A brief interlude, in which I discuss something that has, frankly, blown my mind today. If you want to get a job in the finance world coming from IT, it would pay well to learn K, a programming language as concise as it is targeted at doing maths very damn well. To provide an example here, the following code: (!R)@&{&/x!/:2_!x}'!R is all that is necessary to list all the prime numbers between 1 and R, the argument to the function. Try doing that in your programming language of choice in even twice as many characters. From all I’ve heard, the interpreter is extremely fast as well ...

HK trip 95% confirmed - go on, what are your tips? What to see, what to do, what kind of weather, what food to eat, etc?

The many faces of Charlize Theron: Let’s compare and contrast that to, oh, any number of other starlets who look exactly the same in every movie. Changing your appearance that drastically has to be commitment to method acting if there ever was one. (accompanying article on smh)

Superbad: Teen comedy in the vein of American Pie, but with far better plot and acting. Actors almost look too young (they really supposed to be 18? Is that what 18 year olds act like, really?) Unfortunately doesn’t rise far above the genre, which doesn’t exactly help. ★★★

The Kingdom: “Syriana for dummies” is how the New York Times describes this, and it’s not far wrong. Syriana required you to pay attention in order to really patch all the plot points together, but moved glacially. The Kingdom has a straightforward trajectory, and while it gets lost in the middle a little, ticks the action-and-explosions box solidly. Passes the time of an afternoon. ★★☆