pchivers's comments

I don't know why that is. I think maybe it's the font, coupled with the fact that it's on a white background.

Instead of "To Be a Consultant, a freelancer or an independent contractor", I would change it to something like, "How To Be a Consultant, Freelancer or Independent Contractor".

You would think that after 20-30 trips to US I would have learned to adjust my expectations by now, but it is still amazing to me to witness how much food Americans eat no matter how many times I see it.

The consistent failure of underdogs in professional sports to even try something new suggests, to me, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the incentive structure of the leagues.

This pretty sums up why I generally don't watch professional sports. I love basketball, but the way that it is played in the NBA is so conservative that it's about as interesting as watching paint dry.

I would love to see the pro sports leagues implement financial incentives in order to reward teams that are taking risks. The only organization I know that does this is the UFC (via their "Fight of the Night", "Knockout of the Night" and "Submission of the Night" bonuses), and perhaps not coincidentally, that is the only sport I find interesting enough to watch on a regular basis.

Obligatory Onion article:

http://www.onion.demon.co.uk/theonion/other/babies/stupidbab...

A surprising new study released Monday by UCLA's Institute For Child Development revealed that human babies, long thought by psychologists to be highly inquisitive and adaptable, are actually extraordinarily stupid.

"My hypothesis is that most children are emotionally damaged by [growing up in a dysfunctional family]. But a small percentage, whose brain chemistry and wiring is set for resilience, come out of this with a compulsive, relentless and tenacious drive to succeed. They have learned to function in a permanent state of chaos. And they have channeled all this into whatever activity they could find outside of their home – sports, business, or …entrepreneurship."

http://www.amazon.com/Biology-Love-Arthur-Janov/dp/157392829...

His theory is that the primary cause of mental illness is intrauterine trauma, which negatively affects the structure of the emotional brain at a very crucial developmental stage. This trauma is undiagnosed and untreated in the newborn infant, and persists into adulthood, where it results in depression, addiction, panic attacks, etc.

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EDIT: asciilifeform, do you have some kind of axe to grind?

Anyways, here's a few links to scientific studies that support the relationship between intrauterine trauma and mental illness:

Relationship of maternal and perinatal conditions to eventual adolescent suicide

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2857957

Obstetric care and proneness of offspring to suicide as adults: case-control study

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9812930

Controversial, yes. Without any scientific support, no.

Antidepressants, Placebos and the Failure of Psychiatry

http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2009/03/antidepressants-pla...

Just Don't Go, Part 2

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/03/2009031301c.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uclue

http://uclue.com/

Are there any security considerations to think about if using that approach?

I have a question for the Python hackers in the audience: what file format(s) do you use for configuration files? I've been using INI style files up until now, but I've been thinking of switching to XML for more complicated formats. For example, what about something like the following example. What format would you use to store this type of configuration data for a Python application?

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
  <directoriesToBackUp>
  	<directoryInfo>
		<directoryName>/media/programming</directoryName>
		<excludedDirs>
			<dir>/media/programming/log_files</dir>
			<dir>/media/programming/temp_files</dir>
		</excludedDirs>
	</directoryInfo>
	<directoryInfo>
		<directoryName>/media/documents</directoryName>
		<excludedDirs>
			<dir>/media/documents/archive</dir>
		</excludedDirs>
	</directoryInfo>
  </directoriesToBackUp>

Giving Up the Grade - David Noble

http://www.policyalternatives.ca/MonitorIssues/2007/05/Monit...

Throughout the 30-odd years of my university teaching career I have always found ways around grading, primarily by giving all A’s, thereby eliminating grades de facto, if not de jure. Last year for the first time, after long bemoaning my “anomalous” practice, York University officials formally prevailed upon me henceforth to designate my courses “ungraded “ (a pass/fail option without the fail), thereby taking them off the radar screen and perhaps unintentionally establishing a promising academic precedent.

Please design a new favicon. The current one looks like an ode to mid-nineties shareware sites.