• Lessons Learned: Stop lying on stage (Eric Ries)
  And it’s not as if the stories we hear about entrepreneurs are biased in a random way. Paul [Graham] quotes one of his founders like this: “That's the actual beauty in the off-the-record-ness: you hear just how screwed up most of these successful startups were on the way up.” In my experience, the official stories are always more linear, make the founders and investors look smarter, and dramatically overstate the level of certainty everyone had at every stage of the process. Failures, pivots, and crappy minimum viable products are generally elided. And the kinds of failures that do get airtime are usually failures to adequately plan, anticipate, or design in advance. So, naturally, the kinds of inferences we make from these stories are: we need heroic entrepreneurs, with absolute certainty in a brilliant idea, and we need to plan and execute well.
• 36 places where you can submit your startup for some coverage | Traindom Blog
  (tags: startup pr)
• Are mobile phones on a plane taking off or landing really dangerous?
  Yes, it can, especially in bad weather. I'm going to start turning off my electronics, I thought it was a myth
• The Clean Coder: The Craftsman 62, The Dark Path.
  Choose your tests well, they'll help you get the right algorithm for the problem
• Scott Cook, Entrepreneurial Skills Article - Inc. Article
  "Two, get a coach. Because people aren't going to tell the boss what you need to know about yourself. Bad news never travels all the way up. So get a coach who helps you, and criticizes, and makes demands, and holds you accountable. Don't you think there's a reason that even superhuman athletes, the best in the world, always have coaches? Yet how many CEOs do? I occasionally had a coach [Peter Wendell, head of Sierra Ventures] and made some of my best decisions when using him.
• Hacker News | Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million
  wow. what really impresses me is mint isn't an engineering company - they're a marketing company that put some ajax on top of yodlee. yodlee's been around for over 10 years and they never built a brand or a community like mint. mint is now #1 on my 'notes to self' when i get so focused on engineering my way to a solution i forget sometimes its' better to partner with a competitor and move on.
• Compete | Compete
  tracks website hits, site traffic, you can compare sites
• Rick Bookstaber: The Technology-Driven Consumption Trap
  We are a society that basically eats, sleeps, works and then veges out. Not surprising, I guess, given that the tip of the spear of the economy are those same kids who a decade or two earlier were living at home with their parents after college, after graduate school – well, some still are. That plus a car, food, our two-hundred dollar experience machine games, and we are happy as a clam. I don’t know exactly how this economy works, but I can tell you that it is not working well. What are all of Reich’s workers doing for jobs now? Where is the money coming from for even this minimally consumptive society? What levers can we pull to get ourselves out of this stagnant economy, to reduce unemployment? We are approaching our second lost decade, and nothing seems to work. Not that most people care.
• Experimenting with Delegation and Outsourcing - The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business
  author recommends TimeSvr - $69/month, unlimited tasks, sounds pretty reasonable
• IBM High School Will Churn Out IT Pros | Fast Company
  But graduating students will be equipped to do far more than work at Big Blue, says Stanley Litow, IBM's Vice President of Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs. "The idea is to create a new [educational] model for science, technology, engineering, and math--areas where companies are aggressively hiring. If you look at hiring requirements, you won't see a huge amount of difference in a lot of entry-level IT jobs." So students will, theoretically, have the skills to work any entry-level IT position.

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• IBM High School Will Churn Out IT Pros | Fast Company
  But graduating students will be equipped to do far more than work at Big Blue, says Stanley Litow, IBM's Vice President of Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs. "The idea is to create a new [educational] model for science, technology, engineering, and math--areas where companies are aggressively hiring. If you look at hiring requirements, you won't see a huge amount of difference in a lot of entry-level IT jobs." So students will, theoretically, have the skills to work any entry-level IT position.
• RegExr
  test regexes online
  (tags: regex regular expression test parse tester online)

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• IBM High School Will Churn Out IT Pros | Fast Company
  But graduating students will be equipped to do far more than work at Big Blue, says Stanley Litow, IBM's Vice President of Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs. "The idea is to create a new [educational] model for science, technology, engineering, and math--areas where companies are aggressively hiring. If you look at hiring requirements, you won't see a huge amount of difference in a lot of entry-level IT jobs." So students will, theoretically, have the skills to work any entry-level IT position.
• RegExr
  test regexes online
  (tags: regex regular expression test parse tester online)

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• The Prestige Racket - Colleges use price to signal quality
  What Trachtenberg understood was that perception is reality in higher education—and perception can be bought. “You can get a Timex or a Casio for $65 or you can get a Rolex or a Patek Philippe for $10,000. It’s the same thing,” Trachtenberg says. He bet that students who couldn’t quite get into the nation’s most exclusive colleges—and who would otherwise overlook a workmanlike school like the old GW—would flock to a university that at least had a price tag and a swank campus like those of the Ivy Leagues. “It serves as a trophy, a symbol,” he says. “It’s a sort of token of who they think they are.” During Trachtenberg’s tenure, applications for undergraduate admission increased from 6,000 to 20,000 a year, GW students’ average SAT scores increased by 200 points, the endowment increased to almost $1 billion, still quite low for GW’s size, but higher than the $200 million nest egg Trachtenberg inherited—and the university created five new schools.
• Extending lifespan: Thanks, Mum! | The Economist
  Interesting - starving is a proven way to live longer, but amazingly rotifers who starved had children who also lived longer - presumably "the inherited characteristic was aquired"
• 'The Social Network': A Review Of Aaron Sorkin's Film About Facebook And Mark Zuckerberg | The New Republic
  Zuckerberg is a rightful hero of our time. I want my kids to admire him. To his credit, Sorkin gives him the only lines of true insight in the film: In response to the twins’ lawsuit, he asks, does “a guy who makes a really good chair owe money to anyone who ever made a chair?” And to his partner who signed away his ownership in Facebook: “You’re gonna blame me because you were the business head of the company and you made a bad business deal with your own company?” Friends who know Zuckerberg say such insight is common. No doubt his handlers are panicked that the film will tarnish the brand. He should listen less to these handlers. As I looked around at the packed theater of teens and twenty-somethings, there was no doubt who was in the right, however geeky and clumsy and sad. That generation will judge this new world. If, that is, we allow that new world to continue to flourish.
• 1. The way of the program — How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python v2nd Edition documentation
  way too complicated - ignores basic questions like "how do I run a python shell?" also way too much vocabulary.
• Is "More Sex" actually safer sex?
  No - guy writes a Python script with a basic model of Landsburg's theory. "Landsburg's analysis seems to err on the following point: although the odds for a safe encounter on a single night increase when more low-activity players join the hookup scene, the low-activity players must continue to have more encounters to maintain their higher activity rate and therefore they receive more infections over time, thereby raising the infection rate for the entire population."
• The key to efficiency: limit cereal choice, take a nap - Brainiac
  1. Each night, Pozen reviews his schedule for the following day and makes a to-do list. (Usual GTD stuff.) 2. He wakes, showers, shaves and dresses in 15 minutes. 3. He limits himself to "five winter outfits and five summer outfits." 4. Every day, for breakfast, it's either Cheerios or Life and a banana. 5. Ditto for lunch: same sandwich each day, with a Diet Coke. ("And I obviously don't drink martinis ...") 6. In the afternoon, he takes a nap: "Just close the door, put up my feet and I am out like a light for almost exactly 30 minutes....I feel refreshed with a lot more energy for the rest of the day."
• SaaS Subscription Billing, or How to avoid getting your n*ts in a vice | PeachShake
  Problems with handling processing payments
  (tags: startup)
• Tips, Tricks and Advice for Traveling the World with Kids
  8. Use a small digital camera. The fantastic shots you think you’ll get of the Grand Canyon, or Taj Mahal or Great Wall of China will be left and forgotten. The really great photos that you’ll love and savor for years to come will be the up-close and intimate shots of your kids and your family. And the key to getting great family photos is to take a lot of them. A ton of them! And the way you do that is to take a small camera, have it with you all the time and take pictures as quickly and discreetly as possible. You might insist, I’ll do all that, but with a bigger better camera. But you probably won’t.
• Catalog Living
  hilarious captions alongside decorative photos from magazines.. "On a cold winter night, nothing pleases Gary and Elaine more than snuggling up in their comfy metal chairs and tossing around the decorative polyhedron."

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• BenDauphinee.com - Pay The Bills
• How to Manage Employees When They Make Mistakes | Both Sides of the Table
  Leading through praise is using just half your arsenal; step by step instructions (highlight the error, explain your expectations, plan to ensure it's not repeated, don't go back to nice guy straight away, don't yell, praise in public but discipline in private)
• Itemized federal tax receipt - where your money goes
  $5400 in federal income tax - 1000 for Soc Sec, 625 Medicare, 385 Medicaid, 287 Interest on Debt, 229 Iraq/Afghanistan, 192 Military Personnel

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Step 0: Be patient, there’s a ton of stuff to learn and you won’t be able to understand everything or build up a code base overnight. Also this is Step 0 because in programming, you start counting at 0 instead of 1. When you are working with computers details are very important.

Step 1: Learn what RSS is and start subscribing to feeds. RSS is that little orange button with three lines through it on most pages. If you read ten sites that update periodically, instead of going to each one in turn you can have the site notify you when it updates, and then get all the updates in one place. I use Google Reader. Some good blogs to start subscribing to are Lifehacker, Gizmodo or Engadget, Jason Kottke and TechCrunch. Add a few more based on stuff you’re interested in: there are great psychology blogs, economics blogs, politics blogs, news blogs, etc. To find new cool blogs look at Technorati.com, or check out people’s blogrolls. Another good place to search is the homepage of Delicious.com.

Step 2: Start a wordpress.com blog. A blog is a place where you can practice your writing skills and share a little bit about what you think. Write once a day about anything you want – if you’re tired summarize something you read in your RSS feed, practice your storytelling, sharpen your opinion. Once you get comfortable with using WordPress, switch the theme to a custom theme and install some custom plugins.

Step 3: Get an account on delicious.com to save cool links that you find. This will help you when you want to point someone to something you read 6 months ago. Plus if you want them to, people can see all the cool stuff you’re saving. If you get your friends to sign up too, you can add their delicious feeds to your RSS feed and see what they’ve been reading. If you find a great link in your RSS feed, email the author and tell them how much you enjoyed the post. Odds are they’ll be flattered and delighted to hear from you.

Step 4: Add Hacker News to your RSS Feed. Hacker News is a site where software developers share cool stuff they’ve been reading about and this runs the gamut from marketing to politics to hardcore algorithms and assembly language. Ignore all of the stuff that you don’t understand, but click on and upvote links that you read and like. The quality is uniformly good and you’ll learn about cool stuff.

Step 5: Figure out something you’d like to build – your homepage, or a better design for your blog. Then learn how to design it in HTML and CSS. Start with this:

<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title Goes Here</title>
<style>
/* CSS goes here - this controls how the letters and images look on the page. */

body {
background-color:black;
font:#ffffff; /*this is hexadecimal code for white*/
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div>
Hello World! This is my homepage. Check out more <a href="about">about me.</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>

From here learn how to change the appearance of the stuff on the screen – search on Google for “CSS change font” or “CSS change font size.” Then learn how to add things like images to your HTML code.

Step 6: Buy your own web domain. If your name is available you should buy it, if you don’t want it now you probably will later. It costs about $10 to register a domain name for a year and it’s fairly easy to set up on GoDaddy. After you register your web domain, GoDaddy will display an ad page on your homepage – you’ll need to buy Web Hosting as well. It’s kind of like the difference between buying the deed to a piece of property (registering the domain name) and paying someone to build a house on it and maintain it (paying for web hosting). You can buy webhosting for $12 per year from 2GBHosting.com.

Step 7: Move your WordPress blog to your custom web domain. Learn how to use FTP – it’s how you transfer files from your home computer to your website. Use Cyberduck FTP for Mac, or FileZilla for Windows. You’ll need to get the FTP settings from whoever you bought web hosting from, and you’ll also need to figure out how to set up a MySQL database. It should be somewhat straightforward to figure out how to do these from your web hosting administration panel. Download the WordPress software from wordpress.org, upload it to your site via FTP. Then export all your posts from your old blog and import them to your new site.

That’s it for today. By this point you should have at least 100 posts to your name, and accumulated learning and skills from reading your RSS Feed. All of the above took me about two years, but I could have gone faster if I was more focused on what I was doing. More steps coming tomorrow.

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• Put the brakes on red-light cameras - latimes.com
  An audit released Wednesday by City Controller Wendy Greuel turned up little evidence that cameras influence driver behavior. Accidents fell at 16 intersections in the six months after cameras were installed, but rose at 12 and stayed the same at four. That makes it pretty hard to make definitive conclusions either way. OK, but at least the cameras are generating revenue for the city, aren't they? Actually, no. Greuel's audit showed that the cameras not only didn't bring in a dime for the city in 2008 and 2009, but cost it a combined $2.5 million in those years. That's pretty surprising given that red-light violators busted by the cameras have to pay a $446 citation, but only a third of that goes to the city, with the rest going to the state and county.
• Use The Power of Subliminal Advertising in Your Brochure Text.
  A lot of people ask me everyday whether or not I believe they can harness the power of classic subliminal advertising used in television, then use it in plain text. My reply is always a resounding, "Of course attractive man's large penis but just for a split second you can!"
• The murder club « Mind Hacks
  Murder is not antisocial. If you want a demonstration that we are governed by society even when breaking its rules, homicide is one of the best and grimmest examples. Studies show that victim and offender tend to resemble each other to a striking degree – the young murder the young and the old murder the old, rich and poor rarely kill each other, gang bangers prey on other gang members, and you are likely to be personally acquainted with the person who later ends your life. Socially conservative it may be, but homicide remains a deeply social act.
• The Night VS Naipaul Invited Himself to Our House, Didn't Say Anything
  ‘Mom does the Indian guy not speak English?’ [my 10 year old child] asks. “Kai, he is the foremost English prose writer of the western world … he speaks English alright.’
• My DebugBar | IETester / Browser Compatibility Check for Internet Explorer Versions from 5.5 to 9
  test websites in ie6, ie7, ie5.5, internet explorer

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• How to Write about Africa
  In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.
• Michael Maren: The Might Interview, "A complete waste of money that succeeds primarily at keeping westerners employed"
  Excellent piece, the best concise summary of why Western aid is probably not only not helping, but hurting African countries. Guy works for the Peace Corps, as a "white teacher" he's used as a pawn by local governments, takes job at aid agencies, which play political games, frame issues for donors in too simple terms, but donors don't care anyway. Way too good to quote
• 5 most common dreams and what they mean - TODAY Health - TODAYshow.com
  Falling, being chased, teeth falling out, back at school, spouse cheating. Didn't know being chased was so popular, i don't really have the other ones
• HTML Color Picker
  Get darker/lighter shades of any color.
• What are the secrets to a good apology? - Barking up the wrong tree
  Results indicated that relationships recovered significantly when offending partners used behaviors labeled as explicit acknowledgment, nonverbal assurance, and compensation.
• Water Use in Southwest Heads for a Day of Reckoning - NYTimes.com
  or, you could simply charge for water at the market price: "For the first time, federal estimates issued in August indicate that Lake Mead, the heart of the lower Colorado basin’s water system — irrigating lettuce, onions and wheat in reclaimed corners of the Sonoran Desert, and lawns and golf courses from Las Vegas to Los Angeles — could drop below a crucial demarcation line of 1,075 feet. If it does, that will set in motion a temporary distribution plan approved in 2007 by the seven states with claims to the river and by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, and water deliveries to Arizona and Nevada would be reduced. This could mean more dry lawns, shorter showers and fallow fields in those states, although conservation efforts might help them adjust to the cutbacks. California, which has first call on the Colorado River flows in the lower basin, would not be affected."

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• Table of Condiments and when they go bad
  handy. Ketchup = 5 months
• I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Google’s Pound of Flesh - Cringely on technology
  Speculation that Google wants to use its $30b cash to enter payday loan business: "When I did a Google web search on the term “payday loans” for example, the search results placed the uniformly negative news items near the bottom of the results, below the fold as we used to say in the newspaper business. Similar web searches on the terms “mortgage loan” and “auto loan” put the news in each case near the top of the results, significantly above the fold where it was more likely to be seen. Why would Google do that? Payday loans are despised by consumer advocacy groups, governments, and my Mom, alike. Nobody likes payday loans, except of course the companies that make billions providing and servicing them."
• A user’s guide to websites, part 1: If it wasn’t broken why fix it? « Rev Dan Catt's Blog
  Social media is really hard to scale. Features that work for 500 users break easily once you start adding more... the workarounds are imperfect at best
  (tags: startup)
• Who knows more about religion, atheists or believers?
  Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.
• Advanced Statistics: What Would Auerbach Do? « HoopSpeak.com
  50 years later, stat geeks are trying to measure things that Red Auerbach knew instinctively. He took three Hall of Famers in one draft
• Artist builds statue of middle finger, placed in front of stock exchange
  Maurizio Cattelan’s latest art piece is a monument of a middle finger in front of the Italian Stock Exchange.
• How Tucker Max Got Rejected by Publishing and Still Hit #1 New York Times
  rapport: "Tim: How did I go from Tucker's "Who the fuck are you?" to drinking with him an hour later and having lunch with him the following day? Out of 40 people lined up, why did I make the cut? Simple: I made an educated guess and used language to reflect it. I noticed Tucker had a big neck when he walked up to the panel seats. I therefore guessed he either 1) had trained in jiu-jitsu or wrestling, or 2) was a former football player who at least watched UFC. In response to "Who the fuck are you?" I answered "My name is Tim Ferriss. I'm writing my first book for Random House and used to compete as a fighter." That was the lure. Tucker responded: "What, MMA?" Bingo. "I competed mostly in wrestling and kickboxing, but I train at AKA in San Jose with Dave Camarillo. Swick, John Fitch, and a bunch of the UFC pros train there." A few minutes later, Tucker grabbed me to go drinking. Once again, it pays to know your audience, and being different is often more effective than being better."
• Incredibly Depressing Mega Millions Lottery Simulator!
  simulate 1000 plays of the mega millions, see how much you win. to send to people who play the lottery
• video of guy doing donuts around guy riding a segway
  skip to 3:15
• Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Cal Newport and Ben: IM Conversation
  "whether college students interested in journalism and politics, in order to stand out, must prematurely coalesce around a political party or established ideology, and hold certain to those beliefs, in order to get the appropriate internships at those publications." Cal:I received a recent e-mail from a Dartmouth student who... was worried that he had no specialized enough to be a computer science of physics major. In other words, to him, it was not just fixing on something right away at college, he had the impression that this decision had to be made much earlier… It’s a challenging question. To do what I do — professional research — certainly requires specialization. I think the same probably holds for politics — intern over your summers! — or journalism — start working up the ranks at the school paper! And I often encourage students to focus, focus, focus…
• Peter Thiel Has New Initiative To Pay Kids To “Stop Out Of School”
  Thiel is starting a new initiative that will offer grants of up to $100,000 for kids to drop out of school. Yes, you read that right. Though that’s not how Thiel puts it. Instead, he calls it “stopping out of school.” The basic gist is that he will fund up to 20 kids under the age of 20 who apply for this grant. His hope, obviously, isn’t to ruin their lives, but instead to find the best minds thinking about big things early in life. This is where true disruption comes from, Thiel believes.
• Coding Horror: Understanding Model-View-Controller (the design pattern)
  Skinnability cuts to the very heart of the MVC pattern. If your app isn't "skinnable", that means you've probably gotten your model's chocolate in your view's peanut butter, quite by accident. You should refactor your code so that only the controller is responsible for poking the model data through the relatively static templates represented by the view.
• What Happens At Y Combinator
  "If the question of what the company should do is settled, the most urgent question tends to be what to build first. Usually we advise startups to launch fast and iterate. This doesn't apply to all startups (Clustrix, for example), but it works for most. The reason we advise startups to launch fast is that till you launch you're designing for hypothetical or at best tame users, instead of actual ones. Once you launch you begin the conversation with real users, whose often surprising reactions to your product teach you what you should have been building."
• Freemium is working well for Mailchimp
  Lower cost of customer acquisition main driver
• Hacker News | Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook
• Xmarks Blog » End of the Road for Xmarks
  bookmarks synchronizer can't make any money: "Sit people in front of a search box and ask them to test it, and their first query is their own name. #FAIL. It turns out that with the exception of people doing market research, consumers using search are not typically looking for an authoritative list of sites within a category; they’re looking for an answer to a specific question. Undaunted, we tested some variants of the basic search idea, including a version where we inserted our results into the Google search results page. The verdict from users: too complicated."
• Wage Laws Squeeze South Africa’s Poor - NYTimes.com
  news from a land where the minimum wage really hurts: The sheriff arrived at the factory here to shut it down, part of a national enforcement drive against clothing manufacturers who violate the minimum wage. But women working on the factory floor — the supposed beneficiaries of the crackdown — clambered atop cutting tables and ironing boards to raise anguished cries against it. Thoko Zwane, 43, who has worked in factories since she was 15, lost her job in Newcastle when a Chinese-run factory closed in 2004. More than a third of South Africans are jobless. “Why? Why?” shouted Nokuthula Masango, 25, after the authorities carted away bolts of gaily colored fabric. She made just $36 a week, $21 less than the minimum wage, but needed the meager pay to help support a large extended family that includes her five unemployed siblings and their children.
• Predicting Aid Mistakes | Good Intentions Are Not Enough Predicting Aid Mistakes | An honest conversation about the impact of aid
  Bono fails to start textile market in Africa, group arrested for trying to 'rescue' orphans (children with parents) from Haiti, sexual predators using charities to access vulnerable children, volunteers arrested for practicing medicine without a license
• David Leibow: The Number One Cause of College Unhappiness
  Based on a 2009 survey conducted by the American College Health Association-National College Health Assessment, 39 percent of college students will feel hopeless during the school year, 25 percent will feel so depressed they'll find it hard to function, 47 percent will experience overwhelming anxiety and 84 percent will feel overwhelmed by all they have to do. Academics is #1 stressor, also finances and relationships
• Innocent and spent 29 years in solitary confinement | Robert King | Life and style | The Guardian

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• How to Pitch A Tech Blogger
  really useful Competitive or Political Drama - aka “company X releases product Y to kill company Z” Gossip - “CEO of company X gets tangled up in Y” Insight - “trend X will change the world because of A, B, and C” Evolution & Confluence - “service Y is like X for Z, capitalizing on the recent developments of A and B” Success - “company X has created super impressive technology Y, is growing fast, or has made lots of money” Failure - “company X is dying or has messed something up”
• Caring for Your Introvert - Magazine - The Atlantic
  The worst of it is that extroverts have no idea of the torment they put us through. Sometimes, as we gasp for air amid the fog of their 98-percent-content-free talk, we wonder if extroverts even bother to listen to themselves. Still, we endure stoically, because the etiquette books—written, no doubt, by extroverts—regard declining to banter as rude and gaps in conversation as awkward. We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts' Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say "I'm an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush."
• Hacker News | Is being an introvert okay?
• How Universities Work, or: What I Wish I’d Known Freshman Year: A Guide to American University Life for the Uninitiated « The Story's Story
  great overview of college, liked this bit: One reason professors don’t think much of student excuses is because many students have different priorities than professors. As undergraduates, most professors were part of the “academic culture” on campus; in contrast, many undergraduates are part of the collegiate (interested in the Greek system, parties, and football games) or vocational (interested in job training) cultures. The academic culture, “[has a] minimal understanding of, and sympathy for, the majority of their undergraduate students” at big public schools. The principle is accurate: if you aren’t in school to learn and develop your intellect—and most students in most schools aren’t, as Murray Sperber shows—you probably won’t understand your professors and their motivations. But they will understand yours. Academics are a disproportionately small percentage of the student population at most schools but an extraordinary large proportion of grad students and professors.
• Hacker koan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.

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