• Hitler Hops - find the degree of Hitler
  How many degrees a given page is from Hitler on Wikipedia
  (tags: goodmorningcmc)
• How to Buy a Round-the-World Plane Ticket (That Kicks Ass)
• Dan Ariely » Blog Archive Online Dating: Avoiding a bad Equilibrium «
  when left alone, online daters ask boring questions - college, hobbies etc. When given interesting questions - "How many partners? Any STD's?" etc, much more interesting, everyone happier. Think about the implications

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• BPS Research Digest: How to form a habit
  "Of the 82 participants who saw the study through to the end, the most common pattern of habit formation was for early repetitions of the chosen behaviour to produce the largest increases in its automaticity. Over time, further increases in automaticity dwindled until a plateau was reached beyond which extra repetitions made no difference to the automaticity achieved. The average time to reach maximum automaticity was 66 days."
• ‘The Wire’ Monopoly Game | The Poke:
  “We hope The Wire Monopoly game will go down well not just with fans of the show, but everyone who secretly wishes to be a poor violent black drug dealer from America.”
• Forecasting Bankruptcy More Accurately: A Simple Hazard Model
  What predicts firm bankruptcy? Market Value of equity/Total Liabilities, EBIT/Total Assets, a firm's market size, its past stock returns, and the idiosyncratic standard deviation of its stock returns all forecast failure.
• Evil Overlord List
  funny - "When I've captured my adversary and he says, "Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?" I'll say, "No." and shoot him. No, on second thought I'll shoot him then say "No."
  (tags: humor)

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• How to get a job at a kick-ass startup (for programmers) - Blog - thoughts from the red planet
• BBC News - Man jailed over computer password refusal
  expect this story to come up more and more frequently
• First ever marriage proposal via facebook?
  lamebook.com, excellent window into americans lives
• Mind - Why All Indiscretions Appear Youthful - NYTimes.com
  How people rationalize wrongdoing, maintain positive self image. "Future selves may score the best reviews of all" - emphasize unwritten future potential
• Experimentation, orgasms, and the rise of anal sex - William Saletan reviews the latest national sex survey
• Common "code smells" (bad programming practices) and ways to improve them
  Don't leave variables in global scope, indent consistently, avoid magic numbers in code, functions should do at most 1 task, etc.
• Forty Percent of Groupon Merchants Say Never Again
  Groupon customers are poor tippers, rush of people causes poor service, 30% don't make a profit off of the Groupon. Spas/salons do better than restaurants
• With Alcohol Policy, Tradition Succumbs to Ebb and Flow « Forum | The Official Student Publication of Claremont McKenna College
  From a Sarah Lawrence alum: I don't recall the particular pumpkin-carving event, but Mary's tenure at Sarah Lawrence coincided with all of the following happenings: - The cancellation of Sleaze Ball, an event that celebrated sexual diversity, on the grounds that "too many kids were ending up in ER" (I think the highest count was eight on the evening in question, but my understanding is that more stringent alcohol policies were already in place by then). - The alcohol policy became VERY STRINGENT over the what, four-five years she was at the school. It's by no means a dry campus now, but trying to get a sufficient amount of alcohol at school events tends to be an uphill battle. - A shift in security-student relations. Security became less friends with us, and more disciplinarians. Make of this what you will. The only reason anybody at Sarah Lawrence was sad to see her go was that nobody who met her successor thought that there had been any kind of improvement.
• how to play the american beauty theme on piano
• How to Sell a Domain Name
  Don't commit to a price, don't look weak, as the owner you hold all the cards. Doesn't sound at all like selling a house
• Glenn Beck: Dana Milbank’s Tears of a Clown Excerpt - The Daily Beast
  At the end of 2009, Gallup asked Americans which living man anywhere in the world they admire most. More volunteered Beck than offered the pope, Bill Gates, Billy Graham, Bill Clinton, or George H.W. Bush. The only man to be mentioned more often than Beck was South Africa’s Nelson Mandela.
• Open Source Software in Python
  (tags: opensource)
• How Fake Money Saved Brazil : Planet Money : NPR
  economists invented fake currency that had constant value, after a few months they simply converted to the fake one. amazing
• The bizarre, sad tale of Togo's fake national soccer team. - By Brian Phillips - Slate Magazine
  amazing story of soccer in africa, politics that get involved. fifa tends to promote image of thriving african soccer, downplay the crazy stuff. fascinating

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• 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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