Amazing aerial patterns over Rome, courtesy of some 10M swarming starlings.  This is a yearly occurrence.

(Via SvN)

It’s like a real-world uncanny valley.

(Via kottke)

Disturbing-but-riveting post from Issendai about how to create a sick system.  This is applicable to personal relationships as well as professional, and what’s striking to me is how many of my friends are stuck in sick systems in the name of chasing a ‘career’; many corporations and management cultures are sick.  The key aspects of a sick system, which are essentially a recipe for co-dependence:

Rule 1: Keep them too busy to think.

Rule 2: Keep them tired.

Rule 3: Keep them emotionally involved.

Rule 4: Reward intermittently.

Issendai then goes on to explain some techniques to achieve the above goals.  Such as (and this is but one example):

Keep the crises rolling. Incompetence is a great way to do this: If the office system routinely works badly or the controlling partner routinely makes major mistakes, you’re guaranteed ongoing crises. Poor money management works well, too. So does being in an industry where the clients are guaranteed to be volatile and flaky, or preferring friends who are themselves in perpetual crisis. You can also institutionalize regular crises: Workers in the Sea Org, the elite wing of Scientology, must exceed the previous week’s production every single week or face serious penalties. Because this is impossible, it guarantees regular crises as the deadline approaches.

Quite an excellent read, although sadly you’ll recognize the larger pattern more often than you’d like.

Have you been in a sick system before?

Errol Morris’s new piece in the NYTimes is fascinating to me, as I’ve always noodled the Dunning-Kruger effect around in my mind. And I’ve long held the belief that we act in a social system governed by confirmation bias; that is, we tend towards what we believe or want to believe, both in our learning and actions.

Morris, in his piece, really gets into the holes in our knowledge and how they effect our behavior. This fascinates me, because I’ve been on both sides of conversations that were heated and full of energy only to find one of us was entirely ignorant of an adjunct area of knowledge that played heavily in the rounder conversation.

In Morris’s piece, David Dunning writes:

If I were given carte blanche to write about any topic I could, it would be about how much our ignorance, in general, shapes our lives in ways we do not know about. Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life.

Today’s bit in the NYTimes if part one of five. Can’t wait for the rest.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More nerdery posts.

It’s Monday and you probably need this. What could be better?

In case you’re wondering how they got such high-FPS capture, it’s because they used a Phantom high-speed camera.  Amazing piece of kit.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog.  If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website.  If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

Instead of providing you some Friday links that I, exclusively, find interesting,  instead I would like to ask you a question.  Your answers matter.

Our company name is ‘MIPRO Consulting.’  The first bit, the ‘MIPRO’ part, proves to be difficult for many when it comes to proper pronunciation.  My question to you is how would you say ‘MIPRO’?  Is it:

A. My-pro

B. Mee-pro

C. Mih-pro

D.  Holy cow, did Tiger Woods have a bad week or what?

Please answer in the comments.  Next week, I’ll provide the correct answer.

But wait! There’s more!

Are you a grammar geek?  Word nerd?  Something grammar-related that rhymes with ‘dork’?  Then you’ll love this.

David Foster Wallace, one of my favorite writers ever, taught a nonfiction workshop at Pomona College.  For it, he had a 10-question grammar worksheet entitled:

IF NO ONE HAS YET TAUGHT YOU HOW TO AVOID OR REPAIR CLAUSES LIKE THE FOLLOWING, YOU SHOULD, IN MY OPINION, THINK SERIOUSLY ABOUT SUING SOMEBODY, PERHAPS AS CO-PLAINTIFF WITH WHOEVER’S PAID YOUR TUITION

If you want to test your grammar chops, check it out.  Once you’re done (or you give up), look at the answers.  I got 8/10.

How did you do?

Have a great weekend, everyone.

“I think sometimes that being overly type-sensitive is like an allergy,” said Michael Bierut, a partner in the Pentagram design group in New York. “My font nerdiness makes me have bad reactions to things that spoil otherwise pleasant moments.” One of his (least) favorite examples is the Cooper Black typeface on the Mass sign outside a beautifully restored 1885 Carpenter Gothic church near his weekend home in Cape May Point, New Jersey. “Cooper Black is a perfectly good font, but in my mind it is a fat, happy font associated with the logo for the ‘National Lampoon,’ the sleeve of the Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’ album and discount retailers up and down the U.S.,” Mr. Bierut explained. “I wouldn’t choose it as a font for St. Agnes Church even as a joke. Every time I go by, my vacation is, for a moment, ruined.”

via Design – Mistakes in Typography Grate the Purists – NYTimes.com.

Good to know I’m not alone in this.

What? $18 for a bowl of soup? Outrageous!

(By my calculations, $35,425 of the check is alcohol, the tip is $7,328 and tax is $3,251. That means the food cost was only $1,217, or 2.5% of the entire bill.)

Buzzfeed has the scoop behind this:

This is an actual receipt from Nello’s in New York City. The customer was Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, who had no problem dropping 47k on food and drinks for himself and five other people.

(Via Chris)

From swissmiss comes the following video, a great example of (exercise in?) modern culture-building.  Performances like this illustrate a company’s culture and personality more than any website, blog or piece of marketing collateral could ever hope to.

One of the best TED talks I have seen, ever.  If you have 17 minutes to spare, you won’t find a better way to spend them.