Happy Holidays to all!

On the Uses of Mistletoe

Et quelques coloriages en plus sur flickr (d autres a venir)
[image: img655] [image: img652] [image: img663]
Et quelques

Oh, yeah, and world peace. Don’t wanna come off as a completely selfish and materialistic doofus.

Although I’d probably take the pinball machine over world peace. More fun.

So, what useless crap would you like/would have liked for the holidays? I just tossed in some stuff from my image files, I’d actually prefer, to quote Sally Brown, “tens and twenties”. Adjusted for…
All I Want For Christmas

Interesting links from around the web to help you through your weekend Study Hacks withdrawal…

A Stocking Full of Holiday Productivity

• Bad career advice: Do what you love | Brazen Careerist
  Penelope slams a cherished piece of career advice. And I couldn’t agree more. Worried about post-graduation? Read this…
• When Are You Happiest? | Scott Young
  Scott Young asks his readers to report when they feel most happy. The answers might surprise you…
• How I Gained 50lbs in One Week | I…

Weekend Links: Don’t Love Your Work, Gain Weight, and Stop Multi-Tasking…

Thus endeth the Shephardes kalendere,
Drawne into English to Gods’ reuerence:
And for profite and pleasure shalle Clearkes to here,
Plainly shewed their intelligence,
Our is done, now readers do your diligence,
And remember that the Printer saieth to you this,
He that liueth well may…

The Kalender of Shepherds Miscellany

The Gimble is a nifty tool. It’s not the most versatile book holder (it won’t work with larger books), but it’s small, modestly priced, and cleverly designed and named. I like using it to hold books open while I’m typing out passages.

Why gimble? The OED definition of gimbal helps out:

A contrivance by means of which articles for use at sea (esp. the compass and the chronometer) are suspended so as to keep a horizontal position. It usually consists of a pair of rings moving on pivots…

The Gimble

Design by Jennifer Carrow

A few weeks ago it was David Drummond week, featuring posts here and here. This week (well, OK, a little more than a week) seems to belong to Jennifer Carrow, who designed The Best Intentions as well as this smart and funny jacket for this study of the benefits of melancholy.

I love how the heavier title type introduces the smallest bit of asymmetry and makes the frown a little more droopy. Someone’s got their Occam’s razor nicely sharpened 🙂

…
Against Happiness

Typos are bad enough when they result in gibberish like “procedurw,” but words that are close together and technically correct—like “manager” and “manger"—will easily slip by Word’s spell check. If you find yourself making those kind of situational typos often, the Productivity Portfolio blog can walk you through creating an "Exclude Dictionary” to have Word’s checker prompt you whenever it finds certain words. That way, you’re the one who decides whether you meant the guy who deploys…

Use an Exclude Dictionary to Master Your Typos [Spell Check]

At the margin, that is.

Information in the modern world is virtually free, and well-defined tasks can be outsourced very cheaply, if need be.  Don’t specialize in those.

Bias is everywhere, and overcoming bias yields great gains.  Empirically, our biases stem strongly from our nationality, our language, and our cultural background.  (It is, by the way, remarkable how much libertarianism is an Anglo-American phenomenon.)

To overcome those biases we should travel, spend some time living…

A simple theory of liberal arts education

The first full-length episode of The Simpsons aired on this date in 1989. It was originally done as the eighth episode of the first season, but the Christmas theme made it perfect for a mid-December debut.  BTW Matt Groening will be making his Arf
book debut in the next volume. Matt himself is doing some special art for Comic Arf!

This Day in Arf History: The First Simpsons Episode Airs