Another Friday the 2013

1) Hope for those who haven’t taken down their Christmas trees: Elephants eating Christmas trees. Ok maybe not.

2) “thank you for spreading happiness” – Dale Carnegie, your job is not safe.

More Cute Kid Notes.

3) More cool optical illusions.

Like so

And so.

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4) How blind people take iPhone photos. By blind movie critic. (How Do You Explain The Color Blue To A Blind Person? What’s your answer? I’m just saying…)

5) Speaking of movies:

Oscar Nomination Shockers. Wow that’s a lotta movies I haven’t seen.

50 Must-see Movies of 2013. Wow more movies to not see.

6) Kid gets arrested (technically not for drunk driving) after posting he had been drunk driving on his Facebook status. I stopped being very active on Twitter after finding that post where Xiaxue takes down some food bloggers via record of their Tweets. I mean, it’s not like I was tweeting anything like that anyway, but I didn’t want to be caught in a careless, offhand remark made months ago and potentially even taken wayyy out of context (not that xx did that here, I just mean the way in which some of those bloggers had been caught illustrates they were either idiots or tweeting way too freely. At least I can remove the possibility of my tweeting too freely :D)

Some of my HK readers are very cautious about commenting and instead I will get emails with like, a dozen looong, detailed comments, suggestions and questions which they don’t want to put on the blog (glad to see they are at least not on pseudonym with me 🙂 – “in this post where you said this it’s something I can relate to because……” “in that post may I ask…..” “and then in this one………” I initially wanted to ask for permission to cut and paste some of the comments back up here, but when comments come all in one go and too many for me to be able sort in a short space of time, I file them carefully and try to take note of the input – I take it as a compliment, that there are readers meticulous enough to do that, I have to say it on the blog for The Rockstars to read that I hope it’s because kids can bring out some of the best in us. Oh, shurrup, I said I hope 🙂 (Remember this famous post?)

Anyway, score another one for social media changing the way the world works – it’s old news for a potential boss to check your Facebook. How about NY police regularly checking MySpace for criminals who post photos of themselves with stolen goods?

Dis is an actual criminal posting cash he stole on victim's Facebook page. Yes, you now know what he looks like.

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7) 15 things Twitter tells us about humanity. Marketing people, dis is goods:

Top food tweet in the study is a McLobster. Ok, maybe not so goods.

There’s a lotta information out there about say, what kind of products people tweet or Instagram the most. In the link above is also an article about how Twitter employs real humans to handle some of the data because what machine can understand the true meaning of Mitt Romney’s infamous “binders full of women” (nerd alert – cheap thrill for me, I watched that comment being made live on tv!)

Sorry ah, How Come Still Got Graphs – it’s there because it illustrated to me how language and data tell important tales. Like, the only time I’m gonna say Accounting degrees (go NTU!) can teach you something cool – one of my gofer jobs when I first got out was translating P/L and Balance Sheet statements off the Bloomberg into numbers inputted in a default probability software. It then occurred to me the extent to which the concept of “language” encompassing everything is quite trippy – if you move your definition of “poor people” to say, people who make less than USD 12k a year instead of USD 10k a year you then have a gadzillion fewer people qualifying as being “poor” without actually doing anything to help poor people.

Now, think what you can do when you define profit, loss, assets, grades in the classroom that way. Technically, a government could really go Yay, under our watch there are now fewer poor people! We’d like that pat on the back right…. there.

Very The Matrix, right. Nothing you see is…. real. Thought for the weekend…

But……………………………….

Lemme just say this mess is real:

She likes spoons now.

Spoon = Deliverer of Yummy New Foods. Spoon good.

Yeah I barely made it Friday. Her Highness decided since last Tuesday that instead of total 5 hours daytime napping, she would be doing 1 hour. Seriously. She has only stayed asleep a collective total of 1 miserable hour every day since Tuesday. She’s not cranky, so long as we stay home and she sits with familiar toys and books, just Not Asleep. I’m still ?! What Gives? Now How Do I Have A Life?