Just last week I read an entire book by Allan and Barbara Pease. Even this book (which promises the moon in three easy lessons) says that body language is best interpreted though consistent clusters.

Here, the static eye test amounts to a form of dead reckoning.

Claiming that this equates to the general ability to read people smacks of claiming that someone who can track big game from muddy impressions and broken twigs has the cognitive drop on Charles Darwin on all matters of big game observation.

As with personality indicators, one could in all likelihood devise fifteen other masked channels (not all of which consist of static images) with roughly the same degree of outcome correlation (where the reference outcome is something like success in group settings).

I also think this study's emphasis on freeze-frame campfire empathy is unfair to male performance. If you're in the business of poking sharp sticks at snakes or lions, the perceptual ability required is not to determine the animal's emotional state (angry, aggressive, threatened, lethal) but to determine moment by moment whether the animal will shrink back or strike forward.

The Pease book is clearly aimed at people in a sales environment (in which I also include making presentations in a board room) where the ability to form extremely rapid first impressions / first-reaction impressions is critical to career success (as opposed to short-term blood retention).

Compare the "it's not your fault" scene in Good Will Hunting (pachydermous elephant in the room) with the extended marital quarrel in Before Midnight (mass stampede of the unshackled lambs).

In the later case, neither spouse is seeing anything he and she haven't seen before (they could each write a book), but their proficiency in scorched-earth integration to identify a workable point of repair is severely put to the test.

That sounds a whole like Empathy to me, but dressed up in some fancy new clothes.

How could you know when you identity every person in the entire Empathy clan as just some Jim Bob or Jane Barb from poverty valley?

Empathy was never a precise concept in the first place, and most people are too lazy to clearly distinguish the perceptual side of empathy from the dispositional side (the later of which is heavily conflated with approval seeking and conflict avoidance, and these are further conflated with meekness/aggression, introversion/extroversion, low status/high status).

Dressing empathy up in a recognizable set of clothes (e.g. Marty Mindsight), roughly equates to clearing your throat before attempting to say something civilized.

Slow filesystems access disks, and store data, less efficiently. It's a pretty big deal.

Whaa? I'm not talking about the FS using memory and CPU, but that it is slow for accessing data off the disk, which is a common bottleneck.

OSX is slow as balls compared to Linux, on Apple hardware no less.

benchmarks.

Postmark on Ubuntu on an Air is THREE TIMES as fast on Ubuntu as Linux. Probably because HFS is an abomination. Even graphics accelaration is much better with Linux. MAFFT is more than twice as fast.

Only for python packages. apt-get/yum/etc are far easier and more reliable than half-assed package managers like Homebrew.

a.k.a. "NEWS FLASH: Pasty Mountain Dew-Swilling Nerds Praise Film Where Handsome Badass Pretends To Do Their Job While Things Blow Up."

Hell, if they made a movie called "The Product Manager" and it was Chris Pine seducing inexplicably hot KPI project manager analysts, engaging in high-speed car chases with developers throwing ninja stars and screaming "put this in your requirements document!" and muttering catchphrases like "Oh, it will ship all right. But you can download it in HELL!" while he walks away from explosions, I'd say "yeah, that is exactly like my job."

The quote you cite comes from a paraphrase of former baseball manager Leo Durocher, and is intended to be understood in a sports context. Sports is a zero-sum game: somebody wins and somebody loses, and there are no points for character. The rest of life is not necessarily like that.

While "nice guys finish last" is often extrapolated (dubiously) to areas like dating, or is sometimes put in the mouth of realpolitik advocates like Niccolo Machiavelli or Henry Kissinger, it was never meant to be a general descriptor of how to get along in life. Some bosses - like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, or pre-mellowing Bill Gates were legendary assholes and still got great results out of their employees. There are other people who manage their employees with a gentler hand and play to their strengths, and get good results too. Your mileage may vary as to which is the best approach, but I certainly know which environment I would thrive in and which one would make me quit the first day.

Sometimes even if all you care about is the end result you may find that the end result would have been better if you had viewed the road getting there as being full of unique persons and not interchangeable tools. If you just aren't good at dealing with people, then fine, don't try to make yourself that type of leader/manager. But just remember that - to fight adage with adage - "you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."

Tying the antropocene epoch to the first nuclear detonation is a brazen attempt to smuggle the Garden of Eden / fall of man metaphor into this discussion under cover of a blinding fireball.

How about using Madame Curie instead, and picking a nice round date like 1900?

In 1900 Curie became the first woman faculty member at the Ecole Normale Superieure [/.sic] ...

I also noted this passage in the Wikipedia article.

Despite Curie's fame as a scientist working for France, the public's attitude tended toward xenophobia—the same that had led to the Dreyfus affair—which also fuelled false speculation that Curie was Jewish. During the French Academy of Sciences elections, she was vilified by the right wing press who criticised her for being a foreigner and an atheist. Her daughter later remarked on the public hypocrisy as the French press often portrayed Curie as an unworthy foreigner when she was nominated for a French honour, but would portray her as a French hero when she received a foreign one such as her Nobel Prizes.

In 1911 it was revealed that in 1910–11 Curie had conducted an affair of about a year's duration with physicist Paul Langevin, a former student of Pierre's—a married man who was estranged from his wife. This resulted in a press scandal that was exploited by her academic opponents. Curie (then in her mid-40s) was five years older than Langevin and was misrepresented in the tabloids as a foreign Jewish home-wrecker.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. [/.sic]

Nobody speaks it. The closest anyone comes is "church latin" a near variant used by the Roman Catholic Church. That's what makes latin a dead language.

Applying the colloquial criteria of "dead" to a language that remained—however frozen—in widespread and specialized use over many centuries is a complete waste of time for the present discussion. "Dead" is really just a shortened version of "dead to the evolutionary fads of populism".

One could argue that Perl is presently a near-dead language (it's evolution has become famously glacial) and then on this basis write a script routing all security advisories concerning Perl (such as DSA-2870-1 libyaml-libyaml-perl) straight into the round device.

On the other hand, perhaps Perl isn't quite as "dead" as the idiom suggests. Perhaps Perl is merely catatonic, or just resting.

Think of it as evolution in action. You can stay on one planet while some disaster takes it out. We have lots of choices of disaster, don't we? The human race can continue via those "space nutters".

Sure, we should try to avoid the disaster, etc., but planets are not forever.

You know someone is going to come in and say this is awful because reasons, because it was done under the Obama administration by Eric Holder.

They must be killed - judge, jury, executioner - before they can reveal that "Charlie" was a Gladio.