Pets in America

Every puppy sold or given away makes it more likely one in a shelter will be put to death.

...read more here

Duuuude

yankee doodle dandy -> "doods" -> "dude"

It came from over here

 http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/data-analysis.html

"mathematics cannot tell you if your hypothesis is true.

mathematics can tell you if your hypothesis is consistent with the data.

if the data is sparse and unclear,

then so is your conclusion."

Killing Kernels

My computer’s been acting up since I upgraded to OSX 10.9, so I’ve been peeking at the Activity Monitor to see if I can learn why it's crashing.

After checking the Activity Monitor app a few times throughout the day, I started to recognize a pattern. Occasionally, I’d see a new process called kernel_task sitting up at the top, consuming almost a gig of RAM.

Hmm, I thought, something fishy’s going on here; I’ve never seen this process before… I’m used to Firefox, Chrome, Rubymine, or occasionally Emacs at the top, but kernel_task? Naturally, I immediately wanted to kill it. This (I decided in the moment) is why my computer’s been crashing. If I just kill kernel_task, I’ll free up memory for the rest of my programs and maybe even stop my computer from crashing.

Before I enthusiastically killed the thing, I thought I might as well google it. I wasn’t worried it was a virus; I was worried it was a weird bug in the new OS or something related to this greedy iPhone or Polaroid bluetooth thing called distnoted I caught getting away with 3.5 gigs a few weeks ago.

Good thing I landed on this forum post before I killed it. Turns out, kernel_task is the operating system itself. This is simply an informed guess, but I think OSX 10.9 may have changed the Activity Monitor’s default process view from My Processes to All Processes. I wasn’t used to seeing kernel_task in the list, so when it showed up I figured it didn’t belong. Lesson learned? Well, no, not really.