A group of permies went for their regular lunchtime run; then it started tipping down with rain and, being out in the countryside, there's no shelter for a couple of miles 
Anyway, enough of revelling in their misfortune; here's some stuff to waste time over:
Happy invoicing!
Anyway, enough of revelling in their misfortune; here's some stuff to waste time over:- The Heretic - "For decades, the U.S. government banned medical studies of the effects of LSD. But for one longtime, elite researcher, the promise of mind-blowing revelations was just too tempting." Good profile by Tim Doody of Dr. James Fadiman, who has been researching psychedelic drugs since the early 60s
- 10 things I hate about Git - Steve Bennett feels the same way as I do about the version control system Linus Torvalds flung together for Linux kernel development, and which is now the trendy system to use: "It has a powerful distributed model which allows advanced users to do tricky things with branches, and rewriting history. What a pity that it’s so hard to learn, has such an unpleasant command line interface, and treats its users with such utter contempt."
- PixarAnimationStudios / OpenSubDiv - Speaking of open source projects, here's one from Pixar: "OpenSubdiv is a set of open source libraries that implement high performance subdivision surface (subdiv) evaluation on massively parallel CPU and GPU architectures. This codepath is optimized for drawing deforming subdivs with static topology at interactive framerates. The resulting limit surface matches Pixar’s Renderman to numerical precision."
- How Google's Marissa Mayer Prevents Burnout - "Many entrepreneurs don't even think twice when it comes to working around the clock. Marissa Mayer, Google's 20th employee and current vice president of location and local services, is no exception. When Google was a young company, she worked 130 hours per week and often slept at her desk."
- Seeing in the Dark - "A blind man shocks researchers with what he sees." Interesting piece about a patient who is functionally blind yet whose brain is still able to act subconsciously on visual stimuli; the full paper from which this is drawn is at ScienceDirect.com - Current Biology - Intact navigation skills after bilateral loss of striate cortex
- Managing Email Realistically - "[Systems like GTD] are not for normal people; they’re for obsessive-compulsives who just happen to prefer filtering email than counting toothpicks or quadruple-checking that the oven is off. You, however, are a normal person, and the time you’d spend on all those formal task-management rituals is better spent aimlessly surfing the web, or even going home early. You’re just an ordinary lassie or laddie who gets too much goddamned email." Excellent tips from Matt Legend Gemmell, OS X and iOS developer extraordinaire, on getting to Inbox 0. Coincidentally, just before he posted this I'd achieved Inbox 10,000, with unread emails dating back to 2006
- How to Write a Malcolm Gladwell Book - I posted an article on this subject back in MLFTB XXIV, in June 2010; it seems Gladwell is still an easy target: "...you’ll need things like – have connections, have education, work hard, and experience good luck. However, these are all obvious or are things you can’t manually adjust. So change them to things like “find a connector,” or “be a fact synthesizer.”"
- Gold fever heats up in Mother Lode - "Gold prices are at all-time highs. Signs of a new gold rush are popping up all along Highway 49 through the Mother Lode: grizzled prospectors panning in the creeks, new underground mines preparing to go into production, rampant mining-stock speculation, boosterish media coverage and even an old-fashioned salted-mine hoax." California has a gold rush of sorts again, at least as long as the price holds up.
- Stung - "There I was, 10 feet up a tree, holding a bag of live wasps in one hand, basically blinded with pain." Meet entomologist Justin Schmidt, who has been stung by more insects than probably anybody else, and after whom the pain index categorising the nastiness of them is named. Bonus linky: Did the creator of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index volunteer to get stung by everything on earth?.
- 25 Cats Who Have Found That Perfect Place To Relax - frankly, I'm surprised nobody had thought of putting pictures of cats on the Internet before now.
Happy invoicing!
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