Friday: No I did not spend an hour on this.

Somewhere today I found a link to this spirograph simulator.  I never had a spirograph as a kid, and all the people I knew who did thought they were boring.  Because they were dumb, I guess.

Wobbly orbit-like things.

The inside.

Adding the outside.

This one nearly looks 3-d.

This one I really like.  The plank had 150 pins, and the gear had 50, so there's a nice small number of repeats.  Unfortunately, there's no "reflect gear" option, so there's no way to make the pattern completely symmetric.  Still, I really like the dispersion pattern that comes out.

• Steven Universe.
• Squirrels.
• Yeah, Star Wars would have been far better with this kind of writing.
• It probably wasn't the best idea to let all the airlines merge in the first place.
• Dr. Isis is pretty much wrong on this one.  Or, as the one comment suggests, "becoming evil."  Why?
• She basically suggests that strikes can't be done by postdocs, because they'll be fired and replaced with someone else.  Sure there is a general excess of postdoc candidates, but this isn't the same as firing the cashier at McDonalds.  Those kind of jobs usually don't have to do a candidate search as intensive as is done for postdocs.
• She explicitly suggests that not working overtime would result in bad recommendations, and that because some postdocs would work overtime without added pay, it would force everyone to do so.
• The "I have to work overtime, so why shouldn't you?" comment completely ignores the concept of an exempt worker.  Are you in a managerial position, making more than the salary threshold, and doing work requiring advanced knowledge?  Then you are exempt, because you theoretically have control over your time.  The proposed rule will increase the salary threshold, making postdocs no longer exempt.  This reflects the fact that they generally don't.  Since, you know, they're not the boss.
• "Blah blah, there's only so much money."  Yes.  That's the underlying problem: science is insufficiently funded.  This problem means that PIs put in requests for grants that assume everyone works 80 hours a week while being paid for 40, because even though the job really requires two FTEs, that would make it uncompetitive against those grant requests that are underpaying workers.  To claim that trying to fix things on one end is somehow wrong doesn't make sense.
• It really doesn't matter much to me personally, as I'd be above the proposed threshold anyway.  It also doesn't change the fact that this year, like I have for the past three years, I will point out during my performance review that we really should have about twice the number of people on our project than we do.