Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.

I’m ready for the tools to expand to fit my ideas. I refuse to keep cutting down my ideas to fit the tools.

While the wealthy have more control over their lives and live far more easily, such an existence that emphasizes and rewards greed corrupts their humanity, leading to antisocial attitudes and behavior. A 2012 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is titled: Higher Social Class Predicts Increased, Unethical Behavior.

The authors found greed propels this behavior and that “relative to lower-class individuals, individuals from upper-class backgrounds behaved more unethically in both naturalistic and laboratory settings.” One of the authors, Dacher Keltner, commented: “As you move up the class ladder, you are more likely to violate the rules of the road, to lie, to cheat, to take candy from kids, to shoplift,and to be tight-fisted in giving to others."

"Yak shaving." Our very own Carlin Vieri invented the term, and yet it has not caught on within the lab. This is a shame, because it describes all too well what I find myself doing all too often.

You see, yak shaving is what you are doing when you're doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you're supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you're doing to the original meta-task. Here's an example:

"I was working on my thesis and realized I needed a reference. I'd seen a post on comp.arch recently that cited a paper, so I fired up gnus. While I was searching the for the post, I came across another post whose MIME encoding screwed up my ancient version of gnus, so I stopped and downloaded the latest version of gnus.

"Unfortunately, the new version of gnus didn't work with emacs 18, so I downloaded and built emacs 20. Of course, then I had to install updated versions of a half-dozen other packages to keep other users from hurting me. When I finally tried to use the new gnus, it kept crapping out on my old configuration. And that's why I'm deep in the gnus info pages and my .emacs file --- and yet it's all part of working on my thesis."

And that, my friends, is yak shaving.