My UID is five digits, so maybe I'm just old—but I liked the Ctrl-Shift-T post. Also, people have been posting the same exact complaints about /. going downhill since I joined. It's not. Deal with it.

In Mind Wide Open Steven Johnson points out that "Laughing is not an instinctive physical response to humor, the way a flinch responds to pain or a shiver to cold. It's an instinctive form of social bonding that humor is crafted to exploit."

Think about how often you laugh at references, the more obscure the better. You're sharing a bond with the person making that reference—and once you start looking for that, it becomes increasingly obvious (at least it did for me).

That's probably why "I like my X like my Y, Z" style jokes are funny—they make us think, "Wow, you and I both see that X and Y have that relationship, possibly based on abusing a synonym, which doesn't immediately spring to mind when you think of them."

The more I think about humor as an exploit of laughter as social bonding behavior, the more I notice it. And the more I notice people laughing when things aren't funny, but when it's appropriate to reconfirm a social bond (like when someone does something embarrassing that might take them out of the social norm, and the people around them laugh to reassure them that the social bond has not been damaged... much).

This is where I would make a joke about how geeks are not good at social bonding, but I'm too much of a geek to relate to such things.

I struggled with this myself when I was studying CS at CMU in the early '90s. I'm naturally a very ego-driven, arrogant person. I'm very much driven by other people appreciating me, liking me, and thinking that what I do is really cool or good. I think geeks, more than others, are like that. When we walk around with, say, a geeky t-shirt, or walking stick, or Doctor Who scarf, or some other affectation, what we're saying to the world is, "Look at me! I'm cool!" Even when we're socially introverted, once other people engage us we want so badly for them to think we're cool.

And the funny thing is that many of us geeks actually do have a lot of interesting, cool things about us (even if not the traditional "cool" of Fonzie, Mr. T, Dawson, etc.). I learned through a lot of self-examination (and a few very patient, non-geek girlfriends) that people gave me the reaction I wanted ("I like you, you are interesting, and I want to listen to you") much more often if I became less arrogant.

Here's what I had to do to become less arrogant. First, I had to stop arguing with people. I had a habit of arguing to completion, especially using pedantic arguments. With other geeks, this was great. With civilians, this really pissed them off and made me a very frustrating person to deal with. I would win an argument through logic and rhetoric, but then the person would never really talk to me again, or treat me poorly. I decided that I would rather lose the argument but win the friend. An interesting side-effect of that was that when I listened to other people—actually listened, not just waited for them to stop talking so I could make my next argument—I discovered that they often had something interesting to say. Sometimes they were even right, and I was wrong!

That was the second thing I had to learn: that sometimes I was wrong. This was a difficult thought for me, because I am so used to being right. But just like I didn't always ace every test in college, I also didn't always walk into every discussion knowing everything. The more I listened to other people, the more I realized that the world was more complicated and less obvious than I thought it was. I started to dismiss people less, even people who seemed stupid or wrong, because even if they only had one thing to say, they might still be good company—and if they liked interacting with me, they would give me more of that recognition from others that I craved (and, if I'm honest with myself, still crave today).

Finally, I had to recognize that social skills, like all other skills, improve with practice. I used put my foot in my mouth all the time: I'd say something that would commit me to a fact, idea, or opinion, often an extreme one (said very loudly), then I'd have trouble walking back from it. That would be really embarrassing, especially when it turned out what I said was something I didn't really want to say, or was wrong. Sometimes I would blurt something out that would bother me for days afterwards. It really helped when I started treating this like a skill to be improved. I tried to treat each of those things as a learning opportunity. What did I say wrong? How could I prevent myself from doing that in the future? Almost always, the answer turned out to be to qualify absolute statements with phrases like "I think" or "It might be true that" or "Maybe." Often, the answer would just be to keep my mouth shut for a few extra sentences and listen.

My interactions with others improved a lot after that, and my arrogance naturally started to deflate. It's amazing how much less arrogant we become once we start listening to other people, even people we assume at first are wrong because they disagree with us.

The biggest social skill improvement, for me, has been to recognize that other people really like being right as much as I do. When someone else said something that was right, I would grudgingly admit they were correct, then I would try to one-up them: "Yes, you're technically correct, but here's my idea which is so much better!" This came off as very arrogant, and made people dislike talking to me. Now, instead of trying to one-up, I will encourage the person: "Wow, you're right about that! That's pretty cool." Instead of making it about me, I'd make it about them. After all, in a conversation, it's only fair that it should be at least as much about the other person as it is about me, right? I've come to learn that the more I openly recognize that other people are right (when they are), the more they will reciprocate, and the better they will treat me.

Some of these things draw on basic facts of social psychology. One book I wish I'd read earlier is "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini. It does a really good job of showing how people influence each other, and it gave me a lot of ideas of ways to improve my arrogance problems.

I hope this helps some fellow geeks!

The New York Times gets a lot of (often well-deserved) criticism for its science reporting—but in this case, this isn't science reporting at all. It's written by Mark Bittman, and according to his website, Wikipedia, and various other sources, the author is a food writer and editor with a degree in psychology whose background mainly consists of writing and editing cookbooks and cooking magazines (and driving a cab).

Yes, pedigree doesn't mean everything and good science can come from people who aren't scientists. But still, consider the source and take it with whatever size grain of salt you feel is warranted.

There are a lot of people who will judge you purely based on the quality of your code and skills, as it should be. But there are definitely some people in our field who will blatantly discriminate against job candidates based on their age. I've seen it myself when I've hired older candidates and gotten discriminatory feedback from peers and managers. Many people I know have seen it as well -- here's one example from someone I know.

About ten years ago, a good friend of mine (a highly experienced software development manager) was running a programming team. She asked her team to give her feedback about a developer who was in his early 40s. One of her programmers said the candidate was too old. He didn't think the candidate could possibly be up to date on current technology, and would never be able to keep up with the rest of the team. My friend hired him anyway over the (blatantly illegal and, frankly, disgusting and stupid) age discrimination of her team member. The new developer turned out to be one of her top programmers.

It's now ten years later, and the person who raised the objection is probably older than the candidate he had wanted to reject. I wonder if he's gone on an interview recently...

The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper is one of the best books on usability I've ever read. It's entertaining, highly thoughtful, and contains a lot of timeless lessons about usability and UX. My favorite story in the book is a case study of the software bundled with the Logitech ScanMan. They used personas to understand their users and strip out all of the extraneous features, and instead concentrate on making a much smaller feature set easier to use:

What surprised us was that every one of the test subjects expressed the opinion that Peacock was the “most powerful.” In literal terms of the number of features, this was far from true. In terms of effective power realized by the user, we had increased it significantly. page 141

From TFA: Facebook officials say their service is good for people. "Facebook can be like broccoli," [Facebook spokesman] Schnitt says. "Everyone can benefit from it but not everyone will want to."

That's very unflattering. Is that really how Facebook is perceived by the people who work there?

If Brazil borrows from India, it doesn't matter if those bonds are indexed in reals, rupees, renminbi, or Icelandic krona. Brazil can just go to JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, BofA, or any other bank with a derivatives desk and buy some currency swaps. As far as Brazil is concerned the loan is now indexed in dollars. The bank doesn't want to take any risks, so they'll probably go straight to India and sell them the other side of the swap, and India would be more than happy to buy it. The bank now makes a fee without taking any risk, and Brazil and India get the PR boost of using bonds indexed in BRICs currency -- without giving up the relative safety of using dollars.

You meant Ridley Scott and not Scott Ridley, right?

It's very likely that there were more than eight 8.5+ magnitude earthquakes before 1900. The Wikipedia you reference says "(est)" after those quakes because reliable global earthquake monitoring only started in the last century. Those eight quakes are famous and, deadly, and most importantly, directly affected (and killed) Europeans. The magnitudes were estimated from historical records.

There were certainly many more large earthquakes between 1700 and 1900, but they weren't recorded.

A little more info on large quakes (including references to the sources for the data on large earthquakes since 1900) here, if you're interested: USGS list of 8.5+ magnitude earthquakes since 1900

My life got a lot easier when I adopted the rule to never write anything in e-mail that I wouldn't want forwarded. Not only does it prevent the "reply all" problem, it also prevents the problem where the person I ranted to cc:'s the subject of the rant, either accidentally or as a way to stab me in the back.

Also, one thing I discovered is that while, as a geek, I chuckle when someone sends me an e-mail ranting about some idiot who deserves it, other (non-geek) people often feel uncomfortable when they see it. I think they now feel burdened with this new information that people that they work with aren't getting along, or something to that effect. My work life got easier when I stopped making the people around me feel uncomfortable, and I bet that my fellow socially awkward geeks would also see similar results.