Does anyone else find this non-humorous clip of Lorne Michaels giving Jimmy Fallon a pep talk about Late Night awkward? Just looking at the apprehensive expression on Jimmy Fallon’s face makes me feel nauseous. Too much information.
(Possibly related: my vicarious stage fright. When I went to see Jessie and Patrick act in plays at Brown I always had trouble looking at them directly for the first 10 minutes or so because I was afraid of seeing them flub a line.)
There is no efficient capital market to reward nonprofit performance in part because there are no agreed-upon performance metrics by which to determine winners. Private investors look to profitability, return, and growth; philanthropists and the programs they support don’t share metrics to judge who is outdoing whom.
Enter fantasy sports—a billion-dollar market in which players operate leagues whose entrants win or lose based on agreed-upon metrics. The players agree in advance on which metrics to use. For example, fantasy baseball looks to hits, runs batted in, home runs, and stolen bases to rate hitters, and wins, saves, earned run average, and strikeouts to rate pitchers. At the end of each season, more money goes to the players whose fantasy picks have outperformed the others.
tags: news, pensieve, webloggish
If salt makes you retain water and caffeine is a diuretic, then do potato chips and a cup of tea cancel each other out?
tags: pensieve
I am reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell at an alarming pace. Right now I’m in the middle of “The Warren Harding Error” chapter, which takes about the possible disadvantages of snap judgments. Gladwell writes about Project Implicit which attempts to measure unconscious biases. The web site has demo versions of the test. In the European-American/African-American test my data indicated “little to no automatic preference between African American and European American.” I would like to think this is because my conscious beliefs and implicit attitudes actually do align on this topic, but for all I know it could just be because I am familiar with the study or I’m left-handed, or the order that the tests came in.
Anyway, still very interesting. I might take some more of the tests later, I wonder if I am more biases when it comes to something like gender and science.
tags: books, pensieve, webloggish
“…How do I get back to my old self?”
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change” – Carl Rogers.
So, I managed to keep to my resolution not to procrastinate as much, even though it appears I am only capable of baby steps. I just finished my second paper for Pragmatism an hour and half before it is due, which is not ideal. But on the other hand, I kept my promise to myself not to write the entire paper yesterday. I wrote half Sunday, another quarter yesterday, and finished up this morning. Still have to proofread but I am going to leave work a little early and do that right before class. Not ideal but it never works when I try to proofread a paper immediately after I finish writing it (i.e. if I tried to proofread it right now). I would like to improve more, though. I didn’t sleep well last night because I knew I would have to finish up the paper this morning, and I set my alarm for 6am so I could spend an hour writing before I went to the Rock for work. I have also failed once again to do all the reading for Pragmatism before lecture. Luckily, my metaethics class is canceled for this week so I will have lots of time this afternoon to catch up with reading.
It is very good to be back at school and back in class. Even Human Factors wasn’t too bad yesterday; we had a guest lecturer who is working on auditory displays instead of suffering through another round of boring presentations on bad instructions. UC152 was fun as usual. Peter came because he is reading The Hidden Dimension, a book from our syllabus that I lent him. He wasn’t bored and he got to see me in my element a bit which is nice. (Because of the nature of his a lot of his interests [visual art, architecture, design] I get to see him in his element all the time, which is very nice but sometimes makes me feel boring in comparison.) It’s hard to see philosophy while walking around downtown Chicago.
For the record my computer at work finally got an optical mouse and I also finally got a travel mug (a “Sue the T-rex” mug from the Field Museum, purchased at Midway). These two items have greatly enriched the quality of life during my ~2 hours a morning, 4 days a week spent scanning 19th Century military art.
I also got my new, cheap IKEA duvet covers from Mummy in the mail (thank you very much). They are both fantastically loud and bright and cheer me up and are overall a nice change, and very much needed because my old cover is pale with lots of stains and is ripping apart.
Soon we will have to choose classes to register for and more importantly choose housing. It looks like Jessie, Josh and I will be going into the lottery together and getting singles, probably in Andrews. A return to Pembroke! Patrick, McComas and Andrew who this year was in Amsterdam will be living somewhere off campus, and Henry already has apartment of course. At first I not looking forward to my living situation next year because I felt nothing could be as perfect this year, living in a suite with my friends with our own bathroom and (okay, very limited) common space. But Andrews is really nice, and living on Pembroke will get me biking more again, and I will be near two people I like very much.