Happy Monday everyone.
Here’s an article to kick off the work week.
Stop working more than 40 hours per week
Studies have shown declining productivity after about 40 hours worked in a week.
Someone once famously said that anything that can’t be accomplished in 40 hours, probably can’t be accomplished in 60 hours either. Or was it 8/10 hours, I can’t recall. The point is, 40 hours in a corporate environment is plenty.
So today we’ve got a few things from various places. First up is a video entry featuring two very skilled, fairly fearless and frankly hubrisric young ladies hauling ass down a beautiful, sweeping road in the countryside someplace, on longboard skateboards.
As incredible a display of balance, line selection, and nerve as this is, all it would take is one errant bit of gravel on the road to cause either of these gals a trip to the hospital for skin grafts. Tale it from a motorcyclist, that is way too much exposed skin (although I’m sure the guys won’t mind too much).
Next up is another video entry, if I can get it to post right. This is about a man named Daniel Suelo in Utah who has decided to “quit money.”
People who know me well know that this is a concept that appeals to me on different levels for different reasons. I can’t say that I would be willing to try it – at least not under my current life circumstances – but it is refreshing to read about a guy who really has done it.
http://player.vimeo.com/video/40669770
A book was written about him, which I just ordered. I will report back on the book once I have read it.
In the meantime, Boing Boing ran an article about them (thanks BB!), and he also writes a blog from the library near the cave where he lives. True story!
Finally, linked from PhysOrg.com, a piece about how analytical thinking leads to more secular tendencies – funny how that works, right? This, I am sure, is part of the anti-intellectualism that pervades the conservative thinking in this country, manifest particularly in the assertion that higher education is “anti-religion”.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-analytic-decrease-religious-belief.html
I realize that evidently people don’t read much anymore, at least not news or literature. Or at least, the sense of anti-intellectualism in this country seems to indicate this.
I also realize that newspaper websites need to do what they have to do in order to pay the bills, as it were.
Still, does the L.A. Times really need to put up a full page, inescapable border for a movie around their front page? Tacky and shameful for a supposedly world-class newspaper.
This just in from our Paris bureau:
I must admit, if I saw this thing flying around, I would probably conclude that I was experiencing some kind of flashback.
This guy sells plans to build your very own, FLYING remote control superhero.
You have to see it to believe it. I believe it is made of a type of foam.
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
~Buddha
We have been on hiatus this past week, as I was on the east coast for business. I have a ton of great stuff to share from the trip.
I the meantime, file this story under “I wish this was made up” and “tragic” as well as “surreal” – the case of a man apparently killed by a swan. And I mean like directly, not like it flew into the engine of his small plane or something.
He was a caretaker for the birds, for a company who used them to keep other birds like geese away from properties in the area. Evidently one swan attacked him while he was in a kayak and he drowned. Very sad story actually.
Tomorrow is street sweeping, which inevitably means that since I worked late tonight, there was no parking to be had on the non-street sweeping side of the street. And somehow, my company gives tomorrow as a holiday (Good Friday).
As I got out of my car, a young man rode past me on his bicycle. He steered with one hand on the handlebars, and held a cell phone to his ear with the other.
As he passed me, he said into the phone,
“You ARE the only person getting my penis, baby.”
Yes, just another day in the life in SoCal.
racing to the red light 