Gifted Slacker

Despite nearly 400 years of scientific revolution, Biology has been unable to deliver on crucial problems like effective cures for viral infections or cancer. Some of our best progress, like antibiotics, has been due to chance and random experimentation. You start a clinical trial for a hypertension drug and suddenly - whoah - all your subjects have hard-ons! Viagra is born. To be sure, chance plays a role in all endeavours, but Physics and Chemistry have a comprehensive theoretical basis powering systematic improvements, whereas Biology has been largely confined to kludges. Wanna treat cancer? Here, blast the patient with radiation and poison and hopefully the cancer will die first. They’re brilliant kludges, and I’m happy to have them, but it’s a far cry from the precision we’ve had elsewhere.

That’s from an excellent essay by Gustavo Duarte.

Don’t get me wrong. I like a lot of what Tom has to say. He gets to the point and speaks (sometimes overstated) sense. But look at this video and tell me that he doesn’t remind you of a cross between Mr. Rogers and a television evangelical preacher.

Grant to Robin, with a wry grin: “You’re the top listing on the stock exchange of my heart.”

From Jason Mulgrew:

“Sexsomnia. This is exactly like it sounds like. Years ago, an ex-girlfriend told me that I started feeling her up in my sleep, before I tried to make out with her. In the morning, I got the “Do you know what you did last night?” line and I thought for sure I had peed or poo’ed in her bed. When she told me what I had done, I had no recollection of it. But, whatever. I’m awesome, and I like making out and sleeping, so it’s only natural that I should combine the two. I chalked it up to a one time thing.

But it wasn’t. Over the years, I’d fall asleep next to whatever girl happened to be getting back at her ex and/or father at the time, and I’d wake up and we’d be doing it. I’m not talking like heavy petting here; we’d be doing it, like actual intercourse. In the midst of this, I’d suddenly come to consciousness, completely disoriented, grasp what was going on, and totally keep going. Because it was awesome.

[This wouldn’t be an R, because for this sex to happen, the girl would have to acquiesce. Basically, I’d be asleep and start trying to be smooth. My ladyfriend would be woken up by this, would either think I was awake or I was doing my sleep sex thing (depending upon how familiar she was with me), and would either go with it or push me away. If she pushed me away, I’d wake up without knowing what happened. If she kept going, I’d wake up and be getting laid. Sweet.]

[Also, I think that ex-ladyfriends would go with it because I’m probably a much better lover in my sleep. While sexsomniaing, I don’t speak at all. While conscious and having sex, my every move is peppered with talking, like "Geez, I’m sorry" or "Whoa - is that what it’s supposed to look like?" and "I swear I just washed there."]

I don’t know what causes this. It’s not as though it would happen after weeks of not getting laid. In some instances, I would have sex only an hour or two before, then “wake up” and want to do it again (which is very impressive, considering it takes me 24-96 hours to recover between non-masturbatory orgasms; I only need ten minutes and a sandwich between beat breaks). And at first, it was kinda rare, but in my last serious relationship, it occurred maybe once every eight times my ex and I shared a bed. Weird? Yes. Awesome? Goddamn right. Anytime I can get right to the good stuff without having to use any foreplay or purchase any fancy dinner and do it while I’m sleep, well, that’s just fucking terrific.

(However, because of the sexsomnia I can never, ever, under any circumstances share a bed with a dude. Just not a good idea. At all. Talk about Russian roulette. Yikes.)”

There’s this program at Google where they bring in interesting authors to give talks. This is so unfair (yes, whinge-whinge). My University doesn’t have anything of the sort. We get lectures from boring old fucks and guys that wrote tedious books about little ideas that nobody cares about.

To be fair, there was an interesting-sounding seminar-ish thing here two weeks ago, but it conflicted absolutely with exams! How about putting a business program on when a big portion of business students are not stuck in exams?

Bryan Caplan writes:

When women see how little housework men do, they interpret it as “shirking” - a willful violation of basic norms of decency. Men, in turn, feel unfairly maligned by the accusation (or, perhaps more often, by the stink eye).

Who is right? Let me just throw away any future career in couples counseling, and say: Usually, men.

The evidence: Look at the typical bachelor’s apartment. Even when a man pays the full cost of cleanliness and receives the full benefit, he doesn’t do much. Why not? Because the typical man doesn’t care very much about cleanliness. When the bachelor gets married, he almost certainly starts doing more housework than he did when he was single. How can you call that shirking?

This is the kind of thing that benefits humankind. Beware the power that economics can have on your daily life!

I finally found a working site for the Tom Cruise video that recently got a lot of comment.

Go watch it.

Now watch something that is meant to be funny

Today I hacked someone’s Netflix account. Sorta.

The other day I got 3 emails saying that certain DVDs from my Netflix queue had been shipped to me. The problem is I don’t have an account. I’m living in England and Netflix doesn’t even operate here!

It turns out that someone named Greg Austin subscribed to Netflix under my email address. I don’t want these emails. I would let Greg know what’s going on, but I have no way of contacting him. Sure, I could contact Netflix and have them take care of it. That’s not how I solve problems.

Anyway, I just submitted a lost password request, logged into his account and changed his registered email to notYourEmailAddressYouDouche@example.com. I sorta feel bad about it, but it’s not like I looked at any sensitive information or filled his queue with gay porn or anything.

This is both ridiculous and oddly practical. If you’re a programmer take a look (don’t bother if not, you probably won’t care). I promise you, you will laugh.

I love Steve Yegge:

Web Programming is a Big Crap Sandwich, and we all have to take a bite of it.