There’s a new book by Susan Shapiro Barash asserting that women are better liars than men. (I haven’t read it.)

True enough, any woman with a wee bit of guile knows how to tell a proper lie. But basing your thesis on the data collected from a test pool of women who responded to Craigslist ads? Please. That’s begging for skewed results.

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A pretty interesting view of of our culture and environmental issues through art. Artist Chris Jordan is working on a series called “Running the Numbers : An American self portrait” - where statistics are converted to images in the form of large format art works. As the description states, I can imagine they are even more impressive when seen in person but these works are pretty astonishing (and startling) at any scale.

I just finished a great book, “Better” by Atul Gawande, a surgeon, scientist, and writer. A primary message, applicable outside of the world of medicine, is that we should always be counting something, even if it’s just to see if there’s a reason to be counting. I have decided that I’m going to count the hours of sleep I get in a night versus the time of the 50th line of code I write the next day and the amount of truly productive time I spend at work. Why the 50th? It’s easy to get through 1. I could get through 1 just to allow myself to count it. To avoid externalities such as meetings, I will pause my clock whenever I could not for any reason be working on code.

I’m going to give this trial counting run a month and then I’ll examine my results for a direct correlation. I suspect that I’ll find one, and will thus be able to compute the minimum amount of sleep I need to be maximally productive.

Think that sounds hard to track? Guess again - I’m a software developer - the script is already written, and the results shall be tracked in a database.

“truly productive time” - I will gauge this myself to be total time spent “in the zone” doing maximally productive development work. Since I am also compelled to measure my billable time in our time tracking system, I think I will be able to derive some valuable measurements from this experiment whether there is a direct correlation between sleep.

One… one unproductive hour spent reading The Onion and harassing my coworkers! AH HA HA HA HA

Interesting view of US home pricing data plotted to a 3D rolloercoaster ride. Prices are adjusted to inflation, and mapped from 1890 to the present.

Ride the Rollercoaster>