Tom Junod:

You think it'd be impossible to share your house with your wife, your daughter, and fifty million or so Argentine ants. And you would be correct.

Jeffrey Moore:

Do you know, or are you guessing? Do you know, or are you guessing? You're guessing, aren't you? No points! 0! You don't get any points for guessing!

Joel Stein:

There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta.

Jack Handey:

If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I'd say Flippy, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong, though. It's Hambone.

Invasion

Paul Graham:

Several people have told me they like the iPad because it lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would be too conspicuous.

In other words, it's a hip flask.

Matthew DuVerne Hutchinson:

From the crisp scent of vomit-soaked pizza boxes baking in the sunrise on East Sound Pier, to the pink-and-orange sunsets softly shimmering behind the West Railyard prostitute encampments, I love every inch of this town.

I took my first body shot right around the time I spoke my first word, and that word was "body shot."

And yet I fear that our children might not grow up in the same Margaritaville we've been able to enjoy.

David Foster Wallace:

There is no such thing as not worshipping.

Everybody worships.

The only choice we get is what to worship.

Tom Friedman:

We're entering an era where being in politics is going to be more than anything else about taking things away from people.

It's going to be very, very interesting.

Caterina Fake:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Vannevar Bush:

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.

Atul Gawande:

Let us look for the positive deviants.

Mason, Waters, Wright, and Gilmour:

And you run and run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

The Acceleration of Addictiveness

Noteworthy:

Jihad is the new punk.

Jon Caramanica:

What good is punk with nothing to be mad about?

Rebecca Willis:

Is there any sight more comical than a punk in a heat wave?

An exchange:

Ernie: Is there anything fluffier than a cloud?

Big Tom: If there is, I don't want to know about it.

Noteworthy:

Don't give me "The Clash" and claim you're punk.

Peter R. Neumann:

[They] frequently experience a tension between traditional [culture] ... and ... [contemporary] society. Extremism gives them an identity that allows them to rebel against both.

John Boehner:

Don't let those little punk staffers take advantage of you.

Amanda Terkel:

Barney Frank is now distributing "Little Punk Staffer" buttons to Hill aides.

Rattle:

I have a standing offer of $10 for the first person to bring me one of these "Little Punk Staffer" pins.

Abaddon:

Do you know why our stupid congress keeps passing brain dead laws concerning technology? Because some punk kid like you breaks into some soccer mom's network, makes her think you're some super genius hacker that's going to start world war 3 with the click of a mouse and she calls her congressman who is just as clueless as she is and they make more laws that make it illegal to think ...

Advice from a passerby:

Listen to some old school PUNK ROCK

Flynn:

Long live the Sex Pistols!

Tom Henderson, editor of mathpunk.net:

Mathematics is like unicorn anatomy. You imagine this thing, and it doesn't exist, yet it still comes with facts. I know how many legs a unicorn has.

Stefanie:

The Cold War Unicorns Play Set allows you to play out the intense struggle between two global superpowers in the majestic fantasy world of the Unicorn! Can the Communist Unicorn's horn of classless social structure hold up against the Freedom Unicorn's hooves of capitalist opportunity? Each hard vinyl unicorn is 3-3/4" tall with articulated joints for all sorts of dramatic poses.

Decius:

Did I mention that Unicorns are real?

David Pogue:

Not long from now, Facebook will be a frighteningly centralized database containing the information of about a half-billion people.

Kurt Partridge:

I don't think the field has really realized ... how informative it can be.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Erica Naone:

The site's 400 million users have an average of 130 friends each, and just this social graph data is tens of terabytes in size.

The site has long been the largest photo-sharing site on the Web ...

It's stunning to contemplate how large a responsibility the company has for information belonging to a growing number of people around the world.

Kristina Grifantini:

To address privacy concerns, they designed SoundSense so that ... a user can tell the software to ignore any sounds deemed off limits.

Tanzeem Choudhury:

A system that can recognize sounds in a person's life can be used to search for others who have the same preferences.

Christina Hendricks:

No man should be on Facebook.

Cordelia Dean:

There are those who suggest humanity should collectively decide to turn away from some new technologies as inherently dangerous.

S.C.:

Like Facebook, the dollar may not be the best system around, but it's what everyone else uses, hence it's hard to displace.

David Petraeus:

Hard is not hopeless.

danah boyd:

4chan is ground zero of a new generation of hackers who are bent on hacking the attention economy. These attention hackers are highlighting how manipulatable information flows are.

Jeff Bezos's grandfather:

One day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever.

Drake Bennett:

Whether they want to or not, people quickly begin to take things for granted.

Jeff Bezos:

Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.

Gifts are easy -- they're given, after all. Choices can be hard.

You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

Merlin Mann:

It takes a lot of patience and it takes a lot of self-awareness to be open to the fact that you may become popular about something that you didn't want to become popular about.

At a certain point, you don't get to pick that anymore.

Paul Kafasis:

It's got arrogance and self-conceit, followed by comeuppance, which is my absolute favorite kind of uppance.

David Petraeus:

Hard is not hopeless.

Schumpeter:

One of the problems with the corporate world is that all the incentives are towards producing platitudes, and none of them towards plain speaking. We need to invent a way of penalizing people for producing guff.

Daniel Plainview:

I like to think of myself as an oilman. As an oilman, I hope that you'll forgive just good old fashioned plain-speaking.

Barry Bozeman:

Honest clients are in short supply. Most of them think they already have the answers, and want someone to find the numbers to prove them right.

John Marburger:

We need disinterested people.

Mark Bauerlein, Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, Wayne Grody, Bill McKelvey, and Stanley W. Trimble:

More published output means more discovery, more knowledge, ever-improving enterprise.

If only that were true.

While brilliant and progressive research continues apace here and there, the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs. The avalanche of ignored research has a profoundly damaging effect on the enterprise as a whole.

More isn't better. At some point, quality gives way to quantity.

Louis Menand:

Getting a Ph.D. today means spending your 20's in graduate school, plunging into debt, writing a dissertation no one will read -- and becoming more narrow and more bitter each step of the way.

Rachel Toor:

I can tell you, after years of rejecting manuscripts submitted to university presses, most people's ideas aren't that brilliant.

Julian Gough:

As we all know, lax writing practices earlier this decade led to irresponsible writing and irresponsible reading.

Anne Sasso:

History shows that the deeper your idea cuts into the heart of a field, the more your peers are likely to challenge you.

Rejection is indeed a big part of being a scientist.

Ben Goldacre:

Open data -- people posting their data freely for all to re-analyse -- is the big hip new zeitgeist, and a vitally important new idea. But I was surprised to find that the thing I've advocated for wasn't enough: open data is sometimes no use unless we also have open methods.

Chris Mooney:

We've been aware for a long time that Americans don't know much about science.

But as much as the public misunderstands science, scientists misunderstand the public.

It appears that politics comes first on such a contested subject, and better information is no cure-all -- people are likely to simply strain it through an ideological sieve.

Louis Menand:

Ideas should never become ideologies.

Geoffrey Munro:

The scientific impotence discounting hypothesis predicts that people resist belief-disconfirming scientific evidence by concluding that the topic of study is not amenable to scientific investigation.

Mooney:

Experts and policy makers mustn't be deceived by the fact that people often appear, on the surface, to be arguing about scientific facts. Frequently, their underlying rationale is very different.

Cornelia Dean:

For some, the most worrisome thing about geoengineering is the idea that, once people know about it, they will think of it as a technological quick fix that makes it unnecessary to control emissions of greenhouse gases, an effort everyone takes pains to point out is by far the most important step to be taken now.

All the while, humanity is already engaged in a gigantic geoengineering experiment, one that has been under way, however inadvertently, since people started large-scale burning of fossil fuels 150 years ago. So far, the world's efforts to act together on the problem have been, to be charitable, unimpressive.

David Freedman:

We should avoid the kind of advice that tends to resonate the most -- it's exciting, it's a breakthrough, it's going to solve your problems -- and instead look at the advice that embraces complexity and uncertainty.

We have to learn to force ourselves to accept, understand and even embrace that we live in a complex, very messy, very uncertain world.

Barack Obama:

Science is more essential for our prosperity, our health, our environment and our quality of life than it has ever been before.

Colin Macilwain:

Beneath the rhetoric, however, there is considerable unease that the economic benefits of science spending are being oversold.

And even if scientific research does drive innovation, will more investment in science necessarily speed up the process? Unfortunately, economists concede, no one really knows.

Ben Goldacre:

When presented with unwelcome scientific evidence, it seems, in a desperate attempt to retain some consistency in their world view, people would rather conclude that science in general is broken.

This is an interesting finding.

But I'm not sure it makes me very happy.

An exchange:

Frink: "Now that I have your attention, we have some exciting new research from young Lisa Simpson. Let's bring her out and pay attention."

Scientist #1: "She's just a little girl!"

Scientist #2: "Let's not listen!"

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too.

It's just that I've gotten used to it.

Geoffrey Munro:

The scientific impotence discounting hypothesis predicts that people resist belief-disconfirming scientific evidence by concluding that the topic of study is not amenable to scientific investigation.

Being presented with belief-disconfirming scientific evidence may lead to an erosion of belief in the efficacy of scientific methods.

The Economist's Washington correspondent:

I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust.

I had no idea.

Emmeline Zhao:

Caitlin Johnson, 23 years old and a 2009 graduate of MIT with a BS in computer-science and engineering, said she was unable to land any of the 10 positions she applied for.

So she opted to stay at MIT for her master's in engineering. Having just finished her first year of the two-year program, Ms. Johnson said she might look for a job at the end of the summer to start after she completes the degree next year. But finding graduate school more appealing and facing a job market that remains weak, she said she would most likely go on to earn her Ph.D.

Should Ms. Johnson decide to opt for the job hunt instead of more schooling, she likely will face stiff competition. The number of 20- to 34-year-olds with master's degrees in the labor force in June was 12% higher than it was two years earlier. And first-time grad-school enrollment rose 4.5% in 2008 and 6% in 2009 across the country.

Marge Simpson:

Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.

Georgia Tech ranks #1 (percentage-wise) among US colleges and universities on Payscale's ROI survey (MIT is #1 in total lifetime return):

With the average cost for college rising, PayScale helps you figure out which school's tuition costs will return the biggest dividends for you after graduation.

A Desperate Attempt To Retain Some Consistency

PG:

Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew.

And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get.

PR:

We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising.

CB:

If you purchased the recalled bars, please destroy them.

RJ:

All the good bars are south of Ponce.

DB:

I stole a few nibbles from one of the cleaner bars.

Others wiped away the gore and fuel and joined me.

Paul Krugman:

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression.

It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression.

But the cost -- to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs -- will nonetheless be immense.

The Economist's Washington correspondent:

I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust.

I had no idea.

Barry Ritholtz:

This current generation is pretty much fucked.

Simon Johnson:

The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump "cannot be as bad as the Great Depression."

This view is wrong.

Neil Howe:

If you think that things couldn't get any worse, wait till the 2020s.

Anatole Kaletsky:

The battle over bailouts in Europe is only a sideshow compared with the great social conflict that lies ahead all over the world in the next 20 years.

Decius:

Man, what a great time to be alive!

Dan Kildee:

Much of the land will be given back to nature.

People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow.

Decius:

Cutting production means layoffs which will reduce consumption which will reduce orders which means that production will need to be cut which will require more layoffs which will reduce consumption which will reduce orders which means that production will need to be cut which will require more layoffs which will reduce consumption which will reduce orders which means that production will need to be cut which will require more layoffs ...

John Lanchester:

It's becoming traditional at this point to argue that perhaps the financial crisis will be good for us, because it will cause people to rediscover other sources of value. I suspect this is wishful thinking, or thinking about something which is quite a long way away, because it doesn't consider just how angry people are going to get when they realize the extent of the costs we are going to carry for the next few decades.

Judith Warner:

We're all losers now. There's no pleasure to it.

The Onion:

After nearly four months of frank, honest, and open dialogue about the failing economy, a weary US populace announced this week that it is once again ready to be lied to about the current state of the financial system.

The Third Depression