Seth’s blog

The most popular TV show is American Idol. On Survivor, one of the most popular TV shows, an “immunity idol” has a big role. Next: a restaurant chain called Potlatch.

How will Al Gore respond to this, I wonder?

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade . . . All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930.

Thanks to Geoffrey Kidd.

More. A response to this article. Thanks to Kathy Wollard.

I’ve always wondered what makes a job satisfying. Yeah, it varies from person to person. What about features that are true for everyone? What about this, for example?

For a while at Amazon, I was the Manager of Website Performance and Availability. . . . Whenever something went wrong, and some chunk of the site got slow, I tracked down why and got people to fix it. Each week I wrote a report summarizing everything that went wrong in excruciating detail, and presented it to a room of directors and VPs in a weekly metrics meeting. It was as sisyphean a task as any you can possibly imagine. In a software system as large, complex and constantly changing as amazon.com, something is always going wrong. . . . My job was to make a list of irritating things each week, and I was widely regarded as having done it as well as anyone ever had. . . .I found this job to be the most soul-crushing work I’ve ever done. I totally burned out in a year, as did the person who held the job before me.

I tell you this story as a cautionary tale. Try to find work that allows you to focus on positive things. Avoid like the plague any work that focuses on negative things.

Related research. The writing cure.

Today I made a new cup of matcha (powdered Japanese green tea) before finishing one I’d made earlier.

After Raronauer’ed.

My friend in Holland wrote again:

Last year, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that it was OK to have sex with animals, as long as the animals enjoyed it.

She attached a newspaper article in the Hague/Amsterdam Times dated 20 March 2008 that began:

Under a new law being debated by the government, sex with animals will be allowed as long as people don’t enjoy it.

It ended:

The Animal Party was mainly disappointed about the fact that the new bill does not refer to the animals’ dignity.