Friday, January 21, 2011

viPhone

Posted without comment.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Dear Wikileaks haters

Information doesn't kill people.  People kill people. 

In particular, the inhabitants of the countries we invade kill and are killed by the military forces that we have directed to invade them.

Hat tip NRA?

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Anti-Nocturnals

Dear designer of every productivity/scheduling and planning utility ever:

The transition between "today" and "tomorrow" is when I wake up, not midnight.  If it's 12:10AM on Thursday, my "today" list should be for Wednesday.

If you're cool enough, you can let me configure the transition point.  If you're not, let's settle on something reasonable like 6AM. 

kthxbai

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Graceless Degradation

I need to bring this idea into a general Rails plug-in.

Also, "Graceless Degradation" would be a halfway decent name for a band.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Kangaroo and Kangaroo

Giles knows it, Graham knows it.  Just like calories, our bodies and minds rank physical possessions as more scarce than they are.  The result is that we seek too many of them and end up with too many of them.

The extreme reaction is the cold-turkey diet.  There's the lifestyle change theory too.

Like food, energy, information and natural resources, this is another symptom of the "good" kind of problem.  Modern capitalism has been so mind-boggling successful that  many in the world have a new problem: they lack the mental circuitry to handle having more than they need of so many of the things that they want.

This is definitely a problem and we post-industrial societies are going to need to find a solution, but we should all remember that it's the good kind problem.  Better this than the problems encountered last year by folks in Haiti or Pakistan.