kowen

My sister uses bo-po-mo-fo a great deal - but then she's in Taiwan, not mainland China.

I'm guessing that the reason the experiment failed at this hospital is that the language was non-English. In addition, most of the doctors were foreign, speaking with wildly differing accents. Also, many of the doctors would mix two languages when dictating, in addition to the usual Latin terms.

Basically, it was easier to just pay some humans to parse it.

You can use salt and/or baking soda as antibacterials in the water you use for irrigation.

If you add irrigation to your routine, you may want to switch out dental floss with dental tape and "buff" your teeth (floss:tape as thread:ribbon - buffing with a thread doesn't work too well). Makes a huge difference in the buildup of plaque.

Lastly, disclosing tablets or solution (picking one at random from amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W6LW6I) is not just for kids. Using it for a few weeks or months could help you see where your tooth brushing technique is a bit weak.

It's a bit different to code against a failing approval when doing TDD; you still code in very small increments, but you don't necessarily get to green immediately. Slightly disturbing if you feel somewhat obsessive about seeing the green bar.

Locking down legacy code is beautiful. There is a screencast where the guys who developed approvals lock down a battleship game, generating about 8000 lines of output, not even glancing at them, and then refactoring the hell out of it.

http://approvaltests.sourceforge.net/

> It makes evolutionary sense for women to invest heavily in being good-looking

It seems like it would only make evolutionary sense if the males noticed the difference.

It would appear that the research on the subject is somewhat spotty and often gets misinterpreted, sometimes at the source.

I found a book on amazon the other day called Pink Brain, Blue Brain by neuroscientist Lise Elliot, which is next up on my reading list.

http://www.amazon.com/Pink-Brain-Blue-Differences-Troublesom...

One study I read about described a situation where the researchers bundled the same baby up and told some people that it was a boy and others that it was a girl. The people who thought it was a girl tended to comfort the baby when it got fussy, and the people who thought it was a boy tended to try to distract it.[1] Subtle, but I can imagine that there are other ways that we train girls to be more 'face to face'.

[1] from http://www.amazon.com/Failing-At-Fairness-Schools-Cheat/dp/0... --marred by some selection bias in the data they used, but very interesting nonetheless.

http://lolcode.com/examples/hai-world

I've struggled with insomnia my whole life. If I'm able to fall asleep in the first place, I'm usually able to stay asleep long enough to get rested.

I only need the effect for about an hour, maybe 90 minutes. Long enough to fall asleep.

Right! However the employee actually has a couple of choices at this point... either they can have a lot of free time, start a startup, go snowboarding, etc, or they can go to their manager and negotiate. From what I've heard, both of these actually occur.

Another interesting trend is that employees tweak what they're doing and start working more efficiently, increasing a teams output by as much as 35% without working "more".

> [it] could be costly if you have an unmotivated group doing it for the paycheck

It would appear that lack of motivation shows up in lack of results and the unmotivated group quickly has to find another job. In one case, a company fired nearly 90% of a particular department, but the retention rate sky rocketed, so their costs went way down, even when you include the cost of having to look for and hire new people.

http://gorowe.com/

The basic tenet of ROWE is to stop doing busy-work, and start doing only what matters. Stop wasting everyone's time. All meetings are optional. You work when and where and how you like, as long as the job gets done. That's key, by the way... as long as the job gets done.

The most common objection in the corporate world seems to be "but how will we know if people are doing their job if they aren't in the office from 9 - 5?" and the answer, of course is "how do you know now?" (hint: for the most part, you don't, unless you have clear goals and are judging people solely on output rather than on face-time etc.)

In a start-up this is hardly an issue!

Recently I got How to get the tech job you love by Andy Lester (pragmatic bookshelf). It's a great read whether or not you have a job.

I'm not knocking education in itself, just... so much time wasted while the teacher organizes things, disciplines people, and they managed to take interesting subjects and make them utterly boring.

There are probably great schools out there, but the 7 different schools I went to were not very inspiring.

One of the most helpful things I ever did with respect to CSS was read the apress book on html/css patterns (just ignore the parts that use javascript).

http://books.google.com/books?id=xq9IOomk1tUC

(I never realized that standard CSS actually operates with 6 box models!)

There was a discussion here on HN a few weeks back about automating and simplifying taxes http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1072955

Automating and simplifying certainly seems like the right thing to do - but lots of people would lose jobs. On the other hand, they would be free to do something more productive (in the larger sense, producing value instead of papering over the cracks) and certainly more interesting!

Why can't we just automate away the boring stuff, and just work less? I'd be interested to see if it were possible to open source more than software. (Open source organic farming, anyone?) I know, I know, this is utopian and unrealistic and probably plain silly.

I'm not trying to suggest that we should all go create a hippie commune and get rid of money, but not solving a problem right because of some legalese or pure profit just seems wrong to me!

Another thing that I find perplexing is that the depression doesn't only put people with automatable jobs out of work. My father is an extremely talented craftsman. He builds traditional log cabins, wooden boats, furniture, beautiful houses... Right now he is living in a van, and not-quite eeking out a living picking fruit. He sells a couple hundred lbs of fruit a few days a week. He also shoots deer every once in a while which provides protein.

He's this great resource, but hasn't had a job for well over 2 years. If he didn't have to worry about food, he'd work for the sheer pleasure of creating something useful and beautiful. The thing that confuses and frustrates me is that my father would be delighted to work for free provided that his needs were met (seriously! Food, a beautiful view, a sauna, and some poetry. Seems simple enough, right?)

He loves to build beautiful things, and certainly there are people who need houses (even small log cabins would be an upgrade for many). I don't know what the solution is (obviously). It just seems strange that legal tender or lack thereof could get in the way of creating real value.

Oh, man, the truth hurts!

I would much rather refactor than go out and sell.

There is such a zen to refactoring. It doesn't require intense problem-solving thought, but it isn't mindless. More, hm... mindful. sigh