When Wal-Mart tried to impose alien rules on its German staff—such as compulsory smiling and a ban on affairs with co-workers—it touched off a guerrilla war that ended only when the supermarket chain announced it was pulling out of Germany in 2006.
Guilty as charged.
You better not force us to smile - or have fun; we're German.
Though the guerrilla war against affairs sounds reasonable to me.
via www.slate.com/
"The most dangerous species of owner ... is the one who gets into the business for love."
via arstechnica.com/
The authors of the study argue that the root of all these tasks involves making a probabilistic inference, where complete information is missing, so people have to make a best guess based on known odds. Video gaming, in their view, increases the efficiency at which people can process the odds and make an accurate decision—gamers simply can do more with less. As a result, any task of this sort sees benefits.
Action Games improve decision making
The very first company I started failed with a great bang. The second one failed a little bit less, but still failed. The third one, you know, proper failed, but it was kind of okay. I recovered quickly. Number four almost didn’t fail. It still didn’t really feel great, but it did okay. Number five was PayPal. Max Levchin (Cofounder, PayPal)
If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.
Genius
via www.sebastianmarshall.com/
The equal-odds rule says that the average publication of any particular scientist does not have any statistically different chance of having more of an impact than any other scientist’s average publication. In other words, those scientists who create publications with the most impact, also create publications with the least impact, and when great publications that make a huge impact are created, it is just a result of “trying” enough times. This is an indication that chance plays a larger role in scientific creativity than previously theorized.
in theory, theory and practice are the same; but in practice, they're very different.
Incredibly good quote.
It is clearly not easy for man to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it. The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness. I once discussed the phenomenon that is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other — like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on. I gave this phenomenon the name of “the narcissism of minor differences”, a name which does not do much to explain it. We can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier.
The Narcissism of minor differences
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Discontents
Simon Winchester, author of ‘The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary’, said the switch towards online formats was “prescient”. He said: “Until six months ago I was clinging to the idea that printed books would likely last for ever. Since the arrival of the iPad I am now wholly convinced otherwise.”
None
Unlike some jailbreaking apps, JailbreakMe.com does not require a third-party app. All you have to do is visit the JailbreakMe.com on your iPhone and follow the onscreen instructions. When it’s done, your phone will be jailbroken.
This is a small example of how to not do it
via lesswrong.com/
Simon Funk's online novel After Life depicts (among other plot points) the planned extermination of biological Homo sapiens - not by marching robot armies, but by artificial children that are much cuter and sweeter and more fun to raise than real children. […] "In the end," Simon Funk wrote, "the human species was simply marketed out of existence."
None
via arstechnica.com/
Acquisitions are about enabling growth in a hot new market, and not about sustaining revenue in a mature one.
ars technica on why Apple won't buy AMD
via paulgraham.com/
But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to.
Paul Graham on Addiction
The language and idea space of the field have become so convoluted that they have confused even themselves.
On Literary Criticism
Sounds about right to me.
According to a paper by Jennifer Brown, an applied macroeconomist at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Mr. Woods is such a dominating golfer that his presence in a tournament can make everyone else play significantly worse. Because his competitors expect him to win, they end up losing; success becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
via www.scientificamerican.com/
The first case study appeared in 2002 in the journal Sexual Abuse and documented the story of a low-IQ’ed, antisocial, fifty-four-year-old convict who had a strong sexual interest in horses. In fact, this was why he was in prison for the fourth time on related offenses; in the latest incident, he had cruelly killed a mare out of jealousy because he thought she’d been giving eyes to a certain stallion. (You thought you had issues.)
Words fail me.
via www.nytimes.com/
In “Alice,” he attacked some of the new ideas as nonsense — using a technique familiar from Euclid’s proofs, reductio ad absurdum, where the validity of an idea is tested by taking its premises to their logical extreme.
Reductio ad absurdum. Should use if ever writes another university text.
via www.cnn.com/
Historically, anything that's new and different can be seen as a threat in terms of the religious beliefs; almost all religious systems are about permanence
Liberalism, Atheism, and IQ
The article states that current research indicates a (statistically significant though not extraordinary) correlation between liberalism / atheism and intelligence.
via dangrover.com/
I know it always takes me a long time to grasp any new programming paradigm. I still don't quite get the idea of monads in Haskell. You see, unlike laymen, programmers are regularly challenged with new ways of abstracting information (be it entire programming paradigms, new frameworks, or just a new way of factoring their own code) and eventually become adept at this meta-skill.
How programming probably affected my ease of learning systems theory
via cruftbox.com/
“You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.” - Steve Jobs
via cruftbox.com/
“Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” - Gertrude Stein