April 2009
1 post
February 2007: Will orbiting junk rule out space travel? (Ars Technica)
February 2009: Orbiting space junk heightens risk of satellite catastrophes (Ars Technica)
April 2009: Space Junk Forcing More Evasive Maneuvers (Wired)
This sounds familiar…
September 2008
3 posts
“The best way to combat piracy is to make your content available.”
– Jeff Zucker, President & CEO of NBC Universal, on Hulu
(Hulu rocks, by the way.)
Blocking the Box →
New York City Traffic Enforcement Agents, you have my enthusiastic support.
GPS for airplanes →
How is it, I ask you, that airplanes did not have GPS before? Is it possible that it only recently occurred to someone that this might be a good idea?
August 2008
1 post
Reopen Last Closed... Hm.
This is random, but I’m puzzled.
Upon request, Safari 3 will happily either “Reopen Last Closed Window” or “Reopen All Windows From Last Session”. I use these a lot, particularly the latter.
Strangely, neither function works with a window aimed at Google Reader. Try it:
Open Google Reader in a new window.
Close that window.
History → Reopen Last Closed...
July 2008
3 posts
Infinity is just a concept
From a piece in the New York Times on the staggering amount of garbage in the world’s oceans:
“Trash is clogging the arteries of the planet,” [said Sylvia Earle, former chief scientist of the N.O.A.A.]. “We’re beginning to wake up to the fact that the planet is not infinitely resilient.” For ages humanity saw in the ocean a sublime grandeur suggestive of eternity. No longer. Surveying...
How many IRS agents does it take to...
From a recent Times post on the unsurprising complexity of IRS collection procedures:
Between 2002 and 2007, the I.R.S. sent more than 83 million first notices over about $444 billion in taxes. By the end of fiscal year 2007, $79.3 billion was collected, the report said.
That’s roughly 1 first notice per thousand delinquent dollars collected (not counting the various other...
Spaces & Window Layering in 10.5.4
10.5.4 was released yesterday, and Spaces window layering is still broken.
Sigh.
June 2008
4 posts
Focusing on Price and Missing the Point
In a piece of mediocre commentary (hat tip: John Gruber), Michael Rosenwald of the Washington Post attempts to put the low low purchase price of the upcoming iPhone 3G into perspective.
He works hard to explain how and why $200 seems so shockingly cheap compared to the previous $400 and original $600 price tags. (Behavioral economists apparently say that it is because $200 is, in fact, much...
Apple, iPhone 3G, and Honesty in Marketing
As you no-doubt have heard, there’s a newer, faster, cheaper iPhone on the way. Not just “faster” and “cheaper”, in fact, but says Apple: “Twice as fast. Half the price.”
This, friends, is a big fat lie — it may well be twice as fast, but the iPhone 3G is not half the price of the original iPhone. This is not a point I intend to argue — it is not...
They're simple machines - they didn't know any... →
Was Indiana Jones really worth it?
The Economics of Environmentalism - Links
Much as we might like to think that environmental awareness should be enough to make people change their habits, the real driver of change is economics.
Making a point that I’m sure had been made many times before and has been made many times since, Wired claimed back at the end of 2005 that high gas prices were good for America because they pushed more research money (and interest) toward...
May 2008
5 posts
2 tags
Google & Address Book Sync in 10.5.3
So one interesting new feature of 10.5.3 is that it apparently enables syncing of the Mac OS X Address Book with one’s Google Contacts. This is great, but there is some funny business…
Are you one of those people who find that no matter how hard you try to keep your contact info organized, it always winds up scattered all over?
Yes — tell me more!
We’re happy to...
3 tags
Spaces & Window Layering in 10.5.3
According to Apple’s release notes,[This update] resolves an issue in which switching to a different space and returning back to the original space may reorder the application windows with a different active window.But no, it doesn’t. Starting with two empty spaces, try this: Launch iTunes in space 1. iTunes is now active (“has the focus”) in space 1. Switch to space 2....
1 tag
Rare Meat & Wet Feet →
This is the podiatrical equivalent of discussing barbecuing with an epidemiologist. Not recommended.
2 tags
Speaking of gas prices
James Duncan Davidson, telling it like it is:The price of oil and gas may fluctuate down again in the near future, but if it does, it’ll come back up and go even higher. It’s a simple story of demand meets supply of a finite resource. [ More… ] You don’t have to be an economist to understand that concept. A few-month break from the federal gas tax may sound like “relief”,...
2 tags
They didn't want your lot anyway.
Recently asked to name “a credible economist” who supports her plan for gas-tax relief, Hillary responded:Well I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists. And that, folks, is how you roll an opportunity to make some sense into not one, but three more points down the hole. (For those keeping score: −1 for failure to express a rational argument, −2 for the insultingly...
2 tags
-1 for Hillary
Gas-tax relief: Voters buy gas, support paying less for it; John McCain knows this, wants votes; and Hillary Clinton wants in on that action.Clue that a proposed economic initiative is a bad idea: Economists think it is a bad idea.Barack Obama says: don’t be stupid.
1 tag
A Note on Back Issues
In a past life, the DR was powered by Blogger. Posts from that era still haunt Blogger-land. Some are good, some are not. If, for whatever reason, you want to dust off some of the old material, here are a few respectable entries: Irony vs. Coincidence Bimonthly or Semimonthly? Momentarily ConfusedAnd this one too, just so that you don’t think that everything in there is about word-use....