Best Places to Launch a Career

Via Businessweek's amazingly accurate ratings:
http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/career_launch_2008/index.asp

Try to find the arbitrage opportunities
(i.e. sort by average pay and look for the lowest rank near the top, weight by # of entry level hires)

The only banks with liquidity now are sperm banks

(Seen on Sproul Plaza)

Memory Article

Here's an interesting article on memory: Wired

Woodhead Index and the Iraqui War

Google has provided me another way to search the world's information (that's their mission statement). In this case it's the intelligence of US citizens. Google Insights allows you to see which regions or cities are doing the most searches for any given phrase. See who's doing the most searches for misspelled words and you can pinpoint "woodhead clusters".

The problem is that it ranks by volume of searches so big cities will always dominate (even if they are not woodheads). I control for this by looking for differences between the city rankings for popular search terms and the misspellings. Sadly, "myspace" is apparently the most commonly searched term on Google so that is what I used to indicate "normal" intelligence.

One insightful result is that Washington was one of the few major anomalous cities to stand out in a search of "Iraqui":

vs. "myspace":

Woodheads are a significant factor in urban economic research so I am glad to make my small contribution.

Forbes Writer Gets Creative

I like this title a Forbes writer came up with: Natural Gas: Booming In The Beltway

Forbes = elementary school potty jokes

Berkeley vs. Labor Union

Berkeley has officially lost it's revolutionary spirit:

It looks like they're holding the signs because otherwise you'd think they were just more homeless. My favorite line from the article on UCB's website:

About 300 employees did not report to work, yet it is unknown how many of them
were participating in the strike.

Gotta love unions. From the article it doesn't sound like anybody has noticed their absense because many workers and custodial staff are not striking.

Lose 11 Pounds in 18 Hours Now!

I keep an excel sheet tracking my weight, water percentage, and fat percentage.

Today I didn't eat breakfast or lunch and then went to sleep and eventually got dinner around 7pm. When I finally left to go eat my weight had dropped all the way to 139.6lbs, the lowest I've seen it since I started tracking.

Just last night when I stayed up till 4am creating diagrams for my future entries on maxdama.com, I weighed myself at 151lbs. The scale is very precise so mechanical error could not be above .2lbs.

The Max Dama diet: lose over 10lbs in 18hrs. I hadn't realized weight was so crazily variable.