Society

I just read a brilliant short essay by Paul Graham called How to Disagree. Please stop and read it too.

This essay is public education at its finest. It should be required reading for every voter. With this knowledge, we can actually evaluate how honest and intelligent a person's debate is. We can recognize refutation from ad hominem. This is super important when judging a candidate for public office.

Wow. I feel way smarter having read Glenn Greenwald's article in Salon. He explains the primary appeal of the conservative movement which can be boiled down tothe wonderful phrase - threatened tribalism.

I've just seen a beautiful web site for a beautiful product and become ill as a result. Feast your eyes on the Washlet, a toilet seat which wipes your ass for you. Washlet is clearly designed by the world's top user experience engineers. You can just tell that it is a high performance piece of gear, like a BMW or an Ipod. And washlets can be found in 60% of homes in Japan.

The Washlet web site is remarkably clean and pleasing. Roll over the talking heads (innovative navigation!) and listen to the pleasing chimes. The only trouble is ...

We are overheating our Earth. Our food supply is poorly distributed. Our disaster response capability is medieval. These exciting and interesting engineering problems, but our brightest engineers are designing Washlets. This is not at all good. May I remind you about the demise of Easter Island. Read it.

I've recently become interested in the One Laptop Per Child project. It is based in my hometown of Cambridge, MA, and seeks to produce a laptop which costs $100. The idea then is to make sure that every kid who wants one can have one. Anywhere in the world. It is am ambitious project, and on the face sounds impossible on many levels. But the world's best minds are involved and they are making rapid progress.

For example, consider the power problem. namely, many kids have no easy access to electricity. So in order to use a laptop they must get power from some off the grid source. Check out the power source for the laptop - It is a pull cord!. Before you scoff, here are the specs from Potenco, its designer.

A minute of pulling the PCG (pull cord generator) generates enough energy for:

* 20 minutes of talk time on a mobile phone
* 1 hour of Ultrabright flashlight use
* 4 hours play time on an iPod Shuffle

Just pull for a few minutes and then compute. Brilliant!

Little known fact - I used to work for GE/Martin Marietta/Lockheed Martin as a manufacturing engineer. So I really enjoyed this blog series about Manufacturing in China. Really interesting first hand diary about life and work in China. I've always wanted to manufacture my pet inventions, so maybe this will come in handy one day.

We are in desperate need of a legislative solution to identity theft problem. I live in Massachusetts, which currently provides little protection for me. It is quite likely that my records and yours are publically available. Organizations have reported 88 million stolen records in the past 15 months.

[via Wired 12.10: The Long Tail]:

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p>For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.

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Sensational article describing how the web makes new businesses possible. Examples include NetFlix and Amazon. This is not typical media fluff - this is thoughful analysis using basic economics principles.

Wonder if this is for real. Costs $60 for an occasional use version of $300 for everyday use version.Neat.

The system allows moving heavy and bulky objects safely over adverse terrain, yet gives the sensitive control necessary to navigate over fragile hard-wood and custom tile floors and around interior walls.

Interesting "theft" of radio station information. I don't think one passes the smell test, but I hope it does. Information wants to be free.

Armed with the playlist data, Microsoft's computers try to replicate the various station playlists by dipping into the company's vault of 500,000 licensed songs. (Unlicensed songs -- like those by The Beatles -- don't get played.) Microsoft hopes the online clones, available only to PC users for now, will sound a lot like original stations, just without contests, jingles, chit-chat or local commercials.

Is all this legal? Microsoft, after all, isn't just using station call letters. It promotes its clones by using station nicknames (i.e., Star 100.7 or K-Earth 101) and, in some cases, their slogans ("today's best rock hits," "lite rock, less talk"). If you go to the Radio Plus website and click on Salt Lake City, for example, a list of 11 choices will pop up, including "Like 92.1 FM/KUUU U92 Blazin Hip-Hop Beat" and "Like 100.3 FM KSFI FM 100 Continuous Soft Hits."