link round-up

[cellio]

Today is clean-out-the-browser-tabs day.

Wrong tomorrow tracks testable predictions made by public figures to see how they turned out. (Link from nancylebov.)

The next weird financial gimmick -- life-insurance futures. I can see all sorts of ways this could go wrong; do they? (Link from sethg.)

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (PDF), aka the incompetence study. It's 76 pages long so I haven't read it yet, but I don't want to lose it. (Link from siderea.)

We've just finished mid-year performance reviews at my company, so No Surprises from Rands in Repose caught my eye. "The surprise has nothing to do with money. We’re not talking about compensation here. Yes, you did a splendid job this year and I think they should be throwing raises, bonuses, and stock your way. But it’s even better if it’s clear why you think you did a splendid job. Can you articulate it? And you might know, but does your boss? Can he explain to you, in detail, how well you kicked ass? I didn’t think so."

"Dear Old People. We don't want to kill you. You're our parents and grandparents and we love you. But if you throw a cranky fit and keep us from getting decent, affordable health care, you can figure out how to work your own [damn] PCs and cable boxes and remote controls from now on." (From Reddit via brokengoose.)

The history of time travel as a pretty visualization. It's missing a lot of important data; maybe someday they'll fill it out while keeping the format. (Link from dagonell.)

A different kind of visualization: This is why you are fat. I find the KFC Quadruple Down Sandwich particularly shudder-worthy. (Link from ralphmelton, who found it on the way to looking up something else.)

And a whole site full of light-hearted graphs (most recent reminder from cayeux). For example, difficulty of task as perceived by the average person speaks to one of my peeves.

John Scalzi's guide to epic design failures in Star Wars (link from a coworker).

Rabbi's shofar demo turns into a duet. I don't think that's what he had in mind when he decided to teach people about Rosh Hashana in a public setting... (Link from thnidu.)

Comments

[sethg]

The new thing about this life-insurance scheme is that it does the same trick with viatical settlements that was previously tried with mortgages: some broker makes a whole package of viatical settlements and sells slices of income from the package.