Deep thought

Q: When are you both decreasing and increasing?

A: When you're ironing?

Line of the Day: 2015-08-27

Altruism and compassion toward the feelings of others represent the best of human impulses. And it is good to continually challenge rigid categories and entrenched beliefs. But that comes at a sacrifice when the subjective is elevated over the assumption that lurking out there is some kind of real world.
    -- George Johnson

(h/t: @drninashapiro via @SamHarrisOrg's RT)

Sometimes there are no words

During a discussion about a recent hubbub:

Maybe the work-all-the-time — and work-at-all-costs — culture that the article explored at Amazon wasn’t a tech-specific issue.

The world’s most successful consulting firms, law firms, banks and hedge funds accept that this is the cost of excellence. Rather than deny that the grind exists, employees and managers at elite companies in these fields see it as part of what makes them better. It took a Bank of America intern dying for other leading banks like Goldman Sachs to cap the number of hours that an intern can work at 17 hours a day.

Emphs added, internal links not copied. See the original article.

Oh, the things you'll learn from Wikipedia!

(link)

(h/t: Roy Edroso)

"She was called a fussy, stubborn, unreasonable bureaucrat."

By Big Pharma, of course.

I did not know until just now that it wasn't so much the FDA who saved the US from the horrors of thalidomide. It turns out it was just one woman.

Belated thanks, Frances Oldham Kelsey. You took your job when I was about a month from appearing on this planet, and my sisters were not far behind.

Funny and cool

From today's Versioning email newsletter:

Finally, here’s an amazing image showing the world from space, partially occluded by the moon. Or, to put it in language millenials would understand: “the moon photobombed our big space selfie” [nasa].

Gallons?

A report says:

More than 3,840 firefighters are deployed across the uneven landscape of several counties, including Yolo, Colusa and Lake. They are cutting back underbrush to make fire-blocking tracts, and dropping gallons of water and flame retardant from nearly two dozen aircraft that fly through the smoky sky. But the fire is still only 20 percent contained, according to fire officials, and the flames are surging with unusual speed.

Sheesh. Drought's worse than I thought.

(Emph. added)

Deep thought

Obvious Cat is obvious, yes.

But also, Vague General Ality is vague.

#needzgrafick

---

Sorry. Just read one too many blog posts by one of those tech VC guys.

They'll likely be crushed under some jackboot or another, but still, ...

... in the meantime, this to me is a gleam of hope.

Recently, in Silver Spring, Maryland, drivers at a busy intersection witnessed a spectacle you don’t see much these days, outside of the “Hunger Games” franchise: two children, aged ten and six, walking alone. An onlooker alerted the police. The cops scooped up the kids, drove them home in a patrol car, and reprimanded their father, Alexander Meitiv, a physicist at the National Institutes of Health. Within an hour, five squad cars had arrived.

Meitiv insisted that he was not guilty of negligence. He’d dropped off the children at a nearby park, with the idea that they would walk home. He and his wife are devotees of Free-Range Kids, a movement committed to rolling back the excesses of the helicopter-parent era. (From the group’s Web site: “Fighting the belief that our children are in constant danger from creeps, kidnapping, germs, grades, flashers, frustration, failure, baby snatchers, bugs, bullies, men, sleepovers and/or the perils of a non-organic grape.”)

[Link added to the blockquote]