This mention reminded me of a study where men experienced difficulties remembering the news when the speaker was a beautiful woman. Beautiful women should take up chess. Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gransmark wrote a Stockholm University working paper in which they found that male chess players pursue riskier strategies when they’re facing attractive…
What are the questions you would bring up to Ray?
Dear Google, When you treat special characters such as underscores, colons, and hyphens as a space, you corrupt my search for a single term into multiple terms, aka not what I sought, so I get too many useless results. Function names, class names, or file  names ought to be treated as a single word not…
A while ago, there was some kind of difficulty understanding why we (the DBAs) and another group were unable to read the same words yet not draw the same conclusion. The words in bold are what I wrote on my white board explaining why there was a difficulty. Communication Vocabulary Standards: Words have agreed upon…
Recently, Patrick asked how many geeky teeshirts do I have? I have 17 unique shirts. (Bought multiples of a few.) Bruce asked how many have a picture on Facebook? He had posted many of the pictures of me and most of those involve a geeky teeshirt. Thinkgeek Shirts got root? /Everyone stand back/ I know…
We have a tendency to over-exaggerate what will make us either happy or sad. That gadget, clothing, car, etc. probably will not turn the world into a Utopia. So I found this Profhacker post, “Things We Can Live Without” interesting. I don’t mean annoying things we could do without, like complaints about grades or being stuck in…
I tend to buy books. As Heather pointed out on Flickr, I could save lots of money by checking books out from the library. I don’t for one big reason. I am lazy. Most of my purchases fall within a sweet spot of wanting to read more about something because I heard about it on…