The Hidden Benefit of a Really Crappy Job

The best job I’ve ever had was cleaning deep fryers at McDonald’s at 4:30 in the morning. By “best,” I don’t mean most pleasant. Each morning, I would take a filtration device (basically a heavy bucket with a filter, on wheels) up to each deep fryer, empty the fryer’s oil into it and, while it churned away, I would scrub the sides and bottom of the fryer. After the filter was done working, I would pump the filtered oil back into the fryer and turn on the heating element to prepare it for that day’s cooking.

Read on.

Ground-Breaking Study that Should Change Your Life

An important study has been published

This spring, Dr. Johannes Bohannon and a team of German scientists discovered that people on low-carbohydrate diets could lose weight faster if they used one weird trick: Eat a bar of chocolate every day.
Newsrooms around the world responded eagerly to Bohannon's findings.
"Excellent News: Chocolate Can Help You Lose Weight!" Huffington Post India declared in a report...Even Europe's highest-circulation newspaper, Bild, got in on the action, publishing a report titled "Slim by Chocolate!"
Journalists and readers looked past the too-good-to-be-true nature of the findings and devoured the story wholesale.
But Bohannon's research was a hoax.
The health study was deliberately faked to test the hypothesis that scientists and reporters rarely detect junk science. No one caught on to this ruse.

No, not the one about the chocolate, the study about the quality of science reporting in our news. Bottom line: you need to learn science, method and critical reasoning because your betters aren't going to do it for you.

How Much of Human Nature is Optional?

Rachel Ryan doesn't feel like a man... but she feels a little guilty of that fact. She thinks that gender is not a social construct and discovered that makes her transgressive!

Nowhere is this oppression more apparent than in the workplace. God forbid

a young, ambitious career woman admit to wanting romance and a family as much as she wants that corner office. Instead, feminist champions of our gender-neutral society encourage “single young women in their sexual prime” to suppress conventional female desires in favor of “more-important things… such as good grades and internships and job interviews and a financial future of their own.”

Since entering the professional world, I’ve found amusement in openly admitting to wanting a family in the not-so-distant future. After all, I’m a fan of shock-value, and this statement is almost always guaranteed to raise eyebrows.

She is also a social science type and reads journal articles.

How Scarce?

Economists vs Ecologists, moderated by Matt Ridley, who wears both hats.

Economists ... What frustrates them about ecologists is the latter's tendency to think in terms of static limits. Ecologists can't seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered, or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along, or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls.
That frustration is heartily reciprocated. Ecologists think that economists espouse a sort of superstitious magic called "markets" or "prices" to avoid confronting the reality of limits to growth. The easiest way to raise a cheer in a conference of ecologists is to make a rude joke about economists.

Science with Tom

Every week, some article he read in a newspaper...rapped. I believe this guy gives off my level of cool.

(Aug'15) Plus Inside Out and My Charon-a