From Barbara Ehrenreich:

My theory is that employers prefer college grads because they see a college degree chiefly as mark of one's ability to obey and conform. Whatever else you learn in college, you learn to sit still for long periods while appearing to be awake. And whatever else you do in a white collar job, most of the time you'll be sitting and feigning attention. Sitting still for hours on end -- whether in library carrels or office cubicles -- does not come naturally to humans. It must be learned -- although no college has yet been honest enough to offer a degree in seat-warming.

I have always thought that there is a creepy self-loathing that's part and parcel of the experience of academia...which is why we always talk about the "real world" as though it's something distant, remote, inaccessible. What a strange thing.

Hats off to the author of this piece...

This reminded me of how easy it is to get lost in the challenge of completing a high volume of tasks instead of taking a single, incredibly interesting task and inventing a whole new way of completing it.

I don't know if anyone reads The Circle Panel who doesn't also read YUIBlog, but if you missed Joe Hewitt's talk on Firebug coinciding with the Firebug 1.0 release last week, check it out as soon as possible. I thought I was using Firebug pretty thoroughly -- it had even persuaded me to abandoned my beloved Safari for the much slower Firefox on my G4 PowerBook. But I didn't know a damn thing about Firebug, I realized, after watching Joe's talk. This is a tool that, when used well, can change the way you understand your own web applications and even those in which you simply take a casual interest. If you're a web developer, watch this video. A higher-resolution version is available from the YUI Theater.

Is anybody this far ahead of his time today? Steve Nash?

I love the interplay of this video with the Green Day song. Basketball as an art from...ironically, I think there's less of it today rather than more. But what a nice retrospective, where you see a man prefiguring what his profession would become...15 years, at least, before the fact.