Monday Links from the Bench: Vol. XI

[NickFitz]

More shenanigans from the bottomless pit:

• The Treacherous Optimization - Ridiculous Fish (Apple developer Peter Ammon) confronts Ultimate Unix Geek in a battle of the algorithms: "...as everyone knows, the best way to get amazing results is to set arbitrary goals without any basis for believing they can be reached."
  
  
• Ten reasons to avoid talking on the phone - another insightful comic from The Oatmeal.
  
  
• Why smart people defend bad ideas - from Scott Berkun: "I feel qualified to write this essay as I’m a recovering smart person myself and I’ve defended several very bad ideas."
  
  
• Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love - Ars Technica explain why AdBlock might not be such a good thing, and give the findings of a brief experiment where adblocking visitors also found the content blocked. (They decided that was a bad idea.)
  
  
• Hollywood movies follow a mathematical formula - "Hollywood movies have found a mathematical formula that lets them match the effects of their shots to the attention spans of their audiences." Full details of how the pace of editing in successful movies approximates to 1/f fluctuation (pink noise) can be found in the complete research paper (PDF).
  
  
• Learning About Contrast in Design - a tutorial-in-a-comic from Brad Colbow.
  
  
• The Things He Carried - "Airport security in America is a sham — 'security theatre' designed to make travelers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of prohibited items — as our correspondent did with ease."
  
  
• You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. - Commenter Bob Ince finally snaps when once again somebody asks the same old question on Stack Overflow. (You need decent Unicode fonts to get the full effect.)
  
  
• The Days of Miracles and Wonder - Greg Knauss travels back in time to talk to his 1990s self. The iPad isn't the only good news. "Oh, no. You’ve got the good Bush."
  
  
• SMS Shorthand for Geeks Using Server Response Codes - Liz McLean Knight demonstrates the use of HTTP response codes to save all that unpleasant phone typing. "[FRIEND] where teh frak r you??? weve been waiting for 2 hrs now... [YOU] 404"
  
  

Happy invoicing!

[darmstadt]

Thank you very much, I've been waiting for this as it keeps me entertained each week sitting in a hotel room. Keep up the excellent work

[cailin maith]

More shenanigans from the bottomless pit:

• Ten reasons to avoid talking on the phone - another insightful comic from The Oatmeal.
  
  

Happy invoicing!

[NickFitz]

Thank you very much, I've been waiting for this as it keeps me entertained each week sitting in a hotel room. Keep up the excellent work

HTH

[RichardCranium]

Bloody Hell.

I have still got tabs open from Vol IX or VIII that I haven't visited.

And I think I've only seen six or seven of these posts.

[NickFitz]

Bloody Hell.

I have still got tabs open from Vol IX or VIII that I haven't visited.

And I think I've only seen six or seven of these posts.

On the "Advanced search" page, stick "Monday" in the search box, my username in the "Posts by" box, ensure "Search thread titles" and "Show results as threads" are both selected, Choose "General" in the forums list, and search. Though you probably knew that.

I have to do this every week to check that I'm not repeating myself