Business class alternative NYC <-> London

Saw a random advertisement for Silver Jet, which seems to be a new airline catering solely to business travelers. Seems like a really nice alternative to standard business class if your company's willing to pony up for business class in the first place...

What it's like to be a CS (or math) student

Child's Play makes the big time

Nice to see video games getting good press for once.

The growth in scale of Child's Play is mindboggling. And as the article mentions, video games make surprisingly good therapy for sick kids.

Today's creepy news

Girlfriend sexy? Maybe it's 'cause she's...infected with a parasite! Yay!

94% of Spanish bank notes have cocaine on them

Wow.

American view of the world

My bare lady

I...have no idea what to say. Except, don't open this at work.

Water...in...spaaaaace!

It's shit like this that makes me wish I could play around in weightlessness for a while.

RIP James Brown

Boo. James Brown died this morning.

You are an atheist

To celebrate Jesus' birthday, I thought I'd share one of my favorite quotes:

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

-- Stephen Henry Roberts

Merry Christmas. ;)

New Transformers trailer

Please don't suck? Please? This is my childhood you're fucking with here...

Dear all 9/11 conspiracy theorists

Shut it.

You will be assimilated

One of the trickiest things that criminal law will have to deal with in the next few decades, assuming of course that it doesn't bury its head in the sand, will be the erosion of the idea of free will. Personally, I think this is something that needs to be absorbed into the public consciousness before we can ever get public policy right.

Are you lactating?

Or: mmmm...delicious baby...

Wisdom of the Crowds

I find this a bit disturbing. I'm not sure why.

New Firefox logo

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the new Firefox logo.

Relatedly, this seems to be becoming an internet meme...

Wow.

The failure and ineptitude of the 109th Congress summed up on one concise article.

Pennies not even worth a penny

Wow. Has the dollar turned to such shit that the metal in the coins is worth more than the coins themselves?

Deep.

Work

I really liked this article on, well, work that was linked from David Brooks' latest column. It's surprisingly Marxist given that it was linked by a conservative.

I'm not sure what to say about it. One of the asides really resonated with me, which is that self-esteem comes from one's own achievements in and of themselves rather than external sources. In some ways I think that's the point of the article: cubicle jobs are soul-crushing precisely because they are rote and involve no personal investment, and yet the relentless trend in modern capitalism is to concentrate what can only be described as the "interesting parts" of work into fewer and fewer hands, leaving only the assembly-line jobs leftover.

How chilling.

God has a dark sense of humor

This is some kind of divine poetic justice for the fact that Jeffords left the Republican party, isn't it?