Happy Black Friday

MLLP (HL7 interface) buffer termination character in Python ...

... is '1C'.decode("hex"). In case you were wondering.

4,835,716,461,499 percent

... the question is: how much inflation has Argentina seen since 1940?  In case you were wondering.

Faculty time study

College faculty spend "17 percent of their work week in meetings – including those with students – and 13 percent of the day on email ..."

This is even more incredible when you consider that faculty now make up less than one-half of the payroll at universities nationwide.  At the turn of the twentieth century, almost all of the money we spent on higher education went to teaching and research.  What percentage of tuition, endowment and taxpayer money actually gets spent on teaching or research nowadays?  25%?  20%?  Nobody knows.

I just wanna testify

Modern living

Quote of the day

Those who make the nation's songs (so much more admirable than its laws) advise us to look for the silver lining, to seek the blue bird, to put all our troubles in a great big box and sit on the lid and grin. Alice Coker had been unable to follow this counsel. Old Man Trouble, that foe of the songwriters, had plainly conquered her proud spirit.

   - P.G. Wodehouse, Bill the Conqueror.

What a headline ...

... but terrifying for the victims:

Shipwrecked tourists swam 6 hours towards erupting volcano

From the New York Post: "Tourists who escaped a sinking boat in Indonesia swam to an island with an erupting volcano and survived by drinking their own urine and eating leaves."

First gay marriage, now this.

57% of all Americans now use the Oxford comma.  What next, grown men playing soccer?

Good enough for government work.

(from the Volokh Conspiracy.)

Macaulay Culkin eating a pizza

 And if that's not exciting enough, here's how to get pi in Macaulay.

Babies, bathwater, potato, potahto

As a public rebuke to Donald Sterling's vile racism, UCLA is giving $425,000 back to Sterling, and is refusing to accept the rest of the three million dollars he and his wife donated to them for research into kidney disease.  Kidney disease affects African-americans much more than white americans; for example, McClellan et. al. recently noted that:

Age-adjusted [End-stage Renal Disease] rates are 982 people per million among black and 256 people per million for white individuals, a 3.8-fold racial disparity.

This sounds more traumatic that it was

This sounds more traumatic that it was; bear in mind that it was the 1980s.

Werther at the Met

What an odd place to store your pistol.

Quote of the day

En vérité, avec tous ces cônes, on dirait d'un temple baroque dédié au dieu Suppositoire.

  - Dubois (1911) Our beautiful Niger