For the past week or two The Daily WTF has been reis­su­ing older clas­sic sto­ries. I’ve been really enjoy­ing these gems. Today’s story is about a bright idea that Microsoft had to begin asking brain­teaser ques­tions during job inter­views to see how the inter­vie­wees responded. A silly ques­tion always deserves a sill answer:

During a screen­ing inter­view, I was asked how I would design a bike fit for some­one visu­ally impaired. I responded some­thing to the effect of, “What, like, for blind people?”, and she answered yes.

I thought for a moment and then I responded, “Well.. a blind person riding a bike doesn’t sound like a very safe idea, so I would make the bike sta­tion­ary, maybe with a fan blow­ing in the person’s face. He prob­a­bly wouldn’t even know the difference.”

She was speechless.

So bad. Although, if I was asked a sim­i­lar ridicu­lous ques­tion in an inter­view I would prob­a­bly react by think­ing of the most sar­cas­tic response I could. Good thing I already have a job.

Here’s a great tidbit from McSweeney’s: Foot­notes, End­notes, and Par­en­thet­i­cals That Cost Me Marks on My Thesis. My favorite:

3 Who, although a gifted aca­d­e­mic, is still a douche.

Full marks for honesty.

Via Kottke.

Oddee has a fan­tas­tic post about the 10 Most Amaz­ing Ghost Towns in the world. The arti­cle has some great pho­tographs, but even more inter­est­ing is that each pho­to­graph is accom­pa­nied by a short back­ground story about the place and how it came to be a ghost town.

One of my favorites:

Via Kottke.

A couple of weeks ago when I was brows­ing through Google Earth, I came across some pho­tographs of the MIT Ray and Maria Stata Center, more com­monly known as simply the Stata Center.

This build­ing has always amazed me ever since the first time I stum­bled upon it. It is quite an impres­sive sight. Oddly enough, I live within walk­ing dis­tance of this build­ing. I didn’t real­ize until I read the Wikipedia entry on the build­ing that sev­eral notable people have their offices in the Stata Center, includ­ing Noam Chom­sky, Tim Berners-​Lee and Richard Stallman.

The fun­ni­est thing for me about the archi­tec­ture of the build­ing is that it has always given me a very vis­ceral reminder of Ayn Rand’s novel The Foun­tain­head. Every time I see the build­ing I think that it looks like some­thing Howard Roark would have built.

I have no idea why I always have this reac­tion, because when I actu­ally stop to think about it, I believe that Roark would hate the Stata Center. He would hate it because it doesn’t make any sense. Excerpts from the Wiki entry only high­light this fact:

There is also one lec­ture room where, because of the slight lean of the wall panels, some people have been known to expe­ri­ence ver­tigo. Sound insu­la­tion is almost absent. The build­ing has also been crit­i­cized as insen­si­tive to the needs of its inhab­i­tants, poorly designed for day-​to-​day use[...]

Also later in the entry:

On Octo­ber 31, 2007,[9] MIT sued[10] archi­tect Frank Gehry and the con­struc­tion com­pany, Skan­ska USA Build­ing Inc., for “providing defi­cient design ser­vices and drawings” which caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, drainage to back up, and falling ice and debris to block emer­gency exits.[8] A Skan­ska spokesper­son said that prior to con­struc­tion Gehry ignored warn­ings from Skan­ska and a con­sult­ing com­pany regard­ing flaws in his design of the amphithe­ater, and rejected a formal request from Skan­ska to modify the esign.

This is most cer­tainly not some­thing that Roark would have done. If not this though, what would one of Roark’s build­ings actu­ally have looked like? It is appar­ently a common spec­u­la­tion that Rand based Roark’s archi­tec­ture on that of Frank Lloyd Wright. Although she has specif­i­cally denied this, it seems to me to be a very close match based upon her descrip­tions of Roark’s architecture.

Appar­ently former U.S. Supreme Court Jus­tice Sandra Day O’Connor is dab­bling in a new field: game design. The Escapist writes:

The game will present stu­dents with “real issues and real problems,” O’Connor said, giving them the oppor­tu­nity to “step into the shoes of a judge, a leg­is­la­tor, an exec­u­tive - teach them how to think through and ana­lyze prob­lems, take action and voice opin­ions to their elected representatives.” As an exam­ple, she cited an early exer­cise cen­ter­ing on First Amend­ment rights, using cases like Tinker v. Des Moines and “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.”

In addi­tion to The Escapist arti­cle, The New York Times also pub­lished the arti­cle “Sandra Day O’Connor’s Plan for Joy­stick Jus­tice” in yesterday’s paper.

One quote that caught my eye in the arti­cle from The Escapist:

“Only one-​third of Amer­i­cans can name the three branches of government,” O’Connor said in a keynote address to the Games For Change con­fer­ence, “but two-​thirds can name a judge on Amer­i­can Idol.”

While I under­stand O’Connor’s point, that doesn’t really seem to be a fair com­par­i­son. Wouldn’t it make more sense to say that that x many people can name all three judges on Amer­i­can Idol? I’m sure that a lot more than one-​third of Amer­i­cans can name at least one branch of our gov­ern­ment, while (pos­si­blly) less than two-​thirds of people can name all three judges on Amer­i­can Idol.

I, for the record, can name all three of both. OMG I’m so smaht¹.

1. Pro­nounce pho­net­i­cally² for Boston accent effect.↩
2. There is a sad, sad irony in the fact that I just had a really hard time fig­ur­ing out how to spell pho­netic (and wasn’t even close). Thank good­ness for Goolge again.↩