I don't really expect Herman Cain to win the Republican nomination, and I sure as hell don't want him as President, but I do enjoy imagining the collective national mindblow that would result from a Presidential contest between two black men.

Thing I do every day: Read Language Log

Thing I did yesterday for the first time: Eat at Five Guys burger chain.

Thing that happened today for the first time: Five Guys got mentioned in a comment on Language Log.

According to Wikipedia:

"Elves often appear as dim, flattened, expanding glows around 250 miles (402 km) in diameter that last for, typically, just one millisecond."

Things That Are Not Very Effective, #2199: Putting your laundry in coin-op washing machines, adding detergent, and leaving without closing the lids, or putting in any coins, or pressing Start.

Perhaps the most amazing time-lapse photography I've ever seen, by Terje Sørgjerd.

Thanks to Ze Frank for the tip.

When interviewing engineers with UI credentials on their resumes, I sometimes ask In what situations one should use checkboxes vs. radio buttons vs. a popup/dropdown menu.

Hopefully I will not soon be interviewing the creator of this gem, from a web form I recently filled out:


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I and some of my friends - er, fellow henchmen - have applied to join the World Henchmen Organization (which we suspect may be a front for a puzzle event being run in Seattle and the bay area in June and November, respectively).

Watch our 3-minute application video!

(There are certain advantages to having friends who work in video game studios.)

From this NYT article:
The human head louse, for instance, evolved from the chimpanzee louse when the ancestors of humans and chimps split apart some five million years ago. The human pubic louse, on the other hand, is related to the gorilla louse, from which it parted company some 13 million years ago.

I find this immensely awesome.

Stretching an analogy too far is like stretching a rubber band too far - eventually it breaks, and you end up with pencils or whatever all over the place, and very likely a painful red mark on your fingers.

I grew up in Ohio, and must have gotten some Ohio history in school; but if so I remember almost none of it. (I do however remember extremely useful facts such as that the state fossil is the trilobite and the state rock song "Hang On Sloopy".) I certainly had never heard about the Toledo War, a rather remarkable border dispute which, in the 1830s ( Read more... )