2009-2010 Influenza Season Week 40 ending October 10, 2009 →
I find it odd that the pediatric death rate in Region 6 (AR, LA, NM, OK, TX) is twice that of the national pediatric death rate. Makes me glad to live in Iowa.
Instead, e-mail has, in the past 15 years in particular, become that path of least resistance for almost everything that transpires within an organization.
Son-of-bitch! I work at Taco John’s and don’t get called ‘sir’ all day. Thank you!
— Dave Helmer in response to someone yelling “Very well, sir!” to him when he asked the crowd how they were doing at the Vaudeville Mews on Thursday night.
…when under the influence of extremely high magnetic fields, there is physical motion in the magnet’s wire, leading to friction. The friction generates local heat which transitions a small amount of wire from superconducting to “normal”. The magnets carry such immense currents that the small resistance of the normal wire turns into a large amount of local heat; this in turn *transitions more wires* from superconducting to normal; and the process spreads. It all happens fast, with the risk of explosion.
— Vern Paxson, explaining the risk of explosion in superconducting magnets used in particle physics like the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC will start again in December.
Sadly, at the last minute, the production facility got cold feet because it altered so many aspects of their production cycle that it also altered the power structure in Hermann-Miller. It would have put the engineers in a stronger position than the chief designers, who were running Hermann-Miller at that time, because the designers are all geared to producing large numbers of very highly tooled products.
— HR.com Human Resources Management, Training, Jobs, Information - Features
It’s the Tom Sawyer business plan: I’m trying to convince all my friends how much fun it would be to help me,” said Mr. Sprengelmeyer.
— Reporter Resurrects Career - Buys His Own Paper - NYTimes.com
Quick Campfire Insult Bot
#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'tinder'
require 'hpricot'
require 'open-uri'
campfire = Tinder::Campfire.new ''
campfire.login '', ''
room = campfire.find_room_by_name ''
def insult
url = "http://www.randominsults.net/"
doc = Hpricot(open(url))
doc.search( "//table[@id='AutoNumber1']//tr/td//i" ).first.inner_html
end
puts "bot starting up at " + Time.now.to_s
(1..100).to_a.each do |i|
room.listen do |m|
if m[:message].match(/(shit|fuck|damn|ass|asshole|stupid)/i)
room.speak "Hey #{m[:person]}, #{insult}"
end
end
sleep 3
end
puts "bot shutting down at " + Time.now.to_s
Pitchfork has always seemed more obsessed with canonizing indie rock than most Web sites
— Pitchfork’s Decade Of Lists - All Songs Considered Blog : NPR
Insanely long music video about Bell Labs. I worked at Lucent when this was produced. Company went from 120,000 employees to 60,000 in the short 2 years I was there.
As he put it: “You get to decide what you worship.” But before we get giddy with po-mo relativity, he reminds us that nine times out of ten we wor- ship ourselves. Out of this double bind, the exit signs are hard to see, but they’re there. When the praying mar- ried man puts his hands together, the gesture might be metaphysical, but he’s seeking a genuine human con- nection, which, in Dave’s stories, is as hard to find as any God. Love is the ultimate value, the absurd, impossible thing—the only thing worth praying for. The last line is wonderful. It reads: “And what if she joined him on the floor, just like this, clasped in suppli- cation: just this way.
— Zadie Smith at a memorial service for David Foster Wallace in October 2008.
