The authorities’ overreaction to this act of murder represents a kind of unwitting moral collusion with the terrorists. In a very real way, it completes their act of terror, by allowing it to have the kind of impact that the two men on their own could never have.
So the new Xbox was announced yesterday, and I watched the video last night. Here are my takes on what was revealed:
I’m sure we will get more details as time goes on, but for now I’m somewhat underwhelmed.
The company is so large, and spans so many interests, that to say something as vapid as “Google is evil” does not adequately portray how complex and sprawling the Google system is. There is a Google that drives exciting, fascinating innovation — such as that in wearable computing, automation, big data, cartography. There is a Google that supports and nurtures research and thinking into distributed systems, cloud computing, and the practice of software engineering. There is the Google that hires scientists, engineers, designers, and my friends and supplies them with a pleasant environment for them to do their very best work. Ultimately, there is the Google that reports finances to shareholders — the Google that is concerned with making a profit.
The great workplace dilemmas of our time…
Last week I was sitting nervously in a medical office waiting room to undergo a procedure I was not looking forward to, and to calm me and keep me amused, my dear ladysisyphus was texting me. There was some conversation about how one would cite a podcast in an academic paper, which lead to us…
‘Lose Yourself To Dance’ by Daft Punk
I need to sit down and give the whole album a proper listen, but this is shaping up to be on par with ‘Discovery’ in awesomeness.
A new study from the International Labor Organization takes a global tour of youth joblessness and finds that what’s gone up won’t come down in the next five years. The youth unemployment rate* among the richest countries is projected to flat-line, rather than fall, before 2018. As a result, the global Millennial generation could be uniquely scarred by the economic downturn. Research by Lisa Kahn has showed that people graduating into a recession have typically faced a lifetime of lower wages.
Brilliant. Exactly what I wanted to great.
Every week they get to the heart of the issue. This time, it’s ‘the thing’ about engineers.
MERLIN:
People who are engineers have trouble thinking… understanding how people who are not engineers think, because they understand the mechanics of how the universe operates at a physics level. And so they don’t understand why people would not think the same way that they do.
JOHN:
Right. They don’t understand why nobody can read the instruction manual that they wrote because the instruction manual they wrote is totally obvious to an engineer.
(Source: Roderick on the Line ep.71)
So I decided to re-watch Star Wars: Episode 1, after listening to them berate it on the Incomparable Podcast.
I realise now that all this time I’ve been wrong. It is definitely the worst of the Star Wars movies. By far. I don’t know if I was just giving it a free pass because of how excited I was when it came out to see “a NEW Star Wars movie!”; but it really is reprehensibly awful.
I mean, the only believable character in the whole thing is R2-D2 (probably because he has no dialogue).
So, for those who care, my revised order of preference now stands (from best to worst):
Thank goodness for machete order. When I watch these films with my kids they won’t have to sit through this rubbish.
