• 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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