when it's your favorite panda's birthday or you want to make any occassion more festive, the obvious choice is to make panda cupcakes!

okay, originally i presented this to laura as her new favorite website ever, but let's be honest: hi! monkey is basically the most wondrous out of all of man's creations.

on research

Sure, I could’ve gotten all subjective about it, and said “but when I hear ‘Michelangelo’, I think of David before they think of the nunchucks,” or “Raphael is more a turtle than an artist in my mind,” but that’s a dangerous road to start down. Once you start letting your personal biases interfere with serious scientific research like this, it pollutes your data. And that kind of subjectivity not only changes the whole attitude of your research, it affects your project in unpredictable ways. The polluted data starts seeping out into other projects — infecting them, if you will — and creating these unscientific monsters, half natural phenomenon, half human bias. Fleeing the scientific community that shunned them, they seek solace underground, searching for results outside the establishment, delivering truth and justice as they see fit, living off delivery pizza. And that’s just the beginning.

(the xkcd blag)

math is dead

So apparently technical support agents don't understand basic math. I guess this isn't a huge shock but HOLY CRAP is our education system really so woefully horrible? Or is it just that these people are willfully making themselves sound like idiots because they'd rather do that than be responsible for losing Verizon $70? Meanwhile, thank you Ms. Simon for teaching this to me by moving all the desks to the edges of the room and explaining 1's, 10's and 100's by the cunning use of the floor tiles. And then making us walk through the hall chanting "Ones! Tens! Hundreds!" like some kind of math mob.

But the real reason that math is dead, much like sting, is that my favorite graffiti in all of new york is gone. On a concrete “jersey” barrier on west 4th between Lafayette and the Bowery, where some construction has been going on for some time now, someone had spray painted the quadratic equation. It's possible it has simply moved, as it has been spotted elsewhere before. However, there are still concrete barriers there and they look freshly painted, so I'm afraid that we will never know which of the two values x turned out to be.