Monica

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.

Tangentially-related: a short discussion of overly-pediatric seders.

Same season, different religion: researchers have found that portion sizes in depictions of the last supper have been rising for a millennium, though I note the absence of an art historian on the research team.

Same season, no religion: I won't repeat most of the links that were circulating on April 1, but I haven't seen these new Java annotations around much. Probably only amusing to programmers, but very amusing to this one.

Not an April-fool's prank: xiphias is planning a response to the Tea Party rally on Boston Common on April 14: he's holding a tea party. You know, with fine china and actual tea and people wearing their Sunday (well, Wednesday) best. It sounds like fun.

Edit (almost forgot!): things I learned from British folk songs.

From nancylebov: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality looks like it'll be a good read. Or, as siderea put it, Richard Feynman goes to Hogwarts.

Real Live Preacher's account of a Quaker meeting.

Thanks to jducoeur for a pointer to this meta community over on Dreamwidth.

I remember reading a blog post somewhere about someone who rigged up a camera to find out what his cat did all day. Now someone is selling that. Tempting!

In case you're being too productive, let me help with this cute flash game (link from Dani).

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.)

bitsy_legend

A few weeks ago BitDefender, my antivirus software, stopped working -- attempting to run a scan emitted a very unhelpful error message. Some time with Google showed me that lots of people were having that problem, and after some work I found and installed a patch. Today it shut down again, and after I tried all the new remedies suggested on a BD forum (lots more people are having this problem) I, in a moment of "it can't hurt" desperation, reinstalled the patch. (It should already be there, right?) And it started working again. I wonder what is going on. Customer support has been responsive but of mediocre quality so far. Ah well, one more reason to move to the new machine sooner rather than later. Once I have the Mac, I won't need the PC to be on the internet. And if I were staying with Windows, I'd surely replace BitDefender with something else when the annual subscription expires. (I have not, by the way, seen any evidence that the machine has actually been infected with anything.)

Signal boost: 530nm330hz has been developing his own siddur for personal use, and wants to know if enough people to justify a small production run are interested. The sample pages are quite lovely (a nice siddur can be more than just the words on the page); he's using color to effectively indicate variations for weekday, Shabbat, and festivals, and is laying it out in a way that sounds useful. Andrew's Orthodox, so it'll be a complete siddur.

This afternoon we saw a flurry of bicyclists cruising down our street. (There appears to have been some sort of organized activity, but I'm not sure what.) And, among them, I saw one guy on a huge unicycle. The wheeel was at least three feet across, possibly four. I wondered how one mounts a unicycle with a wheel diameter bigger than one's inseam. I don't yet have the internet in my pocket, so I had to wait until we got home to find out. Err, now that I know I'm even more impressed. I'm still not sure what you do about temporary stops, like red lights, though. It sounds like you need a hand-hold to get going; what do you do if none are available?

Quote of the day #2: "Always double-check your math if there are explosives involved", via kyleri.

Why aren't people commenting on my post? I've had this in a browser tab for a while waiting for a "misc" post to add it to, and I no longer remember where I got it.

Tomorrow night is Purim, which at my synagogue is usually on the, err, juvenile side. (It must be possible to be accessible to kids while not talking down to adults, but we haven't mastered it yet.) However, I learned last week that, probably at the instigation of our newest rabbi, we are also going to have an adults-only gathering after the megillah reading and spiel -- text study with food and "adult beverages". I offered to contribute a little home-brew mead and he said to bring it along. Should be fun. (But not good old "HS 98", which recently got a surprisingly-good review from a friend who found some in her basement. I only have a few bottles left and I'm saving them for special occasions. :-) )

I'm considering going somewhere else for the megillah reading and then going to my congregation for the adult study/festivities. This is hindered by the Chronicle, for the first time I've ever noticed, omitting the calendar of congregational services this week. Gee, thanks. So I'll have to look them up individually.

Purim seems a fine time for the roll-out of this contest in Peeps art. I must give this some thought. Check out the prizes -- $100 gift card, blah blah, dental hygeine products. Um, yeah. And should I enter and win, I think it highly unlikely that I would use the Peeps lip balm, though I would look with curiosity through "Peeps: Recipes and Crafts". (Understand that I can't actually eat Peeps because they're not kosher, but there's no rule against using them in art projects.) Can any of my readers suggest a punny title around the exodus from Egypt? I figure a seasonal tie-in would help, but it sounds like a pun is especially important and I'm terrible at that. ("Let my peeps go?" Needs work, I think.) If I use your suggestion, you can have dibs on the lip balm. :-)

Speaking of contests, from Snopes: in 1984 a newspaper announced a Daylight Saving Time contest to see who could save the most daylight. Fun stuff. (I think this would be better designated Daylight Shifting Time, as there is no saving involved.)