My physical therapist recommended swimming (which I last did on a regular basis in 1990) as the best initial treatment. I just googled for pools, and there's one by my apartment. But closest to my office is the National Swimming Pool Institute. Naturally, it's on K Street, the infamous home of the American lobbying industry.

NSPI doesn't seem to have a website, so I can't check what their policies are. Most of the people on K street seem pretty predictable: people with wealth and power use their wealth and power to preserve their wealth and power. And somehow this always seems to involve collateral damage. Depending on the industry, this can be brutal and horrible—think of the blood on the hands of those who have prevented effective food safety procedures in the United States—or fairly petty, such as the compromise agreement between the US and Singapore that allowed US gum to be sold in Singapore (which banned chewing gum years ago) provided it was sugar-free and prescribed by a dentist. I can't help but wonder who the National Swimming Pool Institute opposes in the name of unfettered profiteering. Lifeguards? Water wing salespeople?

We were expecting the average price paid to be highest for Linux users and lowest for Windows users, but the gap was larger than we thought it would be.

And, users of the specific distribution of Linux that I happen to use, Ubuntu, paid more than users of other distributions, such as Red Hat.

So that doesn't work well at all. What works better? I just went to a training session on Structured Interviews. They work much better, they're not that hard, and I wish I'd been using more of these techniques when I did hiring in the past. The basic principles are:

• Have subject matter experts create questions that test job-related competencies
• Structure the questions with the STAR model: what was the Situation or Task, what Action did you take, what was the Result?
• Ask all applicants the same questions in the same order in a neutral manner
• If followup questions are necessary to elicit useful answers, use prepared questions in a consistent fashion
• Rate the answers consistently on a pre-determined scale
• Train interviewers to use consistent methods and to avoid common biases

Kim Ng interviewed for the San Diego Padres’ vacant general manager’s job on Saturday, giving her another chance to become the first female GM in major league history.

Ng, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ assistant general manager, interviewed with Padres CEO and vice chairman Jeff Moorad, according to a person familiar with the process. —AP

I've been walking past a sign for the National Museum of American Jewish Military History for a while now, and, since they are closed weekends, I took advantage of the Columbus Day holiday to visit. It doesn't seem like they get a lot of visitors, but only part of the building is the museum; the rest is offices for the organization. Shortly after I started browsing, a docent came down to chat. It turns out that this organization dates back to the US civil war. And there is another organization of Jewish American military history, currently based in New York, which descends from the Confederate Jewish veterans' group.

I really had no idea what to expect, but it turned out to be pretty cool. It's the usual museum stuff: pictures, stories, some artifacts, done very well. The ground floor has some background information on women in the US military and then profiles of a number of Jewish women, from WWI to the present. It made good fodder for trying to imagine them as real people, to be in their present. There was a section on concentration camp liberation, and downstairs many more exhibits. I don't think I'd seen a Medal of Honor in person before. You can see a list of everything on their website; I saved some of the permanent exhibits for another trip, and finished with "A Mother's Grief", which profiles Sanford (Sandy) Kahn from birth, through school—they have his baseball glove—into training, to deployment in France, including his last letter home, to getting three bullets in the back of the head.

... an essentially random relationship between recent performance and first-round success. None of the correlations even reached .05 in either direction, and six of the eight were actually negative. ...

the conventional wisdom that a team's recent performances foreshadows their playoff fate is generally wrong.

The flag belongs to this country.