"Don't say these terrible things that wound me psychologically," we say. "I'm going out of town for a week and keeping my door unlocked. Please don't rob my house," is what the troll hears.

(via)

Dear student looking for a summer internship,

When one of the prominent credits on your thin résumé is “Perfect SAT Score in Math & English”, you really ought to have caught the howler in “I have learned how to diffuse confrontations…”.

And, yes, I know you’re an undergrad, so there’s not much to fill the page with, but the sidebar labeled Strengths has 2 lines of technical ability (repeated from the main text), and 32 lines of Precious Stanford Snowflake back-patting; this does nothing to endear you to me before the interview.

P.S. I know it’s not your fault that modern college admissions forces you to play up bulllshit like Presidential Community Service Awards. Just show up prepared to talk about problem-solving and putting your technical skills to practical use, and you’ll do fine.

Self-mocking feminism detected. And here I used to think that Mark Ethan Smith was an outlier…

Best comment: “People like this are the reason we have to put instructions on shampoo bottles.”

Wish I’d known that before I paid for next-day-air delivery yesterday. Now it’s sitting in a depot a few miles away, taunting me with the knowledge that I won’t have it for my day off tomorrow.

Lots of press about the “Hour of Code” campaign recently, which has the goal of briefly exposing children to computer programming. Money down the drain, since most school curriculums still don’t include Hour of Basic Logic, Hour of Problem-Solving, or Hour of You Are Not A Precious Snowflake.

[Update: a number of the discussions of this are linking to Jeff Atwood’s Please Don’t Learn to Code, and wow did that attract hundreds of comments from people who completely missed his point. I agree completely with Jeff, and a lot of the reason is that I remember exactly what it was like when we did this back in the Eighties: put a bunch of kids in a room and try to teach them to program, and 60% will pretend interest and parrot what they’re told, 30% will be too bored to pretend, 9% will be actively hostile, and 1% will be excited about the opportunity until the other kids bully them into doing all the work. Bottom line, if the school curriculum included critical thinking skills in all courses, an “hour of code” would be as necessary as giving floating lessons to ducks. No offense to any ducks among my readers…]

[12/13 Update: apparently the folks at code.org think being exposed to computer science is like being exposed to radiation: “More students have participated in computer science in U.S. schools in the last three days than in the last 100 years”. They are so completely full of shit that I’m surprised my browser didn’t turn brown.]

Waking up with frost on my lemons (not a euphemism), a warm breeze comes from Lion.

Volcano edition:

(via Volcano Discovery)

Lowell Observatory's Putnam wants to name asteroid for Trayvon Martin

The victims of media-instigated “justice for trayvon” attacks will be required to time-share a small rock tentatively named “Fuck You Whitey”.