An anonymous commenter pointed me to this comic panel:
Athough it sounds like something the Head Counselor at the Micahel
Jackson Sleepover Camp does, a butt-stroke is actually a rifle-combat maneoeuvre in
which you strike someone with the butt of your rifle. Butt-strokes were apparently on the menu at Abu Ghraib.
If you are in what Douglas Adams liked to call the Shouting and Killing People industries, you can learn butt-stroke techniques here.
…was not this. “Icy Eight” or “Special K” on their own? Fine. But together? That’s just overkill, man.
While I’m posting oddball covers of pop tunes, I thought I’d throw in
this one for good measure. You may not know it, but Bill Cosby also
does jazz/funk performances. Some of them are quite good, and some of
them are…odd. Here’s an odd one: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band! [2.1 MB, MP3]
…is this one:
…and now someone’s decided to replace “whatever” in Liam Lynch’s My United States of Whatever with it, creating a new single, My United States of NOOOOOOOOOOO! [2 MB, MP3]
It made me laugh.
If you’re looking for an engagement ring, you may want to check out
this eBay auction for a couple of reasons. For starters, it’s a pretty
nice, understated and elegant ring:
More importantly, the guy who’s selling it could stand to have a
little good fortune. Here’s an excerpt from his story, taken straight from his auction
page…
Since we had been ring shopping before, I knew I had picked out the
exact type of ring that she wanted and I thought she would be thrilled.
I thought she would finally be happy that we were officially going to
get married.
However, she seemed troubled and after asking her a few questions, she
blurted out that she was upset about the ring. She was upset that the
ring wasn’t from tiffany’s and was only 1 ct. instead of 2. I told her
I had planned on getting 2 cts but I couldn’t afford it. She then
accused me of putting a price on our relationship and couldn’t believe
that I did not get a 2 ct stone. She was pissed.
Yee-ouch. The full story, in all its painful detail, is on the eBay auction page.
I once had a girlfriend who secretly referred to me as “the Bank of
Joey”, so I have a rough idea of how this poor guy’s feeling. If you’re
in the market for engagement blingery, give this guy’s auction a look, won’t you?
Evan Robinson, author of the IGDA paper Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work, commented on my entry about it. I thought it was worthy of getting promoted to its own entry. Thanks, Evan!
I didn’t hammer the point home in Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work, but sleep deprivation is much, much, much worse than long-term Crunch Mode. The analogy that I draw in something I’m writing now is that long-term Crunch Mode is “shooting yourself in the foot”, while sleep deprivation is “shooting yourself in the head.”
Military studies (I cite Colonel Belenky’s work in Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work) show that each 24 hours without sleep reduces cognitive function by 25%. Other studies report the equivalence of 21 hours awake to legally drunk.
The details of Belenky’s work are fascinating: sleep deprived soldiers can shoot stationary targets as well as ever, but their performance against popup targets (which require constant observation, decision-making, and precise movement under time pressure) degrades rapidly. Belenky’s conclusion is that “In contrast to complex mental performance, simple psychomotor performance, physical strength and endurance are unaffected by sleep deprivation.” Unfortunately for us, programming is not primarily “simple psychomotor performance”.
Belenky concludes that the mechanism for this failure is the slowdown of decision-making. When a decision has to be made, but the sleep-deprived soldier can’t make a decision in the time available, essentially an intermediate result from the ongoing calculation is output as the decision. Naturally, an incomplete decision is often not the correct one. Friendly fire incidents can result. Belenky’s description of what happens to a sleep-deprived artillery unit would be funny if it weren’t so serious. At GDC I spoke to an Army Captain back from Iraq who was concerned that this information wasn’t made available to him and his men.
Unfortunately, recognition of sleep deprivation as a problem isn’t widespread, especially in programming. We’re still proud of pulling all-nighters or 100 hour weeks, and remain (sometimes willfully) ignorant about the effects on our bodies and our projects. Dr. Dement’s 1999 book The Promise of Sleep provides a good overview of the general problem. As the founder of the Stanford Sleep Center in Palo Alto, Dr. Dement is better position than many to understand the consequences of sleep deprivation.
CIRA, the Canadian Interney Registration Authority, is, as their “about” page says:
…a not for profit Canadian corporation that is responsible
for operating the dot-ca Internet country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD)
as a key public resource for all Canadians in an innovative, open, and efficient manner.
CIRA may carry out other Internet related registration activities for the Canadian community in a similar manner.
was running for position on CIRA’s board of directors and thought he
had enough nominations, which isn’t surprising considering his many
contributions to the field of internet domains in both CIRA and ICANN.
The dude’s forgotten more about domains than I will ever learn.
One day last week, two-thirds of his nominations just disappeared. Ross’ suspicion:
…a
person or person controlling a large block of votes purposely inflated
the amount of support for my nomination – which gave me a false
indication of my status in the process – and then withdraw that false
support minutes before the nomination process.
I am inclined to agree.
Ross has the details on his blog and the EFF’s Wendy Seltzer has blogged her take on the situation.