I never even attempt to socially interact via text. For me, texting is something I do rarely, and generally just as a means of requesting or conveying practical information (Where are you?). I’m glad I work at home, because I hate mobile phones for communication in general, whether talking or texting. I’ll often forget to take it with me (in fact I did just yesterday) when running errands. As I’ve often remarked, I don’t think most young people even know what good telephone service (or music reproduction) is like. They think the crap quality they get from cells is normal.
The point about the overuse of exclamation marks is also interesting. I had an email exchange a year or two ago with a twenty-something whose emails were full of them. I gave her some unsolicited advice to be more sparing with the bangs for professional communication, which she took well, but it’s a hard habit to break, I expect, and as the article notes, some people have grown to expect them.
And as a pre-warning to commenters: Get off my lawn. 🙂
I’m having trouble uploading the video to the Kickstarter page (they’re figuring out what the problem is, hopefully), but meanwhile, here’s a higher-quality version of it on Youtube. I’m not thrilled with audio quality (it sounds sort of like I’m in an echoey lecture hall), but I don’t have a sound studio, just a Sennheiser headset.
[Update a few minutes later]
Oops. Just noticed, it looks like I lost the end credits. Have to look into what happened there.
[Update a while later]
For some reason, I hadn’t included the final credits in the build. Here’s the new version.
[Update a while later]
Sorry transitions are so choppy. I’m sure it has something to do with Youtube’s post-processing.
Discusses his new novel, and the role of science fiction.
He is one of the few authors whose books I always look forward to reading, though I was a little disappointed with Anathem. But this looks like a fun read.
I should also note that one of the points I make in my book (and in op-eds) since, is that our unwillingness to use the hardware we have on hand to get into space is an indicator of how utterly unimportant human spaceflight is (a point that is accentuated by the relatively poor sales of a well-reviewed book). Stephenson describes a scenario in which it suddenly becomes very important to become as spacefaring as possible, as soon as possible, and how society reacts.
Let’s force doctors to spend a lot of money to become technology dependent and adopt electronic health records when the old way of doing things was working just fine. And hey–as a bonus, our health information is now more vulnerable to hacking and we can lose some privacy along the way! Electronic health records haven’t saved a single life or a single dollar, but they have created a lot of expense, confusion, and tremendous demoralization for our health care providers. It wasn’t broken, and it shouldn’t have been “fixed.” If the Republican Congress was smart, it would repeal this onerous, useless provision of Obamacare.
There are a lot of things the Republicans would do if they were smart. On the other hand, I can understand why they don’t want to repeal this abomination piece meal. They need to scrap the whole thing and start over, but it won’t happen until we get someone in the White House who actually understands markets and actually gives a damn about others.
I wonder how much this (I assume, cost-plus contract) is costing compared to what Blue is spending on the BE-4? I predict that this LOX/kerosene engine will never fly.
Stephen Smith has a lengthy review of John Logsdon’s latest book.
As he notes, the dual myths of Kennedy as space visionary and Nixon as space villain don’t stand up to any sort of realistic historical scrutiny. In fact, with Apollo, Kennedy set us up for decades of failure, in terms of making spaceflight economically realistic.
Cold is much more deadly than heat, by an order of magnitude.
I have no more confidence in this prediction than I do of predictions for warming (and particularly predictions of catastrophic climate change). The lesson is a) the climate can always be counted on to change, b) we don’t really know what the future holds for climate, c) we need to be prepared for anything, which means maximizing economic growth and d) (related) we need to stop fantasizing that carbon dioxide is a magical climate-control knob.