Whatever

We don’t get the local paper, we get our news through Yahoo (Donna) and Google (Brian.) On the Google News page there are the main stories on the left and in the right hand column there are headlines from various news outlets. These headlines get tailored to your tastes, both content and source, after time and to fill up tonight’s post I will give you excerpts, and then a link to, from 4 New York Times articles that I have interesting in the last week.

1) A more accurate description than ?100 percent natural whole-grain oats,? ?plump raisins,? ?sweet cranberries? and ?crisp fresh apples? would be ?oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.? – How to Make Oatmeal . . . Wrong

2) As anybody who has ever worked in any institution ? private or public ? knows, one of the primary ways employee effectiveness is judged is the performance review. And nothing could be less fair than that. – Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You

3) Consider what?s happened with lighting over the past three centuries. As people have switched from candles to oil-powered lamps to incandescent bulbs and beyond, the amount of energy needed to produce a unit of light has plummeted. Yet people have found so many new places to light that today we spend the same proportion of our income on light as our much poorer ancestors did in 1700… – When Energy Efficiency Sullies the Environment

4) The affected men were, in each case, those who?d trained the longest and hardest. Spending more years exercising strenuously or completing more marathon or ultramarathon races was, in this study, associated with a greater likelihood of heart damage. – When Exercise Is Too Much of a Good Thing

Here at the Valve Store(tm) we play a Safety Bingo game. Each week day a new number is “called” and the idea is that when each employee checks for the number he or she will be reminded to be safe.

Normally bingo numbers are chosen by computer or the old fashioned way by a ball dropping out of a barrel, but here, the company nurse, AKA: The Bingo Coordinator, uses a deck of cards.

I don’t know how long this has been going on, I just noticed it with the current game (only because it started on a Monday), but a random number from a particular row is always called on a particular day (on Monday it is B, Tuesday is I, Wednesday it’s an N, etc.)

So my question is, how less random is that than calling a number from all 75 at once?

Home is a movie for those of us who didn’t catch the point of Koyannisquatsi from its Hopi Indian title and time lapse photography images. Home also uses time lapse imagery, but to drive its point home (no pun intended, unless of course the film makers did mean it that way too) there is an in your face narration that leaves little to doubt the movie’s message; humans are mucking up the planet.

I’m a sucker for time lapse, so I’ve watched a little more than half of Home and will finish the rest tomorrow. Both Home & Koyannisquatsi are available to watch in their entirety on YouTube. From reading the comments, Koyannisquatsi has a few commercials placed in it, Home does not.

I have no new ideas, I’m just recycling old ones.

The one best Life of Brian post from each month of last year.