I Am Very Tall

This factoid comes to you via Marc Andreesen's blog, which came to him via the FT:

EMI, the big music company, spends 25 million pounds a year "to scrap unsold CDs".

I'm sure that those 2,000 people that they just laid off are psyched about that.

It is currently five past midnight. Pudge left this morning for the CES conference in Vegas, although she apparently took a pit stop at the AVN's for good measure. For today, the sum of my productive accomplishments include the following:

* Stopping by the office for good measure and postage
* Mailing something
* Buying groceries for myself

Those groceries included the following: Vitamin water, beer, gummy bears, chicken nuggets, hot sauce, beer, an apple, and some bananas. This is what I am planning to live off of until Pudge comes back, which I believe to be on Wednesday.

The apartment looks like it has been savaged by an angry bear. There are at least three distinct piles forming in the living room; two of them clothing-based, one of them the remains of my grocery shopping. Other articles from the day - a book and sections of newspaper - are lying exposed on a table, next to a random pad of paper that I pulled out and doodled on. My shoes are not on the shoe rack in the closet. The bed has not been made.

I have been playing Guitar Hero III in nothing but my socks and boxers for over two hours. My eyes burn, as I have not looked at a non-electronic surface for more than 10 consecutive seconds in the last ten hours. My back is sore, possibly from the strange dances that I have begun to perform in accompaniment to the music that I have been 'playing.' My face and hands are coated with a fine layer of oil, which I seem to have been secreting for the day. There must also be oil in my hair, which now has spikes vaguely resembling the nimbus on the Statue of Liberty. I can't be sure, but I'm guessing that I smell. I am a glorious mess.

This will all come to an end soon, when Pudge comes back and order re-enters my life. But until then, my life is chaotic bliss.

Ok, back from Turkey, Taiwan, San Francisco, and Mexico. It's been a long trip. I'm sure all of you missed me dearly. Thanks to Pudge, here's some material from the Economist. In short, it argues that beauty (or it's scientific proxy, symmetry) can be a marker for "other, underlying characteristics such as health, good genes, and intelligence." Here's the bigger quote:

'... three researchers correlated people's bodily symmetry with their performance on intelligence tests. Such tests come in many varieties, of course, and have a controversial background. But most workers in the field agree that there is a quality, normally referred to as “general intelligence”, or “g”, that such tests can measure objectively along with specific abilities in such areas as spatial awareness and language. Dr Miller and his colleagues found that the more a test was designed to measure g, the more the results were correlated with bodily symmetry—particularly in the bottom half of the beauty-ugliness spectrum.'

I have two responses to this (if it's true, of which I'm somewhat skeptical). First, if this is true, then it must really, really suck to be ugly. The second one would be to wonder why this didn't seem to make much of an impact at my school/workplace.