Iggy and Williamson in Detroit in 1973

Offices are full of people with past lives — and for more than two decades James Williamson kept his a secret. Before retiring last year, Williamson was the vice president of technology standards at Sony Electronics, where he traveled around the world developing compatibility guidelines for products. Former colleagues describe him as calm and analytical. He looks the part of a Silicon Valley exec — short white hair, suit jacket — and enjoys vacationing in Hawaii and playing tennis. A few years ago he took up the ukulele and the slack-key guitar. It was his first time picking up an instrument, he says, since the 1970s, when he played guitar for the Stooges, one of the most famous punk-rock bands of all time. (That would be his secret.)

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From Boston.com:

More than 170 passengers and crew of a vessel that ran aground this morning 1.5 miles off Deer Island in Boston Harbor were being taken to shore in Hull by the Coast Guard, local agencies, and even a few lobster boats, according to the Coast Guard and witnesses at the scene.
The 87-foot passenger vessel, Massachusetts, ran aground after straying from the safety of the south channel, said Demos Kouvaris, a recreational fisherman who heard the distress signal and hurried to the scene in his own boat. The boat strayed from the safety of the South Channel as it was heading away from Boston Harbor and struck an underwater formation called “Devil’s Back.”

Massachusetts students significantly outperformed their peers on a prestigious international math and science exam, according to results released this morning.

In many cases, the state’s impressive showing on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, which is conducted by Boston College, puts the state in the same elite league as several academically powerful Asian countries.

Massachusetts performed strongest on the fourth-grade science exam, coming in second worldwide just behind Singapore and ahead of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan. By contrast, the United States as a whole placed eleventh with a score that researchers characterized as significantly lower than Massachusetts.

A year ago we took note when Brian May, guitarist for Queen for the last 30 years, submitted his thesis for a Ph.D. in astrophysics. The news now is that the thesis has been published. You, too, can read all about the population of tiny asteroids and space dust that cause the Zodiacal light. The completed thesis appears as the book “A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud” (Springer and Canopus Publishing Ltd., 2008), available at Amazon for $71.96. May was awarded his Ph.D. last summer and accepted a position as chancellor at a British university in November.

Flash forward to the timeframe depicted in Fight Club. Calvin/Jack has reached an all-time low. He has done everything society has told him to do but is completely void of happiness. Hobbes, newly adjusted as “Tyler Durden” (after all, grown-up Calvin would no longer accept a jungle animal walking, talking, and eating canned tuna), re-enters Calvin/Jack’s life, determined to show Calvin everything he’s done wrong, whether he likes it or not.

Tyler to Jack: “I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I’m smart, capable, and most importantly, I’m free in all the ways you wish you could be.”

Calvin has always idolized Hobbes. In Weirdos From Another Planet, he dresses up like a tiger and attempts to live in the woods. Like Hobbes, Tyler is cool, collected, and incredibly cerebral. Given this evidence, one can conclude that Tyler is Hobbes, reincarnated after being trapped inside Calvin/Jack’s brain for so many years. Just as Calvin is Jack, Hobbes is Tyler.

Via Metaphilm…

Fast forward 30+ years. We had purchased a new copy for our kids, and while paging through it I discovered that in many instances it was very different. This was a new edition published in 1991 that was much more politically correct and in many ways much less fun (at least IMHO).

Here’s a Flickr photo set comparing the two editions – http://www.flickr.com/photos/kokogiak/sets/1425737/

BusinessWeek research has found that fewer than one out of three executives who reach those lofty heights do so with the help of an MBA. And if you think a sheepskin from a top school is a necessity, think again. Only half of the executives with MBAs went to the top 10 schools in the 2004 BusinessWeek ranking.

Only 146 of the 500 executives reported having MBAs, a surprising number considering the hundreds of thousands of B-school alumni with enough experience to qualify them for top jobs. What’s more, only 71 received MBAs from the top 10 B-schools, and two-thirds of those executives have degrees from just three institutions: Harvard Business School, Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

To hear B-schools tell it, an MBA is the price of admission to the ranks of senior managers. While it may or may not improve the odds of landing such a job, it is not, strictly speaking, a requirement. Timing plays a big role. Most of the MBAs in the study — including such high-profile CEOs as General Electric Co.’s (GE ) Jeffrey R. Immelt, from HBS class of 1982 — graduated more than 20 years ago. Back then, B-school admissions were determined almost entirely on the basis of test scores, and many students lacked the people skills now recognized as critical to managerial success. So MBAs from that generation might be underrepresented in the executive suite today. This was also the era before the B-school rankings. At the time, MBAs — even those from highly respected schools like Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton — didn’t have the marquee status they possess today.

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This sort of thing is why I stopped watching TV news years ago.

P.S. Go Ron!

2. Schrödinger’s cat

A cat is trapped in a box with radioactive material, a Geiger counter, and a mechanism rigged to release poison if particle decay is detected. According to Erwin Schrödinger, the cat exists in two probable states. But that doesn’t track with reality (cats are not both alive and dead). Proposed in 1935, the postulate illustrates that some quantum concepts just don’t work at nonquantum scales. Also that Schrödinger was a dog person.

8. Parfit’s teleporter

Philosopher Derek Parfit is famous for basing thought experiments on sci-fi. In 1984, he envisioned a teleporter malfunction, like the one that made two James T. Kirks in an episode of Star Trek. Teleporters annihilate every particle in you, then rebuild them from scratch. What happens if the original isn’t destroyed? Which is the real you? Parfit says both. Evil Kirk would disagree.

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In the first chapter of The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin identified roughly a dozen anatomic traits that he gleefully described as “useless, or nearly useless, and consequently no longer subject to natural selection.”

[Examples include...]

VOMERONASAL ORGAN
A tiny pit on each side of the septum is lined with nonfunctioning chemoreceptors. They may be all that remains of a once extensive pheromone-detecting ability.

EXTRINSIC EAR MUSCLES
This trio of muscles most likely made it possible for prehominids to move their ears independently of their heads, as rabbits and dogs do. We still have them, which is why most people can learn to wiggle their ears.

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