PHP CEO on Twitter

@PHP_CEO is a new corporate humor goldmine on Twitter. It’s very much like I am a developer, but, you know, from the CEO perspective.

Some of those tweets are nothing short of brilliant!

Twas the Night Before Christmas — A Coder’s Dream

If you are involved with any kind of coding at all, I’m sure you’ll enjoy this remake of the “A Visit from St. Nicholas” poem.

He opened my laptop, and first installed Node
Who knew that old Santa had learned how to code,
His fingers were flying, his typing was quick,
How will I ever, repay ol’ St. Nick

Researchers Show Parachutes Don’t Work, But There’s A Catch

Slashdot is running a story, which is both insightful and hilarious:

Research published in a major medical journal concludes that a parachute is no more effective than an empty backpack at protecting you from harm if you have to jump from an aircraft. But before you leap to any rash conclusions, you had better hear the whole story. The gold standard for medical research is a study that randomly assigns volunteers to try an intervention or to go without one and be part of a control group. For some reason, nobody has ever done a randomized controlled trial of parachutes. In fact, medical researchers often use the parachute example when they argue they don’t need to do a study because they’re so sure they already know something works. Cardiologist Robert Yeh, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and attending physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, got a wicked idea one day. He and his colleagues would actually attempt the parachute study to make a few choice points about the potential pitfalls of research shortcuts. 

They started by talking to their seatmates on airliners. […] In all, 23 people agreed to be randomly given either a backpack or a parachute and then to jump from a biplane on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts or from a helicopter in Michigan. Relying on two locations and only two kinds of aircraft gave the researchers quite a skewed sample. But this sort of problem crops up frequently in studies, which was part of the point Yeh and his team were trying to make. Still, photos taken during the experiment show the volunteers were only too happy to take part. The drop in the study was about 2 feet total, because the biplane and helicopter were parked. Nobody suffered any injuries. Surprise, surprise. So it’s technically true that parachutes offered no better protection for these jumpers than the backpacks.

Terrible Maps

Via this kottke blog post I came across the @TerribleMaps Twitter account that collects links and images of funny, non-sense, inaccurate and other terrible maps.  Most of this stuff is quite funny.

Greatest safety instructions ever


Over the years, I’ve seen quite a few of similar videos, but I think this is the funniest of them all!  Given how seriously airlines take safety, I hope this flight attendant is not fired or punished any other way.  Because, unlike all those regular instructions, people will actually listen to these, and, on top of them, will actually remember…