September 2011
7 posts
1 tag
“To tell the time using a sundial you’d need calculus.”
– NASA discovers a “Tatooine-like” planet orbiting a binary star system. I’m now concocting a SF story about a planet in a binary system where a Bronze Age civilization, out of necessity, discovers calculus millennia before their Earth counterparts, subsequently taking to the stars...
1 tag
A Brief Rant on Money
In a time of uncertainty like ours, money fetishism can take hold rather easily. You know — goldbugs, Bitcoiners, folks who think that a mild uptick in inflation is a sign that the President and the Fed are “debasing the currency” — those kinds of people. Why is that?
If you’ve ever taken a intro economics course, you know that money serves three functions:
As a...
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Dave Winer: RSS is supposed to be really simple →
One of the creators of RSS says that the problem of RSS overload is due to the way most RSS readers are designed, not the format itself:
If you miss five days of reading the news because you were on vacation (good for you!) the newspaper you read the first day back isn’t five times as thick as the normal day’s paper. And it doesn’t have your name on the cover saying...
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Jacqui Cheng: RSS Is Poison →
I’m an active user of Google Reader, to put it mildly; but even I can recognize that having an information firehose doesn’t necessarily lead to becoming more informed, still less productive. Fortunately, Google Reader’s own trends feature allows you to easily see which sites you actually read regularly, which makes feed-pruning a relatively simple task.
The problem of RSS...
2 tags
Joffre the Giant on Alcohol and Children →
Worth reading in full. I particularly liked this part:
The important thing is that, while we try to be prudent and wise about what the kids are exposed to, an atmosphere of good cheer and openness pervades our lives. Modesty without good cheer is oppression. Alcohol without good cheer is drunkenness.
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“For most people, the summer of 2011 was bullshit. Business slowed down...”
– The Reformed Broker (via pegobry)