Month: December 2012

“I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me” gets me every time.

With Jay-Z & Kanye’s “Clique” on the radio I finally remembered to look up something that I’ve been wondering for a while: the difference between clique and claque.

Literally, a claque is a group of paid admirers. As used more commonly, it refers to sycophants. A clique is a faction that excludes others; it does not always refer to sycophants.

Today’s applied metaphor: A bird in the hand is worth 1/(1+i^(n-1)) in the bush.

(Where i is the annual rate of interest or cost of capital and n is the number of years in the future that you can capture one or more bush-birds.)

Also, in this story, birds represent dollars.

My folks sent me this GED promotion site, with no commentary, and I thought their email account had been broken into. But when I asked them, they said no, it’s something we actually thought you’d like.

Sure enough, it’s an excellent education marketing project. It’s funny and engaging, and the celebrity pep talks might actually inspire more than a few adults without high school diplomas to go back and get their GEDs.

Neat.