From the YouTube Hall of Fame, this is the Mike Tyson interview that ends with this ridiculous quote:

"My style is impetuous, my defense is impregnable, and I'm just ferocious. I want his heart! I want to eat his children! Praise be to Allah!"

Another interesting fact from Malcolm Gladwell:

There's a famous experiment done by a wonderful psychologist at Columbia University named Dan Goldstein. He goes to a class of American college students and asks them which city they think is bigger -- San Antonio or San Diego. The students are divided.

Then he goes to an equivalent class of German college students and asks the same question. This time the class votes overwhelmingly for San Diego. The right answer? San Diego.

So the Germans are smarter, at least on this question, than the American kids. But that's not because they know more about American geography. It's because they know less. They've never heard of San Antonio. But they've heard of San Diego and using only that rule of thumb, they figure San Diego must be bigger.

The American students know way more. They know all about San Antonio. They know it's in Texas and that Texas is booming. They know it has a pro basketball team, so it must be a pretty big market. Some of them may have been in San Antonio and taken forever to drive from one side of town to another -- and that, and a thousand other stray facts about Texas and San Antonio, have the effect of muddling their judgment and preventing them from getting the right answer.

The point is that knowledge and the ability to make a good decision correlate only sporadically, and there are plenty of times when knowledge gets in the way of judgment.

Simply put, this is one of the most memorable meltdowns in sports history.

I'm currently listening to Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell.

Here are some interesting facts from an excerpt on height:

In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or over. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58 percent. Even more strikingly, in the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are 6'2" or taller. Among my CEO sample, 30 percent were 6'2" or taller.

Of the tens of millions of American men below 5'6", a grand total of ten--in my sample--have reached the level of CEO, which says that being short is probably as much, or more, of a handicap to corporate success as being a woman or an African-American.

Not long ago, researchers went back and analyzed the data from four large research studies, that had followed thousands of people from birth to adulthood, and calculated that when corrected for variables like age and gender and weight, an inch of height is worth $789 a year in salary.

That means that a person who is six feet tall, but who is otherwise identical to someone who is five foot five, will make on average $5,525 more per year.

As Timothy Judge, one of the authors of the study, points out: "If you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound it, we're talking about a tall person enjoying literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage."

Maybe this helps explain why Asians get passed over for management positions...

Korea plays Switzerland and France plays Togo this Friday at 12 PM Pacific.

Korea will advance to the next round of the World Cup in the following scenarios:

Korea beats Switzerland.

In this case, Korea would be the #1 seed in Group G. They would play the #2 seed in Group H in the first game of the knockout round.

OR

Korea ties Switzerland AND France does not beat Togo by more than 1 goal.

But if Korea ties Switzerland and France beats Togo by exactly 1 goal, then Korea will advance if France does not outscore Korea by more than 2 goals.

But if Korea ties Switzerland, France beats Togo by exactly 1 goal, and France outscores Korea by exactly 2 goals, then France and Korea would draw lots to determine which team would advance to the next round.

OR

Korea loses to Switzerland AND France does not beat Togo.

If Korea does not defeat Switzerland but advances to the next round, they will be the #2 seed in Group G and will play the #1 seed in Group H, most likely Spain. That would be a rematch of the 2002 quarterfinal where Korea won on penalty kicks.

Since I think most people expect France to beat Togo by more than 1 goal, Korea will probably need to win its match against Switzerland to advance to the next round.

Wow... another crazy sports day...

Having 20 people over at our place to watch Korea get a late goal to tie France was so much fun.

And then Game 5 of the NBA Finals was a nail-biter. Dwyane Wade is amazing...

My company laid off 200 people on Thursday. Fortunately, I'm not one of them. But it's scary to realize how much reality imitates fiction.

David Brent, in The Office: "Our company will be having redundancies."

"The positions in product management, delivery and development are redundant considering a shift from a product-centered business to more of a client-centered one, Fair Isaac said."

Peter Gibbons to Michael Bolton in Office Space: "You're getting fired so that Bill Lumbergh's stock will go up a quarter of a point."

"Fair Isaac stock rose 4% after the provider of credit scoring systems laid out a restructuring plan that includes cutting 200 jobs."

Korea 2, Togo 1



These are the best quality highlights I could find so far...

[Edit] Better quality highlights can be found at the Yahoo World Cup website. (Click on "Video Highlights".)

Seth McFarlane's Harvard Class Day speech:

In this section of the speech, he plays Stewie.



Other sections of the speech are an intro, Peter, and Quagmire.

I've never worked as much as I did this past week:

Monday: normal 8 hours, plus 2 hours at home
Tuesday: normal 8 hours, plus 3 hours at home (stayed up until 1 AM)
Wednesday: normal 8 hours, plus 6.5 hours at home (stayed up until 4:30 AM!)
Thursday: normal 8 hours, plus 4 hours at home (stayed up until 3 AM)
Friday: normal 8 hours

Hopefully I won't have to do that again for awhile...

This is the craziest Coke and Mentos clip I've seen:

Some guy created a guide to college football teams through Simpsons characters.

Here are the Pac-10 comparisons:






California: Dr. Marvin Monroe
Touchy-feely approach seems to be just the ticket on paper, and has been hailed by countless trend-followers looking for the Next Big Thing -- yet nobody who's been through this program, be it one of the Simpsons or Kyle Boller, seems to have improved all that much.






Stanford: Martin Prince
Smart. Quite often annoyingly so. Those who feel inferior because of this can console themselves with the knowledge that both Martin and Stanford will be grease spots in short order, at the hands of either a school bully or a Pac-10 team with a remotely competent offense.






Southern Cal: Fat Tony DeMico
He is the Godfather, the man with the plan, the man pulling the strings. And if you've turned on ESPN in the last five months, you know there's absolutely no escaping his clutches.






UCLA: Troy McClure
"Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such recent embarrassing bowl losses as the 2004 Las Vegas Bowl or the 2003 Silicon Valley Classic." Straight-up Hollywood, still a headline-maker, but the celebrity sheen masks a distinct lack of substance -- McClure can't really act, while the Bruins can't really play any defense. In severe danger of being superseded by newer, hotter stars, such as . .






Oregon: Rainer Wolfcastle
Suffers from some of the same shortcomings as its rival (acting/defense), yet their overall body of work has been more solid of late. And with Nike dumping all of that money into the Ducks' program, they can afford to sleep on top of a pile of money, with many beautiful ladies.







Washington and Washington State: Patty and Selma Bouvier
Washington chose celibacy by hiring Ty Willingham, Washington State had celibacy thrust upon it by being located out in the middle of f#@!ing nowhere. They may have been hot once, but while they may pop up and do something amazing every once in a while -- Wazzou by sneaking into a Rose Bowl, Selma by somehow marrying Krusty or Troy McClure -- life is pretty sad and barren for them at the moment.






Arizona State: Duffman
They always burst onto the scene with great fanfare, a lot of flash, and usually surrounded by a bevy of insanely hot women. Yet when all is said and done, they're usually exposed as just a bunch of drunks.

Bill Simmons claims that this William Shatner performance of Rocketman is the only moment that will ever be ranked as a 100 on the Unintentional Comedy Scale.



And now that I've shown that, I have to show Stewie's rendition as well.