The .Plan

The 2008 NorCal Smart Rally took place today on Lombard Street. This is what the curvy landmark looks like when it is empty on a sleepy, foggy morning:

This is what it looks like with 150+ Fortwos stacked in pairs:

Click through to see the rest of the gallery!

Oh. My. God. Becky, look at his log file.
It’s so… big.
He looks like one of those biostats grad students.
Who understands biostats?
They only hired him because he looks like a total geek.
Okay? I mean, his log file is, like, 200 pages.
I can’t believe he even calculated… what’s a Schoenfield residual?
Gross. Look. He’s just so… smart…

I like good stats and I cannot lie.
You other brothers can’t deny.
When you get some data and you put it in STATA and it spits out a beta of ten,
You get sprung.
And you’re thinking hoorway,
Gonna send that to JAMA today…

Oh data, I wanna get wit’cha
regress and fit’cha…

Using simple caffeine to raise alertness in conjunction with naps during a trip is a winning strategy, Dr. Rosekind said. Caffeine takes 15 to 30 minutes to work, and an effective nap should be less than 45 minutes, to avoid going into the kind of deep sleep that leaves people groggy. So drinking a cup of coffee just before a nap, he said, can ensure that you will awaken with a little extra zip. The caffeine and nap working together “can actually show a performance boost greater than either one alone,” he said. “It’s not rocket science.”
–John Schwartz, “A Cure-All for Jet Lag? Try Caffeine and Naps”, New York Times, April 30, 2008

The first time you go to the Grove, the immensely successful and completely fabricated commercial center in Los Angeles, you will try to hate it. But then you will watch the old-fashioned trolley passing by, or the dancing fountain as it splurts jovially to the cadence of a Sinatra song, and you will drop your snobby urban integrity and walk around consuming things in a mouth-breathing stupor just like everyone else.

“You want to hate the Grove, but you just can’t,” one Angeleno friend said.

“The first rule of L.A. is to stop hating the Grove,” another said.
–Mike Albo, “Only your money is not pretend”, New York Times, April 24, 2008

(Inspired by the good folks at the FAIL Blog.)

…quickly.

[The] Chinese government has trained hundreds of thousands of official cheerleaders. Most are former state employees drafted out of retirement. They have been taught when to roar their approval and why not to boo other teams, especially those from onetime enemy countries. They will be assigned to events based partly on the decibel levels desired, organizers say…

Visitors to Beijing should not expect to see armies of Chinese 20-somethings in communist-red tights. The cheerleaders are more likely to look like a sorority of grandmothers, wearing matching T-shirts and equipped with props such as flags, handkerchiefs and “cheering sticks,” inflatable, oblong plastic balloons that generate thunderous applause.
–Maureen Fan, “Go, Teams! Learning The Drill In China”, Washington Post, April 6, 2008

If it’s not posted on Facebook, it doesn’t count…

Ashley Shinn didn’t know she was in a relationship until asked to confirm it in a message from Facebook.

On Facebook users can share everything from photos to intimate relationship details with 67 million users.

The 22-year-old University of North Texas senior received a Facebook request from her new beau after a kiss.

“We didn’t talk about it, then we kissed and then that night he sent me that request,” on Facebook, she said. “Without discussing it. I was like, ‘Oh, OK, I guess.’”
–Michael Hernandez, “How do you know your love is real? Check Facebook”, CNN, April 4, 2008

…and not just on e-mail:

The proper use of honorifics is no small matter in Germany, a society given to formality where even longtime neighbors insist on addressing each other using their surnames. Those with advanced degrees like to show them off, and it is not uncommon to earn more than one. A male faculty member with two PhDs can fully expect to be called “Herr Professor Dr. Dr. Schmidt,” for example.
–Craig Whitlock and Shannon Smiley, “Non-European PhDs In Germany Find Use Of ‘Doktor’ Verboten”, Washington Post, March 14, 2008