Playing "Set Them Up, Knock them Down" (using toilet paper and paper towel rolls, with his toys balanced atop them) with Leo until he ran in circles around the room, attempted to gnaw his way through one of the remaining walls of the bunny castle, and had to have second breakfast. Apparently he had so much fun he had to take a nap, so he is now flopped out asleep under the futon.
This comic strip.
The opening line of the Summer 2007 Vanguard newsletter, a joke I had not heard before: "One wry definition of an economist is someone who, when he sees something that works in practice, wonders whether it will work in theory."
An email from my sister (with a long backstory) that involves an interview question regarding the 6 Days War that I want her to know I appreciated.
Thinking this dress makes her look pregnant, until I realized that she is pregnant. For a maternity dress, it rocks. (I feel for this woman and this one, to whom I give kudos for being honest in their assessment of those ubiquitous styles that cannot look good on anyone who is not a child. The gathered sleeveless top pattern is awesome on 10 year old girls, for instance, but cannot translate into adult woman wearability, unless perhaps that woman is "too skinny to be a model in Madrid" super-skinny - and maybe not even then - in which case I beg her to cover up before she terrifies the kids.)
Checking my calculus grades online and finding I got a 100 and an 98 on assignments #17 and #18, leaving me with a current grade of 100 going into the last homework set and the midterm. (Muahahahaha.)
[Note: Yesterday I looked at the dismal - overall GPA under 2.2 - UT Austin transcript of the biologist who applied for my job and noted that he took this calc class and received a D: impressive work, dude. Incidentally, I was baffled at how many people included their transcripts with their applications, even when their grades were pretty bad, but Robert said my boss had requested it on the job posting. Upon examination of our - oops, their - web site, I found that almost every job requiring a college degree wanted the transcript as well so it must be an HR thing. Proof, I suppose, that you have the degree that you say you do.]
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3 comments:
I also love that cartoon and I also thought that dress made her look pregnant and was surprised to see that it was also pregnancy that made her look pregnant.
Did you know there are people whose job it is to call up colleges verifying degrees? That's if they can't do it quickly online. They usually ask what the degree was and what year it was awarded. They often ask for dates of attendance. They sometimes ask what the major was.
When I got a job as a researcher, they wanted transcripts to prove that you really did have some coursework in statistics like you claimed. (And that you passed said classwork.) In the interview they asked such an easy stats question that I wondered if I had misheard it. No, I hadn't, and apparently it stumped most applicants.
I had the same experience when I applied for a state job (not the one I actually took, though I was offered) as a statistician/SPSS programmer. The interviewer, who was the head of the section, asked me (if I recall correctly) what a standard deviation is. I said, do you mean in words or the mathematical formula? He said, either. So I wrote the formula for sample s.d. on a piece of paper I had with me and he was, in my opinion, unduly impressed, but as you say, he had a bunch of applicants who did not know how to even describe what it was, let alone knew the formula for it. Mind-boggling.
At the end of the interview, I was given a graph and asked to write a paragraph interpreting the results. I thought that was a nice approach for determining whether somebody had a clue. It was an extremely straightforward graph, so it wasn't likely that anyone qualified for the job would screw up due to interview anxiety.
I can't believe you were asked what the standard deviation was. I could answer that question and I am in no way qualified for a statistician/SPSS programmer job. (Of course, presumably other questions would have been asked which would have disqualified me, etc. But still.)
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