Dear Netflix: I appreciate the convenience of your recent change to treat an entire TV series as one unit in the streaming queue, instead of one season at a time like before. However, in doing so you have taken away the ability to rate individual seasons of shows, which is valuable data. It also makes me wonder, when you recommend things to me based on my ratings, if you are giving all ratings the same weight -- 200 hours of a long-running TV show should maybe count differently than a two-hour movie. Just sayin'.

These photos by Doug Welch are stunning. Link from thnidu.

How Pixar fosters collective creativity was an interesting read on fostering a good workplace. Link from nancylebov.

Speaking of the workplace, I enjoyed reading how to run your career like a gentlewoman and several other articles I found there by following links. Link from _subdivisions_.

Rube Goldberg meets J.S. Bach, from several people. Probably fake, but it amused me anyway. (This is a three-minute Japanese commercial. Do commercials that long run on TV, or would this have been theatrical, or what?)

Speaking of ads, in advance of our SCA group's election for a new baron and baroness today, the current baron sent around a pointer to this video about an upcoming British referendum on voting systems. Well-done! (Of course, I agree with both the system and the species they advocate. :-) ) I wish we had preference ballots in the US.

A while back a coworker pointed me to how to make a hamentashen Sierpinski triangle. Ok ok, some of my browser tabs have established roots; Purim was a while ago. But it's still funny, and I may have to make that next year.

Speaking of geeky Jewish food, a fellow congregant pointed me to The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. which looks like fun. I've certainly found myself in that kind of conversation at times (e.g. is unicorn kosher? well, is it a goat (medieval) or a horse (Disney)?). Some of you have too, I know. :-)

dr_zrfq passed on this article about a dispute between a church and a bar. Nothing special about that, you say? In this case the church members prayed to block it, the bar was struck by lightning, the bar owner sued, and the church denied responsibility. I love the judge's comment on the case: “I don't know how I’m going to decide this, but as it appears from the paperwork, we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church congregation that does not.”

47 seconds of cuteness: elk calf playing in water, from shalmestere.

I don't remember where I found the link to these t-shirts, but there are some cute ones there.

First, what does the Wisconsin collective-bargaining bill say about timing? Does the legislation modify existing contracts in violation of the terms of those contracts, or is it saying that no further contracts will be allowed that stray outside of these new boundaries? The difference matters.

Second, what Google search would have allowed me to answer that on my own? Everything I tried led to lots of news stories and opinions, but even "full text of Wisconsin union bill" didn't get me that. (I'd rather not read the full text if I could find this answer more expediently and credibly, but I'd read it myself if I had to, if I could find it.)

Yes yes, I know that any good that this bill might have done has long since been superseded by the antics of the last three weeks. But I'd still like to know, and I haven't been able to find it on my own.

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hlinspjalda

I talked with the vet today. The test of Baldur's liver function came back normal. As we were discussing next steps (the ones that could produce answers are dangerous), she asked me just what he eats. There's dry food out all the time and its rate of consumption hasn't markedly changed in recent months, but of course I don't know who eats how much. Baldur has ready access, though. He gets tiny amounts of tuna and canned food; basically he gets to lick the spoon when I feed such to Erik. Baldur wolfed down half a can of food in about 15 minutes at the vet's on Thursday, so my vet suggested giving him real amounts of canned food. I've generally avoided that because it's unhealthy, but y'know, he's 17 years old now -- am I really worried about him picking up bad dietary habits at this point? So I'll give that a try; he enthusiastically ate most of a can of food today (between morning and evening), so we're off and running.

I see that the post office wants to cut a day of mail delivery to save costs. I don't mind the cut, but I think it would be much better for us customers/taxpayers if they chose a day in the middle of the week, say, Thursday, instead of choosing a schedule that sometimes means four days between mail deliveries. I assume that giving up all their Monday holidays isn't on the table. (There actually is a segue from the previous item to this one: this morning I refilled a mail-order prescription for Baldur.)

Dani recently ordered some Israeli CDs, and the MP3 tagging has been strange. Two or three different two-disc sets tagged one disc in English (transliteration) and one in Hebrew, for instance. Sometimes song titles will be one way and performers the other. In one case we got gibberish, presumably a unicode failure or something, and Dani typed stuff in by hand. Any one of those cases wouldn't have surprised me, but mixing it up on the same recording is bizarre.

The back-story is that the woman (age 18) beat her previous record by a noticeable margin and has a masculine build. So just to make sure, somebody wants to check. There's a rather straightforward way to do that, but that's not what they're doing so they must not believe it would answer the question. So what's going on -- do they suspect that a teenage athlete might have had major surgery in order to win a race?

This got me thinking about gender and sports more broadly. It's common to have men's and women's divisions, presumably out of a belief that men and women are sufficiently different that it's not fair to make them compete. Does this mean that the division is intended to be by birth status, that a transsexual person would compete in the "wrong" (by appearance) category? In which category does a hermaphrodite compete? When these kinds of sporting events were being invented these would have been deemed frivolous questions, but I imagine that some people have had to wrestle with these issues by now.

Is gender segregation the best way to achieve balance among entrants? I would think that, all other factors being equal, in a race a woman who's a foot taller than me would have much more of an advantage over me than a man of my height does (longer stride). Isn't it time for the short-person division? (Ok, now I'm being frivolous...)

This is based on the end of parshat Emor, Lev 24:10-23.

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