The Happy Moron

Whenever I’m on the phone with a telemarketer or a customer service representative, I’m torn.
I’m on the phone with a person, but I’m interacting with a corporation.
I don’t know who had the bright idea to create an entity devoid of emotion and buffered from liability. It’s awful.
It’s awful because it brings me into conflict over [...]

Most downtown crosswalks have been upgraded from just a flashing red hand to a flashing red hand and a countdown timer.
I don’t know why.
If you watch people, it quickly becomes obvious:
The time on the timer doesn’t matter.
What matters is,
Did the person just before you start crossing?

Does a mall count as indoors?
Does a baseball cap count?
Do you have to tip your hat to a lady if she’s wearing trousers?

Not if you were born after 1900
Exception – you do if you’re wearing a double-breasted pinstripe suit, on pain of ruining the impression

“We can change. There has to be hope.”
UPDATE -  I think perhahps the thing that bothers me is that what he is looking for *is* knowable, but it is not knowable in the way that establishing a field of study will change.
Or maybe it’s the implicit ‘ourselves’ in this statement.
“We can change [ourselves]. There has [...]

Freakonomics posed this as “The greatest question ever asked”
The economics hook is, of course, that people act according to incentives and it’s fun to try and examine a ’selfless’ act.
It’s a polarizing topic; the post gets 200 comments where a more normal number would be around 30. But what kind of comments? I looked at [...]

Perspective is a funny thing.
I’m sure there are thousands of little German boys who would have given anything to be in Robert Enke’s place – the first-choice goaltender for the German national football team.
But on Tuesday, he threw it all away when he walked in front of a train.
Thousands of people are willing to point [...]

Why do we still have TV news anchors?
So far as I can tell, good news anchors embody the following:

Bland and inoffensive
Willing to endure a yuppie haircut
Pretty face
Ability to adhere to standard intonation pattern
Don’t make racist jokes in front of a live camera(see ‘bland and inoffensive’)

Umm… I think I just perfectly described a CGI avatar.
Let’s look [...]

If there’s English hidden in here, I don’t know where to find it.
Context
The presentation-tier request handling mechanism must control and coordinate processing of each user across multiple requests. Such control mechanisms may be managed in either a centralized or decentralized manner.
(from the Core J2EE Pattern Catalog)

I guess I really don’t have to tell you, ’cause you could have guessed it anyway…
The decline of video games sales.
It’s obvious, but it’s worth mentioning, if only to learn a couple lessons. You would hope that these lessons are self-evident, but… apparently not! The article is pretty good.
Lesson 1: Don’t rely on selling the [...]

For the next four months, it will be dark when I go to work and dark when I get home.
Oh Goody.