Stuff I Read on My Lunch Break

I think I just fell in love with IllScientist.

Oh, and certain mistakes made in Texas are just too scary to be believed.

Generational Differences

Excerpt from an email I just sent to Bob Fink, responding to his complaint that my generation is too lazy to analyze things the way people used to:

"To put things in boxes in order to study them is inherently to change the nature of what they are before you study them. And that DOES apply to verbal boxes as well as glass ones. When you show any member of my generation a butterfly in a box and try to talk about the details of the antennae, it is the nature of my generation to become immediately and very profoundly disturbed by the question of why you chose to put it in a box, and why this particular box, why a square box, why a box made of glass or of plastic, why this color and size of box, which direction did you lay the butterfly within the box, and what terrible thing does this convey about your real lack of understanding of a butterfly's proper nature. And these are NOT, really and truly, at all less valuable questions than the ones you'd rather have us focus on, about the shape and structure of the butterfly's legs and antennae."