A term that once described jobs where being friendly and cheerful was seen as part of the job has apparently been co-opted to mean “someone expects me to do something”. (tags: emotionlabourworkrelationships)
A nice little web game where you try to break a threaded program by executing a critical section in two threads at once. It’s pretty neat. (tags: programmingthreadsconcurrencylocksgame)
“I call it Rump Politics, because it is so clearly marked by an admission that it is for the few.” “In the last election, the three main parties succeeded so magnificently in drawing a curtain of silence around their future plans for government, that the dominating policies of the past five years have all been ones that simply were not discussed in the election campaign or mentioned in the party manifestos. These policies were: £9,000 university tuition fees, the bedroom tax, the total reorganisation of the NHS and 40 per cent cuts in local government. Put together, it’s a stark programme. Not an iota of it was mentioned during the 2010 campaign. This time round, both the main TV debates were conducted before the parties published their manifestos. No wonder they felt like talks about nothing. Is it any wonder that people feel disconnected from Westminster?” (tags: politicselectionrumplabourconservativesarmando-iannucci)
“Standard approaches to the arrow of time typically require a rare statistical fluctuation, or, often, the smuggling in of assumptions about initial conditions. Their work offers evidence that ordinary gravitational dynamics may itself be enough to produce the simple “initial” point that can give time a direction.” (tags: entropytimephysicsgravity)
Last Chance Ragtime Band on the radio, talking about playing for dancers. I knew them before they were famous. (tags: musicragtimedancinglindyhopnew-orleans)
John Regehr and friends note that C compilers aggressive optimising around use of constructs the spec says are “undefined” can lead to unexpected behaviour. They propose a friendly C dialect where compilers would produce unspecified values in response to use of these constructs, but would not feel free to make demons fly out of your nose. (tags: Cprogramminglanguagesoftware-engineering)
This, from Al Razi of Ex-Muslim Forum, seems a sensible response, although as the worlds only impartial observer, I’d say that both the class of the victims and the race of both victims and perpetrators contributed to the horrors being ignored for so long. The Guardian will only talk about the former and the Telegraph about the latter, I suspect. (tags: rotherhamabusereligionislamnewsmulticulturalism)
Via Hacker News, where there’s the usual debate about all this. Previously I’ve read research which says you can get gains out of doing it for short bursts but must then rest: longer periods of overtime end up producing less, not more. This article is more about the cultural impact, though. (tags: workprogramminghoursovertimebusinessproductivity)
Linked to the Hacker News thread rather than the original post as the commenters at HN came up with some good additional ones. (tags: worksoftwarejobsinterviewinterviewing)
Scott at Slate Start Codex points out that there’s no good evidence that those “Don’t be that guy” posters have reduced the incidence of rape. (tags: societycrimeadvertisingpostersrapestatistics)
