Misc

This is a video made from an old Tom Lehrer song, “New Math“. The lip-syncing is annoying, but it ends up being pretty funny…

“The existence of organizations like Underwriters Laboratories depends on the fact that most businesses consider it disadvantageous to kill their own customers, both because it will tend to give one a bad name, and because marketing studies have consistently shown the dead to be far less avid consumers than the living.” - Economics For Real People (PDF)

The part about the clowns, not the talking baby…

The accumulation of laws that have been passed over our nation’s history have a striking resemblance to a crufty code base:

• Dead code → Obsolete laws
• Bugs in border cases → Legal loopholes
• Patches and workarounds → Exhibit A: The AMT fiasco
• Unanticipated side-effects → Pretty much every law ever passed
• Spaghetti code → Insane cross-references which make reading some statutes almost impossible

The major difference, of course, is that most crufty code bases don’t run people’s lives.

“…and, in addition to the rest, the reluctance with which men commonly part with money for purposes that have outlived the exigencies which produced them and interfere with the supply of immediate wants.” - The Federalist Papers, No. 7

The funds in the budget for the TiVo subscription came from canceling the YMCA membership.

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in usenet and e-mail?