I know Iâm something of a Federer partisan, but wow, does this commentator take it to a ridiculous level (note that the translation may not be entirely accurate). There’s some excellent tennis in there too, but the commentary really is amazing.
According to a University College London study which monitored the boredom levels of civil servants in the late eighties and then checked in on them last year:
Those who reported feeling a great deal of boredom were 37 per cent more likely to have died by the end of the study, the researchers found.
So boredom isnât just a waste of time, it can be lethal. Iâm not sure what advice is appropriate here, other than: find things youâre into and do them!
I just registered for the 2010 Northern California CrossFit Sectional competition. Iâm doing it for the experience, as I know that my chances of qualifying for Regionals are zero. Despite that, it should help my motivation for training and (just as important) for eating properly. Itâs 27/28 March, seven weeks outâweâll see how fit I can get by then.
Or so our brains are trained to believe, apparently:
[S]tudies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally processâeven totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating itâcan alter peopleâs judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statementâs author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities.
The Python Challenge seems like a good way to have fun with Python through puzzle-solving. As with all riddles, itâs important to read the questions carefully…
This is probably old news to people who follow German politics closely, but I just found out about it (via MetaFilter).
Karl Heinz Kurras was the West German police officer who killed student demonstrator Benno Ohnesborg in June 1967 during a protest against the Shah of Iranâs visit to Germany. This was one of the major radicalizing events of the period for the German left, and hugely influential. [more...]
Recently Clay Shirky wrote âA Rant About Womenâ, a piece essentially claiming that women needed to act more confidently, even or especially in situations where confidence would be unwarranted, in order to be more successful. Thereâs more to it than that, but that was what I took as the core message. I think there are some valid points in there, but I also think that Shirky radically underestimates the ways in which women are frequently punished for acting confident, and and that he appears to assume that a system which promotes self-aggrandizers is something that we all (not just women) should accept as the natural way of things.
I might write up a longer response to âA Rant About Womenâ at some point, but right now I want to bring some attention to a piece thatâs probably more important than my response. [more...]
Roger Federer put more space between first and second place in menâs tennis history by collecting his (record) 16th Grand Slam victory, 6â3, 6â4, 7â6 (11) over Andy Murray last night. Pete Sampras has 14 Grand Slams, and now it seems as if Federer will be looking to match the all-time greats in womenâs tennisâMargaret Court has 24.
I thought it would take Federer four sets to overcome Murray, and maybe five. Instead, Federer again underscored the disparity between his game and everyone elseâs. [more...]
Absolutely one of the most amazing achievements in sports history, and terribly underappreciated. The last time Roger Federer hasnât reached at least the semifinal stage of a Grand Slam: the 2004 French Open. Almost six years ago! In addition, the only people heâs lost to in that span were the eventual champions. This on grass, clay, different varieties of hardcourt, in quite varied conditionsâit hasnât mattered. Heâs always gotten at least to the semifinals, i.e. to the sixth round. [more...]
My own feelings about my postgrad degrees are largely positive, but I think thereâs a big difference between shorter postgrad courses (like mine) and doctoral programs.
Give a $30,000 donation to the university of your choice, on your credit card.
Go to the library and write. Write pages and pages. Every time you reach 50 pages, burn all of them. Repeat for several years.
Take out an ad in Craiglist for someone to pretend to be your advisor. Set up periodic meetings with them where they read your drafts and give you the exact opposite of the advice they gave you three months ago.
Adjunct a course at your local college. Give lots of written work. Submit everything you get to one of the online plagiarism detectors. Despair for humanity.
After ten years, throw a dart at a map. Move where ever it lands for the rest of your life.
All that being said, Iâm not sure Iâd actually argue against doing a PhD.; I know plenty of people who seem relatively happy to have them. (Although most of those people seem to have done them outside the United States, a factor which may or may not be meaningful.)
On the menâs side, for the most part the top seeds have been rolling along. Six of the top eight are in the quarterfinals, the most notable absence being that of Juan Martin Del Potro, who was taken out in a tough five-setter by #14 Marin Cilic, who now faces #7 Andy Roddick. #8 Robin Söderling went out in the first round, and the quarterfinalists are rounded out by #10 Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. [more...]
One of my goals for 2010 was to celebrate my birthday. Yesterday I did just that, and had a great time. Thanks to everyone who came out! To those who couldnât make it, I missed you and Iâm sorry I gave you such short notice! Next yearâs birthday goal will be to celebrate it and give people more reasonable warning…
I was loving this article from The Economist until the final paragraph, and specifically the final line.
The article reports on a series of psychological experiments which strongly support the idea that power corrupts. The interesting wrinkle is that some people are corrupted lessâand these are apparently the people who donât feel deserving of their powerful position. [more...]
Iâve been a big fan of jQuery more or less since it came out, and Iâm happy to see the launch of The jQuery Project. Iâve used jQueryUI a couple of times and find it fairly useful; I havenât tried Sizzle yet but it looks great for situations where youâre really concerned about keeping file sizes low but need decent CSS selector support; and I wish QUnit had been around when I was writing a lot of client-side code.
I found this New York Times article on âThe Damage of Card Rewardsâ to be rather interesting. Basically, to pay for reward programs aimed at getting the better-off to spend more, credit card companies charge merchants more, and merchants reflect these costs in their pricesâbut everyone pays the same prices, while only the users of reward programs get offsetting benefits.
The article essentially concludes that there is no solution to this problemâand, unless I missed something, doesnât address regulation. Iâm not necessarily advocating regulation hereâitâs likely the banks would simply use it to enrich themselves further somehow, although thatâs a practical political problem rather than a theoretical economic oneâbut I do think itâs odd to set up a problem like this, that seems like it could obviously be tackled using an approach of tweaking market rules, while barely mentioning that approach at all.
This post at Yes Means Yes! is an excellent overview of how the profoundly unhealthy culture of American high schools socializes boys to have negative and domineering attitudes towards women. The post is a review of Dude, Youâre a Fag, an academic study of student ethnography and behavior at a Northern California high school. While the degree to which the behavior in the school is typical can be debated, it certainly seems to me that itâs certainly not a total aberration. I think a key paragraph is this one:
[Male sexual aggression in this context] has little to do with sexual orientation or desire and everything to do with a gender performance that positions the boys in relation to other boys.
I really like this idea from Dave Thomas: code katas, small pieces of programming practice involving some repetition. I came by it via Katacasts, a collection of screencasts of people doing the katas. I particularly recommend Gary Bernardtâs String Calculator in Python and Vim. (Which has inspired me to try once again to get past the vim file management issues I have.)
I found this architectural/sociological (sociospatial? psychospatial?) analysis of modern urban warfare, Die Hard, and cinematic portrayals of urban movement to be entirely fascinating. Tactics, psychology, Jason Bourne, parkour, and late-capitalist nonplacesâhow can you go wrong with that?
In 1973 the NFL adopted a new way of measuring statistical passer performance. The passer rating system attempts to combine various aspects of the passing game into one metric. [more...]