TFA lays out a template for getting press for lousy research: publish a paper (doesn't matter where), create an institute and a website, write press releases that lazy journalists can copy almost verbatim. I don't see why this won't work for legitimate and useful science.

This is great news. For those who haven't been following it, white nose syndrome is an emergent disease affecting bats. It's caused by a fungus that grows on the skin of the animals, and has been killing millions of bats across many parts of the eastern United States (map). A decontamination protocol has been established for researchers and cavers who come into contact with the animals. This is the first really optimistic piece of news about the disease that I've seen.

People will trade their passwords for a candy bar.

Plus, public sector workers at least have some job security. I've worked in the private sector for 20+ years, there's a reason it's called "at-will" employment. Sticking your neck out to report a breach won't win you any friends, doesn't gain you anything, and if it get someone who's politically savvy in trouble it could blow back on you. Safer and easier to keep quiet and keep your job.

I wish it weren't like that—and to be fair, the best teams I've worked with weren't (and aren't!) like that. But way too many offices run that way, and politics and sleaziness beats honesty and ethics nine times out of ten.

I'm seeing posts from people saying things like, "Agile isn't working for my team, I just spent my whole daily standup reading this thread" or, "I get a lot of work done during my retrospectives". Of course agile sucks for these people! Agile will get limited—but still useful—results when the team has this attitude.

But if they have a different mindset where they actually try during the daily standup or retrospective, it works so much better.

Look, every really good developer I've worked with has had good opinions and ideas about how the project should be run. When they spend the entire standup or retrospective looking at on their phones, the team doesn't get the benefit of those opinions and ideas. But when they use the meeting to actually share those ideas, and maybe even engage in a good discussion (or even argue for them!) with the rest of the team, the whole project benefits. But that only works if they care about doing a good job with the standup or the retrospective the way they care about doing a good job with their code.

I'm plugging my book, Learning Agile, now. I hope you don't mod me down too much for that. But I think we did a pretty good job arguing this point in the first few pages the first chapter. You can read the first chapter for free [PDF].

A friend of mine was managing a programming team. They interviewed a really good developer in his early 40s, and one of her team members said he was too old. He thought the guy couldn't possibly be up to date on recent technology. She hired him anyway, and he did really good work.

That was well over ten years ago. The guy who raised the objection is now older than the candidate he wanted to reject. I wonder if he's gone on any interviews lately (or found newfangled technology impossible to keep up with).

I know several people who get barometric migraines, or migraine headaches that are triggered when the pressure changes suddenly (usually when it drops). Some of them have told me that migraine medications like rizatriptan and sumatriptan can be effective, but often come with unpleasant side-effects like a racing pulse or grogginess.

This leads to a dilemma: do you take the medication and deal with the side effects, or do you try to ride out the headache? It's especially frustrating for people who get headaches that aren't always migraines, because the migraine medication doesn't necessarily work on a normal, non-migraine headache.

This is where a personal barometric pressure monitor that's been with you for the last few hours can be very helpful. If you are trying to decide whether or not to take migraine medication, you can consult your phone and see if you personally experienced a large pressure drop prior to the onset of the migraine. If so, that helps with the decision of whether or not to take the medicine.

Thanks!! It's super gratifying to hear that! :)

Warning: this is blatantly self-promotional. It's also a pretty good answer to the question, I think, so hopefully I won't get violently modded down.

It sounds like you're exactly who Jenny Greene and I wrote Head First C# for. I played around with a lot of different ways to teach both C# language and core object oriented programming and computer science concepts, and I found that building games was easily the most satisfying way to do it.

The only way to really learn a language is writing a lot of code, and one of the biggest challenges I had putting the book together was coming up with many different projects. The answer was games: a card games, a turn-based game, arcade games -- it turns out that building a game is a great way to keep readers motivated, especially when they're learning new concepts. I've had a lot of really positive feedback from first-time programmers who found it really satisfying to get through the book, and especially building the final project (a retro Space Invaders game).

You can download a free PDF of the first three chapters of Head First C# from the O'Reilly page and see if you like it.

I wrote a popular book for learning C#, and I routinely get emails from people who started programming in the 80s and 90s who felt their skills were going stale and were able to pick up C# without any difficulty.

I do not believe there is an expiration date on our ability to learn new programming skills. This applies for any language, whether or not you use a book... as long as you remember that most (only?) effective way to learn a new language is doing lots of projects (that's something I focus on for my readers).

If the NSF Report actually stated "that roughly 40% of Americans believe astrology to be scientific," this would be an interesting use of five bucks. But that's not what the report says.

Here's what the NSF report acually writes—and it's actually interesting:

Fewer Americans rejected astrology in 2012 than in recent years.
* In 2012, slightly more than half of Americans said that astrology was “not at all scientific,” whereas nearly two-thirds gave this response in 2010. The comparable percentage has not been this low since 1983.

Page 7-6 of the report gives actual details about the survey—speciically, the Science and Technology portion of the General Social Survey". You can search the GSS survey for the word 'astrology' to see the actual question:

ASTROSCI : ASTROLOGY IS SCIENTIFIC - 1037. Would you say that astrology is very scientific, sort of scientific, or not at all scientific?
0 NAP
1 Very scientific
2 Sort of scientific
3 Not at all scientific
8 DONT KNOW
9 NO ANSWER

The whole point is that they're asking Americans if they know what the word 'astrology' means.

If there was a mass epidemic of amnesia between 2010 and 2012, I don't remember it. So what caused the reversal in a steady trend that lasted from 1983 to 2010? Why did the number of Americans who know the definition of the word 'astrology' make a sudden and very large negative drop from 2010 to 2012?

This is an interesting result, and to their credit the authors of the NSF report do a good job of accurately reporting their finding without resorting to hyperbole or finger-pointing.