divia

The book references tons of studies.

That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say “Holden Caulfield” on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say “Fuck you.” I'm positive, in fact.

I'm not against animal testing in general or this sort of thing in particular, but I found that sentence strangely evocative.

If anyone's interested in reading about my experience the first time I went, which was less dramatic, I described what I could remember here: http://divia.posterous.com/my-first-hour-in-the-flotation-ta....

-A Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

from pg's On Lisp

As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

from the 2008 Wall Street Journal article titled "You Can't Soak the Rich": http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121124460502305693.html

The phenomenon is called Hauser's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_Law

and intelligent criticism of the chart can be found here: http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/odd-numbers/2008/05/20/...

You can email a song link or embed the entire stream on another page. (Although, it is not easy to find these options. You have to click on the tiny “comments” link to open them up). For instance, I’ve embedded “Repetition Kills” by the Black Ghosts below. It would be better if you could embed entire playlists.

Edit: After successfully embedding a song I tried sharing it over twitter, and I have a request. It would be great if clicking Post Song to twitter would automatically convert the link to a tinyurl link.

27 percent of those in social class AB found this unacceptable, increasing to 35 percent of the C2s and Ds, and 45 percent of those in social class E.

I'm sure whoever wrote this was just trying to refer to the different groups in a succinct way, but to me this classification system is amusingly reminiscent of a Brave New World's.

Researchers have found that nodding can be used to 'regulate' conversations. If you make single, brief nods while your partner is speaking, these act as simple signs of attentiveness, which will maintain the flow of communication from the speaker. Double nods will change the rate at which the other person speaks, usually speeding up the flow, while triple nods or single, slow nods often interrupt the flow altogether, confusing speakers so much that they stop in their tracks. So, if you want to express interest and keep your partner chatting with you, stick to brief single nods.

All programming is either in Lisp or reimplementing it.