There’s an interesting article at New Scientist that imagines what would happen to the earth if all humans disappeared today. The most basic conclusion is that pretty much all traces of human existence would be gone in 100,000 years.
Equally interesting is the discussion of this topic on MetaFilter. As usual, the MeFi discussion goes in many different directions, but I sense in some of the posts an unease that traces of the human race could be erased so quickly.
Microsoft’s yet-to-be-released iPod challenger, Zune, is already drawing a lot of attention. So, one of Zune’s innovative features is the ability to share musically via a wireless connection with other nearby Zunes. Cool. For copyrighted music, however, the receiver can only play the received content three times or within three days, whichever comes first. Okay, a big nod to the music labels. That in itself is generating a lot of controversy.
But here’s the part that astounds me, directly from the Zune blog:
I was going to leave a comment in my last post answering questions, but I decided to make a new one…
“I made a song. I own it. How come, when I wirelessly send it to a girl I want to impress, the song has 3 days/3 plays?” Good question. There currently isn’t a way to sniff out what you are sending, so we wrap it all up in DRM. We can’t tell if you are sending a song from a known band or your own home recording so we default to the safety of encoding. And besides, she’ll come see you three days later. . .
Just like the music industry attacked file sharing applications because it’s possible to use them to share copyrighted material, Microsoft is defaulting to DRM since it can’t know for sure whether a shared file is copyrighted. Better safe than sorry–safe for them, anyway. Well, that sounds pretty sorry to me. It’s a ‘guilty with no chance of proving your innocence’ strategy. Great way to treat your customers. Of course, a lot of people are observing, justifiably to me, that Microsoft’s primary customer is, in fact, the music labels. The consumer runs a distant second. In which case, the Zune will not catch on.
OK, so what about Apple’s DRM? First off, if I import a non-DRMed song into iTunes, iTunes doesn’t mess with it. Second, Apple doesn’t promise to let me legally share files with someone else. I don’t like DRM any more than Cory Doctorow, but Apple’s ‘five computers plus attached devices’ DRM for iTunes seems a reasonable limitation for personal use. Millions of other iPod owners seem willing to accept it, too.
As the video below demonstrates, getting computers to work with human language is hard–even after decades of research and development.
Over at Slacktivist and Making Light there are lively discussions about ‘Could you live on X amount of money?’ Lots of commenters are chiming in with their mimimum requirements. For me, though, all those participants are missing the point of the discussion. This comment at Slacktivist expresses my sentiments exactly (though more eloquently than I could have done so):
For me, my happiness for their good fortune turns to scorn for their blind privilege when they go from, ‘I wouldn’t know how to live on only 100k a year’ or ‘I wouldn’t want to try to live on only 100k a year’ to ‘I couldn’t live on 100k a year’. I understand that you don’t want to downgrade your lifestyle; who would? I understand that you’ve never had to live on 100k, let alone 50k, let alone 30k, and it’s very understandable that you regard the prospect of trying with some trepidation.
But you could do it. Lots of people do it, because they must, because they have no choice. And if you had no choice, you’d do it, too. So be grateful. Be humble. Help those who don’t have your staggering luck, to be amongst the richest people living in the richest country. You don’t deserve it, nobody could, so at least be thoughtful about it.
One of my biggest fears in life is that I’ll feel entitled to something. For me, being part of an intentional faith community is one of the biggest antidotes to feelings of entitlement. It helps me to keep in mind just how miniscule I am in the grand scheme of things.
Today, I ran across Bob Sutton’s blog, Work Matters. Just up my alley: he shares lots of practical applications of some fairly esoteric ideas. I found Bob’s blog via this post: Strong Opinions, Weakly Held. In it, Bob shares this insight:
A couple years ago, I was talking the Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future’s Bob Johansen about wisdom, and he explained that – to deal with an uncertain future and still move forward – they advise people to have “strong opinions, which are weakly held.†They’ve been giving this advice for years, and I understand that it was first developed by Instituite Director Paul Saffo. Bob explained that weak opinions are problematic because people aren’t inspired to develop the best arguments possible for them, or to put forth the energy required to test them. Bob explained that it was just as important, however, to not be too attached to what you believe because, otherwise, it undermines your ability to “see†and “hear†evidence that clashes with your opinions.
That’s an eloquent description that I find ever so sensible. I do indeed have strong opinions, and like my friend Rafe Colburn, I like to think my opinions are based on well considered evidence, and that I’m willing to change my opinions in light of new evidence.
This web page about English usage ‘non-errors’ has been making the rounds in the bloggin world this week. It contains a list of English usage that people frequently correct, but the author of this page calls them ‘non-errors’ since they are in common usage. I poked around and discovered that the author of the page is an English professor who has published a book on English usage errors.
Given the author’s knowledge of English usage, I’m a little disappointed that he calls the items on this page ‘non-errors.’ In fact, his primary argument that the issues in question are not errors is the fact that they are commonly used. I don’t see how he can publish a prescriptivist book on usage and then not disclose that his view of these issues is based on a descriptivist argument.
Eric Sink has a recent blog post about negotiating. He makes the common sense observation:
In negotiation, the one thing that really strengthens your position is the ability to walk away from the deal.
My salary history over the last ten years bears out Eric’s observation. With every job change except one, I received a decent salary increase. The one exception was the job I accepted after having been laid off. I was not in a strong position to negotiate salary, and I took a big hit for it. It took me several years to get back to the salary I had before.
The New York Times lists ten lesser-known significant dates in American history. For instance:
FEB. 15, 1933: The Wobbly Chair
It should have been an easy shot: five rounds at 25 feet. But the gunman, Giuseppe Zangara, an anarchist, lost his balance atop a wobbly chair, and instead of hitting President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, he fatally wounded the mayor of Chicago, who was shaking hands with F.D.R.
Had Roosevelt been assassinated, his conservative Texas running mate, John Nance Garner, would most likely have come to power. “The New Deal, the move toward internationalism — these would never have happened,” says Alan Brinkley of Columbia University. “It would have changed the history of the world in the 20th century. I don’t think the Kennedy assassination changed things as much as Roosevelt’s would have.”
Apparently, this list of reasons why America actually sucks is making the rounds on the internet. I’m the first to question unbridled ‘America is Number One!’ jingoism, but I’m highly suspicious of this list for several reasons:
I would really like to see someone pick apart the list. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or inclination.
