Jon Stewart's speech at the Rally For Sanity.

"These cars — that’s a school teacher who thinks taxes are too high…there’s a mom with two kids who can’t think about anything else…another car, the lady’s in the NRA. She loves Oprah…An investment banker, gay, also likes Oprah…a Latino carpenter…a fundamentalist vacuum salesman…a Mormon Jay Z fan…But this is us. Everyone of the cars that you see is filled with individuals of strong belief and principles they hold dear — often principles and beliefs in direct opposition to their fellow travelers.

And yet these millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze one by one into a mile-long, 30-foot wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river…And they do it. Concession by concession. You go. Then I’ll go. You go, then I’ll go. You go, then I’ll go — oh my god, is that an NRA sticker on your car, an Obama sticker on your car? Well, that’s OK. You go and then I’ll go…”Sure, at some point there will be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder and cuts in at the last minute. But that individual is rare and he is scorned, and he is not hired as an analyst.

Because we know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light we have to work together and the truth is, there will always be darkness. And sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the promised land. Sometimes it’s just New Jersey. But we do it anyway, together.

If you want to know why I’m here and what I want from you I can only assure you this: you have already given it to me. You’re presence was what I wanted. Sanity will always be and has always been in the eye of the beholder. To see you here today and the kind of people that you are has restored mine. Thank you.”

Quote about excellence

The lessons are straightforward: There is no path to excellence at anything except the deliberate, purposeful formation of daily habits that make the specific form of excellence possible. There are no shortcuts, and mere talent is not enough.

- Edwin J. Delattre

Quote about preparation

The only adequate preparation for tomorrow is the right use of today.

Archbishop Josiah Fearon
Diocese of Kaduna Nigeria

Portrait of the Artist at a Prematurely Old Man

It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every
Bachelor of Arts
That all sin is divided into two parts.
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very
important,
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something
you ortant,
And the other kind of sin is just the opposite and is called a sin
of omission and is equally bad in the eyes of all right-
thinking people, from Billy Sunday to Buddha,
And it consists of not having done something you shudda.
I might as well give you my opinion of these two kinds of sin
as long as, in a way, against each other we are pitting them,
And that is, don't bother your head about sins of commission
because however sinful, they must at least be fun or else you
wouldn't be committing them.
It is the sin of omission, the second kind of sin,
That lays eggs under your skin.
The way you get really painfully bitten
Is by the insurance you haven't taken out and the checks you
haven't added up the stubs of and the appointments you
haven't kept and the bills you haven't paid and the letters
you haven't written.
Also, about sins of omission there is one particularly painful
lack of beauty.
Namely, it isn't as though it had been a riotous red letter day
or night every time you neglected to do your duty;
You didnít get a wicked forbidden thrill
Every time you let a policy lapse or forgot to pay a bill;
You didn't slap the lads in the tavern on the back and loudly
cry Whee,
Let's all fail to write just one more letter before we go home,
and this round of unwritten letters is on me.
No, you never get any fun
Out of the things you haven't done,
But they are the things that I do not like to be amid,
Because the suitable things you didn't do give you a lot more
trouble than the unsuitable things you did.
The moral is that it is probably better not to sin at all, but if
some kind of sin you must be pursuing,
Well, remember to do it by doing rather than by not doing.

Ogden Nash

Quote of the Day

That's so wrong it's not even wrong.


-- Brian Dunning from an episode about "Boosting Your Immune System"

Holland Hall Chooses New Head of School

John D. Marshall

Willpower not necessarily a finite resource

Summary:

Pull your socks up.

Abstract:

Much recent research suggests that willpower—the capacity to exert
self-control—is a limited resource that is depleted after exertion. We
propose that whether depletion takes place or not depends on a person's
belief about whether willpower is a limited resource. Study 1 found that
individual differences in lay theories about willpower moderate
ego-depletion effects: People who viewed the capacity for self-control as
not limited did not show diminished self-control after a depleting
experience. Study 2 replicated the effect, manipulating lay theories about
willpower. Study 3 addressed questions about the mechanism underlying the
effect. Study 4, a longitudinal field study, found that theories about
willpower predict change in eating behavior, procrastination, and
self-regulated goal striving in depleting circumstances. Taken together,
the findings suggest that reduced self-control after a depleting task or
during demanding periods may reflect people's beliefs about the
availability of willpower rather than true resource depletion.

http://www.stanford.edu/~gwalton/home/Publications_files/Job,%20Dweck,%20%26%20Walton,%202010.pdf

Mission Accomplished

Amen. Normally I don't cross post xkcd.com cartoons, because everyone I like should read them, but this one was too good not to pass along.

Thanks, xkcd.

Low Cost Robot Gripper Replaces Human Hand and Fingers

Allows grasping and manipulating irregularly or unpredictably shaped objects using everyday ground coffee and a latex party balloon.

Brilliant hack.

via Kurtzweil Blog.

Nordstrom's Employee Handbook

Welcome to Nordstrom

We're glad to have you with our Company. Our number one goal is to provide outstanding customer service. Set both your personal and professional goals high. We have great confidence in your ability to achieve them.

Nordstrom Rules: Rule #1: Use best judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.

Please feel free to ask your department manager, store manager, or division general manager any question at any time.

75 words. Hard to beat that.

via Wikipedia.

I (Heart) Google

"NASA Ames Director Simon Worden revealed that NASA Ames has 'just started a project with DARPA called the Hundred Year Starship,' with $1 million funding from DARPA and $100K from NASA. Worden said 'Larry [Page] asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, "Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?"'"

Via slashdot.


I don't care what else Google does if they can jump start this.

Bees solve Traveling Salesman problem (en route!)

As bees visit flowers to collect nectar and pollen they discover other flowers en route in the wrong order. But they still manage to quickly learn and fly the optimally shortest path between flowers.

via Slashdot.

Quote from The New Republic

From Leon Wieseltier's column "Ghosts" in the 10/28/2010 issue of The New Republic.

For there is honor in partisanship, when the differences are philosophical; and for the purpose of social change, politics is all we have. Faction is not only a reality, it is also a calling. . . . The memory of courage and wisdom covers [the White House's] walls. Its past is its gift. Behind the Beltway, there is Washington. The Beltway is a venal place, but the streets of Washington are paved with the Constitution, the Constitution is the mortar between every brick of every building, it is in the air and in the light, you can find it even in a brandy glass, and it can get you through the day.

In honor of Wall Street, the movie

How to Tell You're Losing Your Integrity

Thank You, Benoît Mandelbrot

The length of a coastline depends on the length of the measuring stick.

Article on Procrastionation from New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/10/11/101011crbo_books_surowiecki?currentPage=all

'Leaves of Grass': Edward Norton's Tribute to Pot and Walt Whitman - Benjamin Mercer - Culture - The Atlantic

Leaves of Grass Written by Tim Blake Nelson

Science proves that you can compare apples and oranges - Boing Boing

http://m.boingboing.net/2010/10/14/science-proves-that.html

Four Reasons to Tithe

1. It is a joy -- A celebration the bounty that we have received.

2. It is a privilege -- An opportunity to share what has been so generously given to us.

3. It is an act of trust -- An affirmation of the belief that the gift will be put to good use without knowing the details.

4. It is a blessing -- A confirmation that the true gift is often to the giver.

Fr. Tom Furrer Sunday, October 9, 2010

Old School Lunar Lander

Play here.

Water Droplet Bouncing on a Superhydrophobic Carbon Nanotube Array

Trust me on this one.

Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition

Don't talk to all your employees, all your users or all your prospects the same way, because they're not the same.

The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition posits that there are five stages people go through:

1. Novice
--wants to be given a manual, told what to do, with no decisions possible

2. Advanced beginner
--needs a bit of freedom, but is unable to quickly describe a hierarchy of which parts are more important than others

3. Competent
--wants the ability to make plans, create routines and choose among activities

4. Proficient
--the more freedom you offer, the more you expect, the more you'll get

5. Expert
--writes the manual, doesn't follow it.

If you treat an expert like a novice, you'll fail.

From Seth Godin

The Fundamentals of Game Design

Starting out creating an interactive experience, of any sort really, can be rather daunting. In this tutorial, we’ll run through the basic components of a game, so we can get a handle on what the next steps are when you make the jump from the training tutorials to your own projects.

Often people have trouble when conceptualizing a game. The idea, after all, is often the easy part. It’s actually making it, and figuring out where to start, that is the hard part.

A friendly warning, though! Just like writers have different ways of working, and some composers write music in their head and others at an instrument, different game designers are going to have different ways of working. Some work better “in the code” and others like doing everything on paper beforehand. Some think in terms of story and narrative, and others are systems designers first and foremost. So this tutorial may actually run a bit against the grain for you, depending on your natural temperament.

In what follows, I am going to use the language of games, but really, every piece of advice in this article applies equally if you are designing any sort of interactive project whatsoever. So just because I say “game” in what follows doesn’t mean this article won’t be useful to you when you start making a classroom experience or a chat room or some other application.

Pope Says Technology Causes Confusion Between Reality and Fiction

Pope Benedict XVI has warned that people are in danger of being unable to discern reality from fiction because of new technologies, and not old books. "New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality. The image can also become independent from reality, it can give birth to a virtual world, with various consequences -- above all the risk of indifference towards real life," he said.

From Slashdot

Epic Fail of the Bechdel Test

The test, named after 80s lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel, asks three questions:

1. Are there two or more women in it that have names?
2. Do they talk to each other?
3. Do they talk to each other about something other than a man?

Just about every movie I like fails this very reasonable test. I am clearly a sexist pig.

I Heart Carmex

There have been "improvements" to the packaging which allow less material to enclose more Carmex. Fair enough, but I do like the old glass containers better.

Ninth Circuit Approves Warrantless Searches?

If this is true, it's certainly disconcerting.

Seth's Blog: Beware the Nile perch

A blog post about how depending on a temporary fix can cause long-term problems.

It's going to get worse

Douglas Coupland's guide to the future. Spoiler -- it's not pretty.

RSA Animate - 21st century enlightenment

Clark's Law

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. -- Clark's Law.

Adapted from Clarke's Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Ballmer does not get full bonus

Steve Ballmer reportedly didn't qualify for his full bonus this year, based on the failure of the Kin mobile phone and platform. I know someone who worked on this phone, so this feels very relevant to me somehow.

Body Part Size Proportional to Brain Volume For Control

This picture shows how the human body would look if the size of the body parts were proportional to the percent of the brain dedicated to their control. I realize I need a picture of a unicorn or a rainbow afterwards to clear your palate. Sorry about that.

Thomas Malone on collective intelligence

Interesting idea: “that features of the group can be more important than features of the individuals that make up the group, for determining outcomes.” Not surprisingly, the collective intelligence of a group correlates with the number of women in the group.

How rich are you?

This site will tell you, based on your annual income, where you stand compared to everyone else.