Synposium

Jason Y. Sproul

December 16, 2015
by jsproul
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Carrion

Hark, you Judas within:
Dark earth folding beneath marching boots
Mud-sliding between the strangling roots
Cut short the slow hanging-man
From gallows of my corpse, still
Gasping for the cold dawn air.
Why could we not wait till noon?

—Jason Y. Sproul copyright 2014

April 26, 2015
by jsproul
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“Act with a determination not to be turned aside by thoughts of the past and fears of the future.”
—Robert E. Lee

MIT Mystery Hunt 2015

January 21, 2015 by jsproul | 0 comments

WoodPuzzle

A grand time was had by all at MIT Mystery Hunt 2015! The team I participated with, Left As An Exercise For The Reader, placed 17th out of 57 with over 120 solves including 1 of 3 meta-metas.

More importantly it was great fun. Some of the puzzles, like the 2D wood pieces above assembled entirely without the benefit of directions or glue were just spectacular. Some, like Nope! were just insanely frustrating.

I can’t wait for next year.

January 9, 2014
by jsproul
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New Yorker: The Open-Office Trap

…In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction. Compared with standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation. When David Craig surveyed some thirty-eight thousand workers, he found that interruptions by colleagues were detrimental to productivity, and that the more senior the employee, the worse she fared

via The New Yorker.