dannyman.toldme.com

The Wall Street Journal Reports:

Current and former Googlers said the company is losing talent because some employees feel they can’t make the same impact as the company matures. Several said Google provides little formal career planning, and some found the company’s human-resources programs too impersonal.

Concerned that employees may leave because HR is uncaring and impersonal, Google has naturally responded in the Google way:

The Internet search giant recently began crunching data from employee reviews and promotion and pay histories in a mathematical formula Google says can identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit.

Good luck with that.

I picture some super HR geniuses down in the Googleplex able to predict with great accuracy who will quit next, and exactly when, but lack any clue as to why they are likely to quit, or how to retain them. Still, they will still be hailed as ingenious visionaries because they figured it all out with great scientific precision and implemented their analysis using MapReduce.

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I think Twitter is over rated. Some BBC commentator was yammering on the radio this weekend about how Twitter was insufficient to replace established media. WTF? Twitter is a way to waste a few minutes of time and occasionally score a chuckle or a wry observation off a friend. Much like a grilled cheese sandwich, Twitter should not be taken too seriously. And yet, there’s a whole ecosystem of people re-tweeting each other and #tagging their posts and live-tweeting as if like hey, its the blog-o-sphere 5.0 with a 140-character limit. Seriously, if you’re imitating the blagojoshere, you’re doing it wrong.

Today, I tweeted:

Twitter would be more pleasing if not for all the RT RT RT RT and #tagged #whoring #bullshit. I mostly un-follow those twats.

Which gets mirrored over to Facebook, where three people have “liked” it.

Consider this entry as my coming out of the Twitter closet. You can follow me if you like, but I really really really don’t care.

But I will say this for Twitter: it keeps my rants short!

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Public Domain from teslasience.org

Are you a fan of Nikola Tesla? His last remaining laboratory, Wardenclyffe, on Long Island, where he had ambitions of developing a worldwide network of free electrical power, is threatened with sale and demolition. The Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, a would-be museum, wishes to purchase, preserve, and museum-ify the land. They’ll accept donations via personal check. This random lady on Livejournal will accept donations on their behalfonline casino via PayPal, write a check, and for donations in excess of $20, she will draw you a picture of Nikola Tesla, “to your PG-rated specifications” and mail it to you.

(Thanks, beatonna!)

Update: Andrew suggested this crucial documentary on Nikola Tesla.

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I enjoyed Pingdom’s recent posts about the size of technology companies, as well as the money they are making, and I asked myself how that equates to the average profit made per employee.

So, I borrowed Pingdom’s numbers, which Pingdom borrowed from Google Finance, and then I quickly larned myself on the Perl GD::Graph module and I generated my own graph:

Or, if you prefer:

What is Baidu? Think of it as Chinese Google and you’ll know as much as I do. I’d reckon that profit-per-employee would be very roughly predictive of job security. My feeling about Google is that they are perpetually understaffed due to their traumatic recruiting process.

If you want to play, feel free to grab my ugly hack of a Perl script, the input data file, or unsorted output.

Update: Pingdom took my suggestion to heart and published their own summary.

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In browsing the Internet I was tempted to click a link labeled The 101 Hottest Princess Leia Slave Photos. Alas, I was horrified at the horrible scaling and otherwise atrocious user interface.

Then I asked myself if I could solve this problem. Well, not me personally, but the crowdsourcing tool called Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=slave+leia

Flickr can even find a CC-licensed sense of humor:

“You can’t un-see this.” (CC: Official Star Wars Blog)

See also: The force is strong with this one « Flickr Blog

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He is just too cute:

Party Cat Episode One
Party Cat Episode Two
Party Cat Episode Three
Party Cat Episode Four
Party Cat Episode Five
Party Cat Episode Six

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In order to make a Mac nearly half as useful as a typical Unix distribution, you have to sign up with Apple to download special “developer” stuff like a compiler. That means that years after you have given up on using a Mac, you’ll get funny spam like this one:

So, they are soliciting me for a design contest, and the “fine print” to unsubscribe is not merely the usual small, gray text, but small, gray text on a gray background. Layers of delicious failure.

The last spam I received from Apple was for a recruiting event, with no unsubscribe option whatever.

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I am presently enjoying an old thick history book. A footnote in the first chapter says:

“Biologically considered, the distinguishing mark of humanity was systematic developmental retardation, making the human child infantile in comparison to the normal protohuman. Some adult human traits are also infantile when compared to those of an ape: e.g., the overdevelopment of brain size in relation to the rest of the body, underdevelopment of teeth and brow-ridges. But developmental retardation of course meant prolonged plasticity, so that learning could be lengthened. Thereby the range of cultural as against mere biological evolution widened enormously; and humanity launched itself upon a biologically as well as historically extraordinary career.”

W H McNeill
“The Rise of the West”

I was thinking that domesticated animals are similarly developmentally retarded relations of their wild kin. Dogs mature to a wolfishly adolescent level. By remaining in a younger, more affably co-dependent state, they more easily get along with humans. From what I have seen, a lot of adult humans could be described as childish, and while the usual concern is that they are less effective for their childishness, they also subordinate themselves more readily to more ambitious leaders, and this facilitates collaboration.

Or, I guess, domesticated humans and animals fall more naturally into packs, for better and for worse.

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I was at some sort of lecture for really smart people, and a precocious young woman asked a technical question of the speaker, who answered back with some Math, and the questioner apologetically asked for a moment to run the Math through her head before she could follow-up. The speaker replied that she should take her time, because after all, “this is an open forum, not scramble time at a methadone clinic.”

And I was like where the heck did that line come from?!

Later in the dream I was looking for my car in a parking garage and found it not where I thought I had parked it but a little ways away where I had actually parked it earlier in the dream. I was like “this dream has a great continuity” and then I had to pee so I was looking for a toilet in the parking garage. That is when I got up to pee, and realized that I had slept really soundly this night. I was glad the sun was managing to peek through the clouds.

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Eileen linked me to this YouTube video. It rocks. It is Iowa’s Senate Majority leader Mike Gronstal making it clear, in no uncertain terms, that he will not cooperate with the Republicans to amend Iowa’s constitution to ban gay marriage. He quotes his daughter, Kate, after listening for several minutes to her older colleagues complain about the subject:

“You guys don’t understand. You’ve already lost. My generation doesn’t care.”

Well, I, for one, care. And Mike Gronstal is clearly compassionate and thoughtful on the subject:

I think I learned something from my daughter that day, when she said that. And I’ve talked with other people about it and that’s what I see, Senator McKinley. I see a bunch of people that merely want to profess their love for each other, and want state law to recognize that.

Is that so wrong? I don’t think thats so wrong. As a matter of fact, last Friday night, I hugged my wife. You know Ive been married for 37 years. I hugged my wife. I felt like our love was just a little more meaningful last Friday night because thousands of other Iowa citizens could hug each other and have the state recognize their love for each other.

No, Senator McKinley, I will not co-sponsor a leadership bill with you.

And Vermont passed gay marriage, this time through the legislature, and overriding a governor’s veto! Sure, gay marriage can be had in only four states today, but I’m getting this hopeful feeling that the cooler heads prevailing in Iowa are the real tipping point. The Right thought California would lead the nation, and they fought hard to win Prop 8, and they won that battle. But while they were fixated on the West Coast, they have been outflanked by the reasonable Midwesterners making reasonable decisions in the middle of the country. Hoorah!

Also good, thank you Tom, is the Supreme Court Summary for Varnum v Brien, which lays out in simple language over six pages the case for why gay marriage ought to be legal. Basically, unless there’s a compelling reason to ban it, equal protection means you should allow it, and there’s no compelling argument for why a state ought to ban it, so, now, Iowa has it!

Like, duh!

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We used to visit Newton, IA every year or two for McConeghey family reunions. Iowa’s a nice place, though admittedly somewhat dull. But today, America has a big patch of purple right at its heart because the Iowa Supreme Court has declared the state’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Joe Eskenazi explains beautifully in “Will Gay Mecca Relocate From San Francisco To Des Moines?”

Disdain of San Franciscans’ disdain of all things Midwestern has become nearly as clichéd as the original sin. And, yet, there’s always a touch of schadenfreude anticipating city residents’ chagrin whenever legitimately good news emanates from the Midwest indicating its denizens have out-progressived our self-anointed capital of progressivism.

The Iowa Supreme Court this morning did what many observers feel its San Francisco-based California colleagues will not — rule that a ban on same-sex marriage violates the constitutional rights of gay and lesbian couples. This morning’s decision adds Iowa to the very short list of states in which same-sex marriage is legal — Connecticut, Massachusetts, and, now, The Tall Corn State. Perhaps it’s only fitting for a state with the motto “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.”

From what I have read, if conservatives want to defeat this, it will require the legislature to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot. This could be done by 2011, and even then Iowa residents may not support it. Personally, I’m just really proud to see progress being made on this issue, from of all places, the “fly over country” where I grew up. (Well, I’m from Illinois, but I can still root for the hawkeyes on this one.)

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