Quick and happy

Think faster, be happier.

Animated bouncing boobs from Japan.

Of facts

How to learn facts by Steven Dutch:

Facts enable you to remember broader concepts. Facts enable you to explain and justify ideas.

Memorizing is storing information as disconnected fragments. Remembering is integrating information into the rest of your life.

Two links

Social drinking and social capital by Agoraphilia.
Teetotaler spotting guide by Modern Drunkard Magazine

Caper and the question of taste

Having an aesthetic attitude towards life and everything makes one happy and independent, and there are few more chaming traits in a human being than an appreciation of pure and simple tastes. My ex-girlfriend was very fond of berries, and kept on picking raspberries even though I told her I suspected the dogs had peed on them. That made a tremendous impression on me, and I was instantly in love like never before.

My current favourite taste is caper. Spice pages describe caper as follows: The fragrance is spicy and a little bit sour (because of the pickling), the taste is slightly astringent and pungent. Yesterday I cooked spaghetti and ate it with capers, and nothing else. Simple tastes make the feeling after the meal a bit similar to the feeling after sex. If the food is too mashed-up, and one just devours it without stopping to feel the flavours, it resembles masturbation. Which is of course ok too, but seldom rivals the actual coitus.

Anyway, ones who cannot enjoy trash food (or music or art or bad sex etc) too, usually aren't just refined enough. By the way, today I'll eat boiled potatoes.

An ingenious machine

This guy is Ibehem, a computer salesman from my favourite Iznogoud album, Iznogoud and the magic computer. I'm taking my first steps in learning Prolog, and I'm constantly spotting parallels with logic programming and the stories in this album. The second story, Road to Nowhere, combines traversing the graphs, spanning and pruning the trees and using taboos with a story that reminds me of one of my other favourite authors (besides Goscinny), Borges.

Anyway, in late 1960's people seemed to have less prejudices on what the computers are and how they should be used. I think the view that computer is supposed to give us answers instead of just being a passive piece of automation keeps on fascinating me. Ibehem's computer has an ultrasimplistic user intercafe (write your question on a piece of paper and slide it in) that would make Jakob Nielsen drool.

Besides, I found out the word for computer in French is ordinateur, which is one of the coolest expressions I know, only rivalled by Finnish tietokone, literally "knowledge machine". Prolog teaches that computers--oh, ordinateurs--should really be treated and used more as knowledge machines than computers.

How to earn more

Some reasons why men earn more than women and tips for women on how they can catch them up by Marty Nemko:

1. Choose careers that pay more. Because of supply and demand, you'll earn more by choosing a job that:
   
   • is in an unpleasant environment (prison vs. childcare facility);
     
   • requires harder-to-attain skills (hard science vs. liberal arts);
     
   • requires longer work hours (executive vs. administrative assistant);
     
   • is unrewarding to most people (tax accountant vs. artist);
     
   • demands financial risk (commission-based sales vs. government job);
     
   • is inconvenient (traveling salesperson vs. teacher);
     
   • is hazardous (police officer vs. librarian).
   
   
2. Put in more hours
   
3. Be more productive in the hours you do work.