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Computer Science is an odd discipline when it comes to job interviews for software developers. Specifically, all interviewees are expected to write code on the whiteboard, irrespective of their background and experience. Let’s assume that I get to interview for a job at Google (which will be a very real possibility if I fail to get tenure). Like a fresh college grad, I will be asked to write code on the whiteboard. The fact that I have close to 15 years of combined industrial and academic experience as well as more than 40 peer reviewed, technical publications will not make any difference. I will have to ask questions like: “How would you remove a node from a doubly linked list?” “How can you find all the neighboring links using a heap?” The fact that I have been teaching these skills to undergraduates for more than five years will be ignored completely. Purportedly, some academics who have not written much code in a while claim to hesitate even applying for a job with Google for that reason.

If we are to use a medical analogy, imagine interviewing an experienced (10-15 years on the job) surgeon for a position in a hospital.  Can you imagine asking the surgeon: “What is a scalpel? What kind of scalpels are there?” “Now, cut this cadaver as if you were to perform an appendectomy. Good. Now imagine that there were some complications–show how you’d cut in that case.” I hope you are having a good laugh, because such a situation is unimaginable.

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A man was shot dead at a Latvian cinema after eating his popcorn too loudly during a screen of Black Swan, according to reports.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The Cincinnati Enquirer reports on the string of cases in which the Supreme Court has reversed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.  As the Enquirer story notes, the Sixth Circuit has batted 0–15 over the past three Supreme Court terms.  This is quite remarkable. No other Circuit has been reversed so consistently over this period.  As I noted here, it’s also quite unusual to see a single Circuit reversed so consistently in a single area, such as criminal procedure and habeas rights, as the Sixth was last term.

One of the significant indicia of American decline is the fact that Federal Appellate Court judges are becoming figures of ridicule. Remember that nobody laughs at you if you aren’t funny.

Terry Wogan wants to let sleeping soaps lie.

The Other McCain kicks over a rock and finds — surprise! — Democrat politicians.

Dan Collins at Piece of Work in Progress recounts the story behind the protests in Wisconsin: How Democrats, after losing the November election, called a special lame-duck session in an abortive effort to lock in sweetheart deals for government employee unions. When that didn’t work, Democrats have since tried to prevent Republicans from acting to balance the budget at the expense of government employee unions.

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We have seen the future of the health care system, and it is the doctors on the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, handing out free sick notes to public sector union members so they can fraudulently collect their pay for missing work.

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I am not making this up.

Let’s see him name the kid ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ and see how long he lasts.

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Why don’t they just sink the damned ship? It’s not as if Israel has any friends to lose. What would happen that isn’t going to happen anyway? It would certainly guarantee that there isn’t another exciting episode in the whole ‘flotilla’ soap opera.

The Germans never put up with this shit. Hell, the British never put up with this shit, back when they had balls.

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I’m a photographer. I mainly do street photography now, but i still do the odd bit of contract work. I travel with expensive gear though not that much of it. I like to travel light. The INS do not like that. If I turn up with just my camera backpack and a small bag of clean underwear for a one week stay I usually have to spend a lot of time being interrogated for my lack of a huge suitcase. (I guess they suspect I live in the US illegally. Which borders on comical since nobody knows more about my travel patterns than the US government. Besides, my passport is usually filled with stamps that should tell them that I travel a lot and that even if I lived in the US, I spend most of my time flitting around the world)

Paranoid as the INS are, the TSA are even worse. Mostly because they are a huge bureaucracy where nobody seems to be accountable and their on-the-ground personnel are mostly people who had to choose from a range of other low paying jobs. On several occasions I’ve had expensive gear disappear from my carry-on during security checks and last year a TSA agent dropped my Canon 1D Mk3, smashing both the lens and the camera body. No apology, but more importantly: I was never compensated. I’m not rich and that camera (and the lens) was important to my livelihood. An expensive piece of kit lost that meant that I basically didn’t make any money that month.

I’ve been to Russia before the cold war ended. I’ve been all over the middle east. I’ve been to China. I’ve travelled all over Europe. I’ve been to Cuba and I’ve been to Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Nicaragua.

What all of these places have in common is that going there was a far more pleasant experience than going to the US. Yes, you read correctly: going to the US is more unpleasant than going to Soviet era Russia or even Iran 10 years ago. Sure, you sometimes have to bribe people, but at least I’ve not had gear stolen off me during security checks or had people break my gear without at least compensating me.

Welcome to the Obamanation. Bend over and spread ’em.

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Few people are aware the San Francisco has had a tax provision in its municipal code since 2004 that requires companies to pay a payroll tax on gains from employee stock options. No one pays it, and San Francisco hasn’t enforced it to date, but companies are becoming increasingly agitated that the city may change that policy at any time. The number of high profile and high value startups based in San Francisco – like Twitter and Zynga – may be too big of a temptation for the city to ignore.

We’re hearing that some of the city’s biggest startups are increasingly concerned that the city will start applying its local payroll tax to employee stock options– something even the Federal government doesn’t do. This would create potentially huge costs for startups that they can sidestep simply by moving a few miles to the North, East or South. If enforced, expect an exodus of San Francisco jobs to surrounding areas.

And rightly so. Like the Mafia, governments can’t stand to see other people making money without thinking that they deserve a cut.

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Crespo wants trains to come to a complete stop while drivers — he says conductors, but the drivers would do it — inspect the tracks for people before moving ahead very slowly. The cost in lost productivity due to slower commutes alone would wipe out the savings in human life and liability payments.

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I guess high-speed rail isn’t as wonderful as the reactionaries progressives make it out to be. Too bad, Barry.

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To avoid a vote on a proposal to limit collective bargaining rights in the state of Wisconsin, 14 legislators have fled the state, to an undisclosed location. I am not sure if there is a precedent for this. The reason they crossed state lines was to dodge the Wisconsin police

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Money flows to those who can afford to buy Congressmen make campaign contributions.

But the amendments are likely to be killed, if not in the House then in the Senate, on the grounds that such changes are “complex” and should be addressed in the next farm bill, due to be negotiated in 2012. The subtext of the message, especially in the Senate, will really be “Get lost; the amendments’ deficit impacts are negligible and, as usual, we don’t want to take any grief from the major farm organizations whose leaderships disproportionately consists of large-scale farm operators and whose members have a regrettable habit of voting.”

Steve Sailer watches some chickens coming home to roost.

We now mostly just squabble amongst ourselves, minorities v. whites and whites v. whites over who cares about whites least. So these kind of divisions are pretty easy for the Larry Ellisons to manipulate to add a few billions to their net worth.

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I think of it as evolution in action.

These dead bodies serve a function similar to the heads on spikes above a city gate. However, like the latter, the deterrent effect is less than it might be.

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Roughly one-fifth of tests that bone and joint specialists order are because a doctor fears being sued, not because the patient needs them, a first-of-its-kind study in Pennsylvania suggests.

Well, duh. Can you blame them?

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Two TSA agents were busted today at Kennedy Airport for stealing $160,000 in cash from bags, authorities said.

Yeah, I feel safer already.

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Considering how badly Mexico treats illegal immigrants from elsewhere in Latin America — of course, they’d scream bloody murder if the U.S. treated Mexican illegal immigrants that badly — I doubt that this will fly. But you never know.

The Other McCain is outraged.

Maybe Egyptians could use one of Filipovic’s pious lectures about “no means no” and “stop means stop.” I’d probably be accused of some sort of thought-crime if I were to suggest that the spontaneous outburst of savagery against Lara Logan of CBS News says anything about the future course of democracy in Egypt.

I don’t know who Jill Filopovic is, but I doubt that I would like her.

There is a sort of tournament among feminists, in which they compete for prizes by striving to excel their rivals in the denunciation of misogynist scapegoats. And because feminism is a phenomenon of the Left, it’s preferable if the scapegoats can be somehow linked to the Right.

As with all leftist ideologies, feminism is collectivist in nature. Rape is therefore not a crime perpetrated by specific criminals against specific victims. Rather, rape is men’s collective crime, of which women are the collective victims: All men are therefore complicit in every rape, and all women suffer when any woman is raped.

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Tammy Church and Eric Dunlap of St. Louis filed separate suits Monday in St. Louis Circuit Court. Their son, Jeremy Dunlap, 21, was stabbed at the center by another homeless man Feb. 12, 2008. That man, Robert Gamble, was  convicted of murder and is serving a 30-year prison sentence.

Uh-huh. Where were they when their son needed help? But they’re quick enough to sue the people who were doing the job the parents ought to have been doing.

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Ah, back to the good old days. I guess even wolves couldn’t make it under Communism.

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Further adventures from the fantasyland of ‘intellectual property’.

Well, here’s a pleasant surprise. We’ve been talking a lot about the rise of publicity rights as a relatively “new” form of intellectual property, driven by a collection of confusing state laws that create a poorly defined “right” for someone to block the use of their likeness (and, in some cases, their appearance, voice, mannerisms, gestures and more…). This has given rise to a new group of what can best be called “publicity rights trolls,” looking for ways to exploit these laws for cash. There are some cases making their way through the courts that question whether or not publicity rights violate the First Amendment, but in a surprise ruling up in Washington, a federal judge has ruled that the state’s publicity rights law is unconstitutional.

Cringely reads the tea leaves.

That’s why Nokia did the deal with Microsoft, which will be assuming the burden of all that software development and paying Nokia for the privilege. It’s a short-term play that makes perfect sense in an industry where CEOs last an average of four years. Stephen Elop’s four years are now fairly certain, his golden parachute packed and ready.

When watching the clip of Elop and Steve Ballmer appearing together on stage, I kept waiting for Ballmer to pat Elop on the head and say ‘Good dog! Good dog!’

(Does Steve Ballmer look like Uncle Fester, or is it just me?)

Robert Samuelson takes the government to the woodshed.

There’s something wildly irresponsible about the national government’s undermining states’ already poor long-term budget prospects by plying them with grants that provide short-term jobs. Worse, the high-speed rail proposal casts doubt on the administration’s commitment to reducing huge budget deficits (its 2012 budget is due Monday). How can it subdue deficits if it keeps proposing big new spending programs?

Despite the subsidies, Amtrak does not provide low-cost transportation. Longtime critic Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute recently planned a trip from Washington to New York. Noting that fares on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela start at $139 one-way, he decided to take a private bus service. The roundtrip fare: $21.50. Nor does Amtrak do much to relieve congestion, cut oil use, reduce pollution or eliminate greenhouse gases. Its traffic volumes are simply too small to matter.

The reasons why passenger rail service doesn’t work in America are well-known: Interstate highways shorten many trip times; suburbanization has fragmented destination points; air travel is quicker and more flexible for long distances (if fewer people fly from Denver to Los Angeles and more go to Houston, flight schedules simply adjust). Against history and logic is the imagery of high-speed rail as “green” and a cutting-edge technology.

Power Line does some fisking.

Obama made his mark on the NEH with the appointment of Republican former Rep. Jim Leach to serve as its chairman for a four-year term. Or should that be former Republican Rep. Jim Leach? Having been defeated for reelection to the House in 2006, Leach abandoned his party and endorsed Obama in a speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. For his service to Obama, Leach must have had dreams of office higher than the chairmanship of the NEH — his name was floated as the possible United States Ambassador to the United Nations — but the NEH is what he got. Leach was sworn in as chairman on August 13, 2009.

Hey, 30 years as a Congressman makes it hard to say no when the price is right.

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Of course. Souls don’t come cheap, even these days.

Steve Sailer does Hollywood.

That’s pretty funny when you think about it: a major player in Hollywood is a Scientologist for his entire career, but he finally rebels because … one Scientologist staffer in another city signed a petition against gay marriage.

To me, the most interesting thing about Scientology is how it was an outgrowth of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. L. Ron Hubbard was a sci-fi writer, the great editor John W. Campbell heavily promoted his Dianetics (which was originally intended not as a religion but as an equally plausible and cheaper competitor for Freudianism), and Hubbard’s pal Robert A. Heinlein supposedly gave him the idea that you could get rich starting your own religion.

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Police launched a full-scale search for the leopard following Tuesday’s attack, which happened near the town of Brits in South Africa’s North West province.

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US security officials are reportedly worried that a new generation of drug-smuggling submarines – able, unlike their predecessor semi-submersibles, to travel completely submerged beneath the waves – might be used to carry out terrorist operations.

The Texan paper also quotes Laurence McCabe, a professor at the US Naval War College, as stating that the appearance of true submarines in criminal hands is causing much concern in military and security circles.

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Is any other subculture reported on so exclusively by its own members? Or with a frequency and an extensiveness that bear so little relation to its size? (The “slow food” movement that we keep hearing about has fewer than 20,000 members nationwide.)

The Roman historian Livy famously regarded the glorification of chefs as the sign of a culture in decline. I wonder what he would have thought of The New York Times’ efforts to admit “young idols with cleavers” into America’s pantheon of food-service heroes.

Naturally the food-obsessed profess as much respect for tradition as for evolution. Hamilton, in Blood, Bones and Butter, writes of her childhood dinners: “The meal was always organized correctly, traditionally, which I now appreciate.” Even relatively young traditions like the Thanksgiving turkey must be guarded zealously against efforts to change or opt out of them. Foreign traditions destigmatize every dish even for the American. In Best Food Writing 2010, one foie gras lover asks another whether he would eat tortured cat if there were sufficient Mongolian history behind the dish; the answer is yes.

I am not making this up.

Steve Sailer finally gets on the bus.

What I’m reminded of is that fairly similar stuff happens in Mexico regularly without the U.S. press paying much attention at all.

All these years, I’ve been trying to pay attention to Mexico when everybody else is obsessing over the Middle East. After all, I reasoned, Mexico is right next door to us, while the Middle East isn’t. Plus, you gotta admit this Mexican stuff can be pretty colorful. How about the growing cults of Jesus Malverde, the narco saint, and Santa Muerte?

On the other hand, how much of this Mexican history has turned out to be all that important? Mexico seems to keep on being Mexico, just with more Wal-Marts and more chopped heads. Maybe the American press was right to pay little attention to Mexico. On the other hand, how much of this Middle East stuff that preoccupies them turns out to matter much either?

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An Australian teenager has died after he fell from a multi-storey car park while typing a text message.

19-year-old Ryan Robbins escorted a couple of women to their car late last Friday, in Melbourne. After they parted ways, Ryan began texting a friend, while walking.

He did not notice the railing – about waist-high – and tripped over, plunging to his death. Ryan had been drinking but was not drunk, according to his grandmother Patricia Schroeter.

Think of it as evolution in action. And, of course

In an interview with the radio station 3AW, she blamed inadequate safety measures at the car park for Ryan’s death and called for taller barriers to be mandatory.

“I don’t want anyone else to lose their children or… to go like this, not if it can be prevented,” she said.

Teaching the kid to be NOT QUITE SO CLUELESS is apparently off the table.

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Liberals — particularly in academia and the social sciences — have a tribal mentality which results in discrimination against conservatives.

What is shocking is not that such tribal mentality exists, but that anyone is expressing surprise.

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A former Army bomb disposal expert tried to murder his pregnant wife by planting a hand grenade in her car after she confronted him about an affair, a court heard yesterday.

And they always told me that skills learned in the military weren’t transferable to civilian life.

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China has secretly built a concrete aircraft carrier for pilot training as part of its military build-up, intelligence sources have disclosed.

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In an e-mail obtained by ABC News, a top staffer for the key Senate Appropriations subcommittee called for a meeting of lobbyists and interest groups that would be affected by expected cuts to the Labor and Heath and Human Services budget. The Jan. 24 meeting was attended by approximately 400 people, sources told ABC, and served as a “call to arms” for those determined to fight Republican budget cuts.

And there you have it.

“We obviously have to cut the budget deficit and address the debt problem, but are we going to do that on the backs of the poor, the unemployed, those without child care, et cetera? That’s the kind of thing that could halt the economic recovery in its tracks.”

Well, yeah, that’s the general idea….

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According to the Daily Mail Online, an immigration officer who worked for the UK Border Agency managed to get his wife out of his hair for three years by putting her name on the no-fly list while she was visiting the in-laws overseas. Officials confirmed on January 30 that the man had confessed to adding his wife’s name to the list after she left for Pakistan, with the result that she was not allowed to get on a plane to come home. Airline and immigration authorities refused to explain to her why she was not being allowed to travel, although I imagine she put two and two together after her immigration-officer husband stopped answering his phone.

Note that this was not a person ‘of British descent’, as they phrase things these days.

The minor lesson is not to employ foreigners from a different cultural tradition in government.

The major lesson is that people will inevitably abuse power, which is why their power needs to be limited to that which is absolutely necessary.

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I am not making this up.

The Advertising Standards Authority – in these benighted short-attention-span days, perhaps one of the most important guardians of the English language – has described the fields of “Natural Preservatives in toiletries” and “Essential Oils” as being “traditional scientific disciplines” and ruled that people qualified in these areas may fairly be described as “scientists”.

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The multinational Task Force 150, to which some 30 navies contribute on a rota basis, has done little to stop the pirates. At any one time there could be a dozen ships on patrol, but this is a vast area, their surveillance is random and even on those few occasions when they could intercept, they do little or nothing.

Our own Royal Navy has shown its muscle only once: in November 2008, a frigate returned fired on pirates who had fired at it, and two of the attackers were killed. But a Ministry of Defence directive since has forbidden RN captains to confront or arrest pirates “for fear of breaching their human rights”.

Perhaps Kenya’s navy has the answer. Its patrol craft covertly operate a shoot-to-kill, take-no-prisoners policy. The Tanzanians almost certainly do the same. The safest ships of all are flying the Russian flag: armed guards aboard them simply blow pirate boats out of the water and leave any survivors to drown. Attacks on Russian vessels have abruptly ceased.

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Arguably, the United States now has a corporate tax code that’s the worst of all worlds. The official rate is higher than in almost any other country, which forces companies to devote enormous time and effort to finding loopholes. Yet the government raises less money in corporate taxes than it once did, because of all the loopholes that have been added in recent decades.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Companies that use loopholes to avoid taxes don’t mind the current system, of course, and they have more than a few lobbyists at their disposal.

And, of course, that wouldn’t matter if lobbyists weren’t so effective, i.e. able to funnel campaign contributions to Congressmen, who then repay the favor by sticking little favors in legislation when nobody who cares is looking.

The problem with the current system is that it distorts incentives. Decisions that would otherwise be inefficient for a company — and that are indeed inefficient for the larger economy — can make sense when they bring a big tax break. “Companies should be making investments based on their commercial potential,” as Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University, says, “not for tax reasons.”

No shit. But the problem here is that often legislators are trying to ‘distort incentives’ deliberately, using the tax code for social engineering rather than just a neutral way to raise revenue. Henry Waxman of California, Chuck Schumer of New York, and the late unlamented Ted Kennedy represent poster children for this.

The true paradox of ‘corporate taxes’, of course, which by its nature a writer for the New York Times is not permitted to mention (or even think, I suspect), is that CORPORATIONS DO NOT PAY TAXES, THEIR CUSTOMERS DO. This is obvious to anybody who has an elementary grasp of business, which unfortunately nobody receiving a government (or media) paycheck has.

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Considering becoming a stalker or rapist? There’s an app for that.

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Well, just off the top of my head, I’d say: One who doesn’t want to be robbed, kidnapped, or murdered … all of which have happened recently to Americans in Pakistan.

That’s just a guess, you understand.

And for America, the case risks revealing many awkward truths. Who exactly is Raymond Davis, described by the US as a member of “technical and administrative staff”? What sort of “diplomat” carries a weapon? What was he doing driving alone through Lahore? Was he actually working for a private military contractor, Hyperion? Was he meeting an informer? Such is the panic, that last week the State Department spokesman denied his name was even “Raymond Davis”. Then this week, a spokeswoman for the embassy in Islamabad said Crowley had not denied the name was “Raymond Davis”.

The only awkward truth revealed here is that the American Foreign Service is staffed by an agglomeration of feckless retards, who work for a State Department run by dickless douchebags (yeah, I’m lookin’ at you, Hil). And anybody with a brain already knew that.

Megan McArdle runs up against government stupidity.

My husband is suffering from a pretty nasty cold.  Last night he had to duck out before dinner with my family to purchase some Sudafed, because he was miserably congested.  Alas, not being aware of the difference, he decided it wasn’t worth waiting in line to buy cold medicine from behind the counter, and instead bought the stuff on the shelf.  He took some, and then suffered through dinner until we could get home to my box of 24-hour Sudafed.  This morning he came down and said, “It’s amazing how much better you feel when you take medicine that actually does something.”  Then after a pause, he said, “So why do they sell you cold medicine that doesn’t do anything?”

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How can you get your own free pass from Obamacare? Maybe you can just donate $27 million to President Obama‘s campaign efforts. That’s what Andy Stern did as president of SEIU in 2008. He has been the most frequent guest at Mr. Obama‘s White House.

Backroom deals have become par for the course for proponents of Obamacare. Senators were greased with special favors, like Nebraska Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson and his Cornhusker Kickback and Louisiana Democrat Sen. Mary L. Landrieu and her Louisiana Purchase. Even the American Medical Association was brought in line under threat of losing its exclusive and lucrative medical coding contracts with the government.

The devil is in the details … grinning back at you as he helps himself to the contents of your wallet. The Obama mask is just his sense of humor.

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Guess Indiana just wasn’t big enough for him.

Don’t think of it as selling out … think of it as buying in.

Freeberg lays it out.

We humans in this day and age don’t have to do a whole lot to stay alive, and we have no natural predators. We’re starting to become idiots.

When I made a list of all the ways our thinking has started to suck green donkey balls, busted them out into their most simplistic elements and eliminated the duplicates, I found the resulting list had exactly thirty items. That seems like a good, round number. Let’s blog it.