Even so I naturally got up and took a shower and went to work; and I did my job so well that I got three positive surveys in a single day for the first time in quite a while. (One or two is typical for me, but with today's three, that makes a total of five good surveys in two days. Go, me!)
That's when you know you're good at your job: you can go to work and fake it so convincingly that you do a better job than you usually do. Well, it doesn't hurt that I've been listening to my supervisors' feedback and working to incorporate their suggestions into my operations--which is also part of my job!--and have finally managed to integrate it all so that I have both a good open and a good close on my call. At this point the open is nearly automatic, a Pavlovian conditioned reflex to the "beep, beep" of the phone when a call comes in, so the close was what really needed fine-tuning. With three positives in one day, I'm getting there.
Anyway: between calls I looked like a complete f-ing zombie, and my boss asked me if he should call someone. Lunch made me feel a bit better but all along I was hoping that Workforce would either cut people or ask for volunteers; tonight it was "volunteers" and I wasted no time doing so. Left just before 8 PM and was home 45 minutes later.
I have a feeling that I, once this post is done, am going to go collapse. I feel cruddy.
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Limbaugh said it best: Words mean things. Quoth Vox Day:
I asked a scientist how many peer reviews he had done. Between 10 and 30 was the answer. Fair enough. Then I asked him how many experiments he had replicated as part of those SCIENTIFIC PEER REVIEWS.This process is otherwise known as proofreading or editing.
None. Or to put in scientific mathematical terms, zero. Also known as "the null set".
And what did he actually do in scientifically peer-reviewing these papers? Well, he read them and occasionally made some suggestions for improving them.
If fifty people proofread a study that claims the Earth is flat, and double-check the spelling, and make suggestions on how to improve the study, the Earth is still round and the study is still wrong. (Even if the original writer takes all their suggestions.) "Peer review" doesn't magically make a scientific paper correct.
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A robot with weapons and no human oversight! As Steven Den Beste asks, "What could go wrong?"
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Borepatch has top 5 and bottom 5 lists of Presidents. I agree with his selections, and why.
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I laughed out loud at today's XKCD:
Of course "0.173 radians" makes no sense as a measure of temperature, but that's what makes it funny.