need to go through the county clerk–do you think it can just be handled here? We have the marriage certificate. Officer: Wait. What–what’s he changing it to? Me: *eye roll* The same as mine. Hyphenated. Officer: He’s… What? Wow. Greg: Yes, I’m changing my name. Officer: *incredulous laugh* Well, I just don’t know… You’ll probably have to go through the courts–look, I don’t know, just go ask back there and see!
The legend of the superprogrammer – "Caper Jones, in an unpublished 1977 study for IBM, found that the very best developers are much more productive than the worst programmer — when working on small projects. The best developer will complete a 1k line of code (LOC) effort 6 times faster than the lousiest. The productivity delta falls to 2x on a 64k LOC project. Beyond a few hundred thousand LOC both sorts of people perform equally well. Or equally poorly."
Skepticblog » The Reasonableness of Weird Things – "Many people have quite good reasons for believing in the paranormal. […] In my experience, the top reasons people believe weird things are not only understandable, but identical to the reasons most skeptics believe things: they are persuaded by personal experiences (or by the experiences of a loved one); or, they are persuaded by the sources they have consulted."
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I get so sick of elitist, skeptic douchebags with their holier-than-thou lock on critical thinking that I — despite having the same desires to protect people against fraudulent untruths — won't put the label of "skeptic" on myself. It's a movement that has a rude, pushy face in far too many of the cases I've seen. I hope more folks take articles like this to heart.
10 New High-Quality Fonts for Your Designs | Freebies – I always love things like this, even if — for the web — it means slicing and dicing text as images. To that end, if sites could consistently and easily push fonts out to users, would that be a good thing?
Arab guilty of rape after consensual sex with Jew | World news | The Guardian – Leaving aside the crazy Israeli politics and the legal side — is deliberately lying about something to get sex with someone rape if you know the thing you're lying about would make the other person say "no"? As of this moment, I think so.
A Toronto Data Guy, I want privacy because I break the law – This is a good essay on privacy and how that related to purposefully and accidentally breaking the law. I like that he doesn't once go into copyright violation (which isn't law breaking, although many think so).
10 things netbooks still do better than an iPad – Laptop & Notebook computers – I'll personally be sticking with netbooks for a while longer (for several of the reasons mentioned in this article, actually), but what tickled me pink here was the line: "Even the most basic netbook has a 160GB hard drive." My netbook has 4GB. I knew it was a dinosaur at ~2 years old, but damn. Maybe $400 for a newer one wouldn't be so bad.