Stephen Colbert is hands down one of the best comedians of our time.  One of my favorite foundations of humor is pointing out and appreciating the absurdities of the world we live in, for which Colbert has unique talent.  In particular, (political persuasions aside) he does a great job of roasting the media.  Whether it’s his legendary White House Correspondents Dinner performance, chatting with Bill O’Reilly (Colbert- “You know what I hate about people who criticize you?  They criticize what you say…  but they never give you credit for how loud you say it… or how long you say it.”), or quitting out of frustration that cowards are taking over America; Colbert delivers the goods.

One of my favorite moments is when Colbert summarizes the Cingular/ATT merger.  The flow… raw cleverness… the delivery… this skit is truly a masterpiece.  Watch more Colbert.  Take life less seriously.  It does a body good.

Estimation- Relative mass of celestial bodies

In any context, a very useful skill to learn is estimation.  Most job interviews typically incorporate some form of case study, where the candidate is called upon to work their way through a problem, making basic estimates and assumptions along the way.  Aside from being able to logically reason through the problem, I’ve found the second most important aspect of making a good estimation is some basic knowledge with which to frame the problem.

In the case of planets, solar systems, and our universe, it’s frequently quite difficult to understand the scale of celestial bodies/forces/energies, and how they relate to one another.  The result of this fuzziness (and that the numbers are so big!) is that it’s very easy to be off by several orders of magnitude.  Aside from being visually stunning (and humbling as a human being, this video does an amazing job of conveying the relative masses of several planets and stars in our universe.  Another exercise you might find interesting for a minute or two is comparing the sizes of planets to eachother, just to have a slightly better understanding of how planets relate to one another.