Here’s a very funny, very anti-homeopathy comedian. You can guess what my favorite line is…
Author: fish1964
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Tori in the pool
Victoria has been getting the typical second child short end of the stick in terms of early swimming. It’s much harder to take both of them, especially if it is just me, so Tori hasn’t been in the pool as much as Danielle had at this age.
Turns out it didn’t really matter.
It started in Milwaukee when we were there for my Mom’s memorial service. I spent a little extra to stay in a hotel with a roof deck pool. I figured the girls would need entertainment and I’d need the distraction. It was a good call. Tori has a swim suit with a floaty built in and she quickly figured out that she could float and move around by herself. So she did. At 2 1/2 Danielle spent most of her pool time with her arms around my neck. Tori would just take off by herself.
Last Saturday the three of us went to our local YMCA which has a very nice pool. Danielle has become such a good swimmer that it’s not as hard for me to watch them both. I can focus on Tori while Danielle happily swims around.
At the YMCA they have those backpack style floaties that just clip around your belly. It took a while to convince Tori to wear one. But she eventually figured out what it’s for and she was off.
She would go to the deep end and just jump in. Didn’t need me to catch her. Went underwater and just popped up happily, swam back to the ladder and did it again. I don’t think Danielle would jump in the pool without me catching her until she was 5.
We’ll be going to the pool a lot…
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Smarter than your average bear
This article amused me…
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Things I don’t miss
I was recently talking to a former colleague who was complaining about dealing with the Finance department. My first reaction was, “I don’t miss that”. My next reaction was, “you know what else I don’t miss? Having to wear socks”.
Which of course led me to think about all the things I really, really do not miss about corporate software development. So, in no particular order, here are ten things that I really do not miss.
- Having to work inside on a beautiful day.
- Mediocre colleagues
- Really lame colleagues
- CYA (this should probably be #1)
- Conference calls that are not useful (if you are saying to yourself, “there’s no other kind” you haven’t worked with a team of four really smart people).
- Time tracking
- Decisions that take longer than five minutes
- Socks. (seriously, other than for running, weddings, or funerals, I haven’t worn socks since April).
- Long pants (see #9).
- Any activity that doesn’t lead to better software (other than drinking, which occasionally still does)
I’m sure there are more. I do miss people, but just specific people (see #2 and #3).
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Project Implicit
This is a research project that has been around for a while. The purpose is to try to study people’s implicit bias on various topics (race, religion, age, sexuality, etc.) in a truly scientific manner. It’s quite interesting.
The methodology is fairly simple. Say you are doing the straight-gay bias test. First the screen will have straight on the left, with you pressing the E button and gay on the right with you pressing I. An image or word will appear (two women together or the word heterosexual) and you have to press the appropriate button. Pretty simple.
They will mix it up left and right to make sure there’s no random bias due to being right handed or left handed.
Then it gets more interesting. On the left will be “straight or good” and on the right will be “gay or bad”. So if the picture is of a man and a woman you press E (left) and if the word is “horrible” you have to press I (right).
Then they’ll switch it to “straight or bad” and “gay or good”.
What it ultimately tests is whether you have a hard time associating “good” and “gay” together (or vise versa). They record how quickly you can complete the tasks and how many mistakes you make. If it takes you a lot longer to do the “gay or good” test, the conclusion is that you have a harder time associating the two concepts and therefore you have an implicit bias towards straight people.
I’ve tried two of the tests. I consider myself a liberal person with few biases. But when I took the black/white test the results indicated that I had a strong bias. And while I don’t like to admit it, I have to be honest, “white or good” did seem to be the easier part of the test. I’d like to think I’m not biased but I grew up in a 95% white neighborhood so I probably am.
Interestingly the straight-gay test indicated that I had a very slight bias towards gay people. In this test I actually found that the old definition of gay as “happy” made the “gay or good” association easy in the test. Though I have to be honest. When I’m reading an old fairy tale to my daughter that describes a prince as feeling gay, I do stumble a bit…
I guess the truth is we all have biases.
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News Flash
This just in, corruption in New Jersey.
OK, not news…
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Moths can jam sonar?
Again, really cool…
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Just cool…
… to see images of a nebula 7000 light years away.
I haven’t tried the 149MB high res download…
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Of course they’re from Staten Island
With apologies to folks who don’t know New York, this really requires no further comment.
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“Free” Business model
Here’s a good brief discussion of “free” as a business model (with lots of good links like this).
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 