• Habit vs. Discipline « Autocatalyst
  I’m going to steal the adage of Hanlon’s Razor, and apply it here: Never attribute to discipline that which is adequately explained by habit. (Hanlon’s Razor states: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.)
• Did Fred Smith (Fed-ex founder) really make payroll one time by taking his remaining cash to Vegas and playing blackjack? - Quora
  By mid-July our funds were so meager that on Friday we were down to about $5,000 in the checking account, while we needed $24,000 for the jet fuel payment... When I arrived back in Memphis on Monday morning, much to my surprise, the bank balance stood at nearly $32,000. I asked Fred where the funds had come from, and he responded, "The meeting with the General Dynamics board was a bust and I knew we needed money for Monday, so I took a plane to Las Vegas and won $27,000." I said, "You mean you took our last $5,000-- how could you do that?" He shrugged his shoulders and said, "What difference does it make? Without the funds for the fuel companies, we couldn't have flown anyway." Fred's luck held again. It was not much, but it came at a critical time and kept us in business for another week."
• What are the best ways to prepare for interviews with top-tier management consulting firms? - Quora

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• Intrade Prediction Markets - Will Congress allow the Bush tax cuts to sunset?
  1 in 6 chance, so not really. I think lots of the CBO projections during the healthcare debate assumed tax rates would revert to their pre-2003 levels.
• What Happened to Your Parachute?
  story behind popular job hunting book "And, over the past three decades, Bolles's preferred method has remained remarkably consistent: Sending out résumés doesn't work. Neither does answering ads. Employment agencies? No way. What does work is figuring out what you like to do and what you do well -- and then finding a place that needs people like you. Contact organizations that you're interested in, even if they don't have known vacancies. (Bolles actually coined the now commonplace term "informational interview.") Pester friends and family members for leads. Once you get in the door of the employer of your dreams, show how you can solve its problems."
• Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers, Study Finds - TIME
  But even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables — socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on — the researchers (a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who were not current drinkers, regardless of whether they used to be alcoholics, second highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.
• This Chaplain Is Protected By God—and by an Atheist--at War - WSJ.com
  an army chaplain in afghanistan has an atheist assistant, good article. "The chaplain was struck both by RP2 Chute's command of the Book of Revelation, and his refusal to take it seriously. "He's familiar with the Christian doctrine, but he chooses not to believe it," says the chaplain, a slender-faced, soft-spoken man with a fringe of gray in his black hair. "That's what I find puzzling."

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• Culture Change - Peak Oil is History
  discussion of some of the issues involved with peak oil. given the shocks that have accompanied increasing oil production, shocks in decline likely instead of smooth decline. large potential for economic collapse, need to prepare
• Ajax Forms with jQuery | Trevor Davis
  tutorial, will implement this soon on cardboardsmile
• Readable Feeds
  (tags: rssproject)
• Pricing & Signup for ClickTale
  (tags: ganguly)
• Online Python Tutor: Write Python code online and single-step through its execution
  pretty cool, steps through program online
• How do I write so much, you ask? Well, glad you asked - | SebastianMarshall.com: Strategy, Philosophy, Self-Discipline, Science. Victory.
  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. So I read that, and I’m like – whoa. You know Neo in the Matrix? Whoa. If you want to make excellent stuff, you need to make a lot of stuff. If you want to make a lot of stuff, you’ll make a lot of crap. If you want to make excellent stuff, you need to make a lot of crap. And my personal opinion here - And that’s okay, because you get judged by your best work, not your bad work.
• Down for everyone or just me?
  IS a website down for everyone or is it a local problem
• Google Code Labs - Google Code
  cool google tools
  (tags: APIs google)
• How To Tell Who Is Influencing Whom in a Group Discussion
  The question Pan and co try to answer at each point in these discussions is: who is going to speak next. Humans listening to these discussions get this right about half the time. Presumably, they are able to use various cues such as the topic of conversation and the inferred emotional state of each speaker. Pan and co's algorithm does significantly better than this, correctly predicting the next speaker between 55 and 67 per cent of the time. And get this: it does it using nothing but the volume of speech to determine the patterns of influence between individuals.
• BonBon Buttons - Sweet CSS3 buttons

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• Node.js for Server Newbs - David Trejo's Thoughts
  web server for beginners
• A Safety Net for Global Capitalism: Inside Munich Re, the World's Risk Center - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International
  awesome article on a german reinsurer, who computes the probabilities of everything. would like to work at that place just to know what the odds are
• Planning on giving to a microfinance organization? Try these ones
  GiveWell analysis of microfinance charities
• The future of the internet: A virtual counter-revolution | The Economist
  Three forces trying to pull the Internet apart: Governments want more access to browsing history, email messages. IT companies might fragment into digital territories they can control, limit access to other parts of internet (the "cloud," I think). Network owners might try to segregate traffic, sending some traffic faster and some traffic slower
• Free Range: Naked : The New Yorker
  I wouldn’t have recognized him on the street and I didn’t know his name, but I knew him, or at least knew his body, and knew this odd habit of his. To put it in social-media terms, it was as if @weirdneighbor were tweeting, “I like playing piano in the nude. Whatever.” Because of the slant of the sun and the size of my windows, I don’t think he could see me, so our relationship, as it were, was less like Facebook, where the exchange is mutual, and more like Twitter: in other words, I was “following” him, but he wasn’t following me.
• If I Taught Greg Mankiw's Seminar, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
  8. Tyler Cowen, The Age of the Infovore. This would replace Landsburg in the category I think of as "economists outside the box." Many alternatives here, none exactly right. What I really want is The Best of Robin Hanson, a collection of six essays (any more and the students' heads would explode), but that book doesn't exist.
• First virtual school in Mass. opens Thursday - Boston.com
  The school also plans to enroll students who may have suffered from bullying, young athletes who spend a lot of time traveling, children from military families who tend to move often and students who don't feel challenged at traditional schools. The school is being funded as any other public school in the state. School districts that have students attending the school will have to pay Greenfield up to $5,000 per student.
• Google Checkout API
  how to add google shopping cart to your site
• BBC News - Charles Darwin's ecological experiment on Ascension isle
  Such ecosystems normally develop over million of years through a slow process of co-evolution. By contrast, the Green Mountain cloud forest was cobbled together by the Royal Navy in a matter of decades. Dr Wilkinson exclaimed: "This is really exciting!" "What it tells us is that we can build a fully functioning ecosystem through a series of chance accidents or trial and error."
• Scientist at Work - Debunking Myths of the Medical World - NYTimes.com
  Dr. Redelmeier’s unusual approach goes hand in hand with some pronounced personality quirks. His e-mails, which are legendary among their recipients, are written as lists, with a number assigned to each thought. Dr. Redelmeier does this, he said, in order to focus on the content of a message rather than get distracted by grammar, punctuation and syntax.
• BPS Research Digest: 9 evidence-based study tips
  Adopt a growth mindset, sleep well, nap lying down for < 30 mins, forgive yourself for procrastinating, test yourself (not immediately following studying), pace your studies (review frequently in short bursts), beware vivid examples, get handouts prior to the lecture, believe in yourself
• notironic.com - Things that are not ironic.
  List of things people call "ironic" that are actually bad luck, coincidence, sarcastic, or hypocritical - in other words not ironic.
• Web packets in flight
  How much data gets sent between your computer and Youtube when you request a video, and how fast
• Want to be a profitable baseball team? Have a low salary and lose all your games
  n both books we observed that payroll and wins in baseball do not have a strong correlation. Specifically, a team’s payroll only explains about 20% of a team’s wins. This means that it takes more than dollars to win in baseball. And this means that simply taking money from the rich teams and giving it to the poor teams is not going to transform baseball’s lower classes into winners. The Pirates appear to be agreeing with this observation. Rather than spend all the revenue sharing money – which may or may not lead to many more wins – the Pirates have decided to just keep part of this money as profits.

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• Kauffman Labs | Entrepreneurship Education
  (tags: jobs)
• Haidt, Graham et al. - Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Roots of an Individualist Ideology by Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva, Jesse Graham, Peter Ditto, Jonathan Haidt
  Libertarians are an increasingly vocal ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they are understudied compared to liberals and conservatives. Much of what is known about libertarians is based on the writing of libertarian intellectuals and political leaders, rather than surveying libertarians in the general population. Across three studies, 15 measures, and a large web-based sample (N = 152,239), we sought to understand the morality of selfdescribed libertarians. We found that, compared to liberals and conservatives, libertarians show 1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle and correspondingly weaker endorsement of other moral principles, 2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional intellectual style, and 3) lower interdependence and social relatedness. Our findings add to a growing recognition of the role of psychological predispositions in the organization of political attitudes.
• Jonathan Haidt - Planet of the Durkheimians, Where Community, Authority, and Sacredness are Foundations of Morality by Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham
  excellent, will blog soon: "Most academic efforts to understand morality and ideology come from theorists who constrain the moral domain to issues of harm and fairness. For such theorists, conservative beliefs are puzzles requiring non-moral explanations. In contrast, we present the "five foundations theory of intuitive ethics," which broadens the moral domain to match the anthropological literature on morality. We extend the theory by integrating it with a review of the sociological constructs of community, authority, and sacredness, as formulated by Emile Durkheim and others. We present data supporting the theory, which also shows that liberals may have a special difficulty in understanding the morality of conservatives. We suggest that what liberals see as a non-moral motivation for system justification may be better described as a moral motivation to protect society, groups, and the structures and constraints that are often (though not always) beneficial for individuals."
• Will Wilkinson on conservatives
  The conservative conception of American identity is so selective and so specific that it tends to suggest to its adherents that many (maybe even most!) Americans aren’t real Americans, or are Americans who betray real American ideals.
• Sarah Palin the Sound and the Fury | Politics | Vanity Fair
  devastating palin takedown. too bad the audience we need to persuade doesn't read vanity fair After starting her new career as a national figure, Palin disengaged from the community. When in Wasilla, she rarely leaves the house. At her favorite coffee shop, Mocha Moose, Palin has been seen only once in the past three months. On those occasions when she goes to Church on the Rock, she usually arrives late, leaves early, and sits in the back. For runs to Target, she waits until it’s almost closing time. She has never darkened the doorway of Wasilla’s one independent bookstore, Pandemonium Booksellers, which took part in her Going Rogue book signing at the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center. Sarah’s mother, Sally Heath, is a charter member of the Valley Republican Women’s Club, which sells a batch of Palin-family recipes for $5, but Palin has not been to any of their meetings since resigning as governor.

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• The bowling pin strategy cdixon.org – chris dixon's blog
  Any company where the value's in the network - focus on one specific area and then expand. Example - Facebook at Harvard
• Whites in Shining Armor
  when there are problems in the third world, whites in shining armor come to the rescue. Local charities and NGO's get no coverage
• YouTube - Oxxford Clothes - Made in the USA
  Promotional video for luxury clothing company in the US. Great example of how to show, not tell, quality - show the tools, the care, the attention to detail, instead of just showing great suits
• Is it often a surprise who turns out to be an NBA superstar? - Barking up the wrong tree
  This article explores the dilemma of choosing talent using NBA data from 1987 to 2003. We find there is much uncertainty in selecting talent. If superstars are found, they are usually identified early. However, more false positives exist than correct decisions with high draft picks. Our results suggest the dilemma of choosing talent is not so much a winner's curse but more like a purchase of a lottery ticket. Most times you lose, but, if you are going to win, you must buy a ticket.
• Unhear it - get that damn song out of your head!
  Plays a random song to unfix songs from your head. Need a mobile version though, if I'm on my computer i can find another song
• How to Focus - A Healthy Information Diet - InfoVegan.com
  Build your focus like an endurance athlete. He uses interval training - slowly building the length of focused time. Recommends ditching second monitor, use Spaces to filter distracting things. Sets up Chrome to have no more than 5 tabs open at one time (oldest one closes if you open a 6th tab). Ditches the mouse (i'm getting close to this point as well).
  (tags: focus productivity)
• Easiest Online Backup Service - Backblaze
  $5 month, unlimited, almost got bought last week. Looks cool - like the FAQ on the frontpage

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• Tech startups are changing the way workers are screened and hired. - By Jill Priluck - Slate Magazine
  In a hiring climate in which companies find talented workers by seeing how they already perform, the RethinkDB founders turned to sites like Github.com and stackoverflow.com, where programmers collaborate and work on special projects. "You can see the code being written and how technically accurate they are," said Glukhovsky, who inhabits a world where 95 percent of coders can't complete basic computer-science tasks. Now, a few months from releasing their first product, RethinkDB is up to six people, a mix of full-timers and interns, both senior and junior.
• Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Get to Know an Internet Commenter.
  get to know an internet commenter is one of my favorite mcsweeney's. this guy might fail a turing test
• Low social class women's faces show age more quickly than other women
• How Our Professional Elites Are Hired - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
  The prize firms are after: talented people, to be sure, but also the ability to tell clients, "We can put together a team for your company that is entirely made up of Ivy League graduates." Apparently this is enormously appealing to companies, which makes sense, given that law firms and especially consulting firms are often used as a kind of responsibility deferral system, allowing managers to fall back on some variation on, Yes, technically I approved this consequential decision that didn't actually work out for the company, but as you can see we hired the most prestigious consulting firm in America -- a whole room full of Harvard graduates! -- who affirmed that this was the best option.
• Is the Federal Government Broke? Posner - The Becker-Posner Blog
  Morgan Stanley’s report estimates that the ratio of current U.S. public debt to realistically realizable tax revenues is 3.58 to 1, which is the highest by a large margin of the countries in the report’s list; only Greece comes close (3.12 to 1). But America has certain advantages, such as a younger population and a more rapid rate of economic growth, and as a result its ratio of net worth to GDP is in the middle of Morgan Stanley’s list of countries—but it is strongly negative, as are the ratios of all the countries in the list (Italy, surprisingly, being at the top, and Greece, unsurprisingly, at the bottom). According to Morgan Stanley’s calculation (which obviously is merely suggestive, as the report emphasizes, because of the uncertainty of the future), America’s net worth is negative, and this negative net worth is eight times larger than our GDP. This means that the net present value of the government’s liabilities, minus assets, is approximately $120 trillion.

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