A guide by John Scalzi to all of the design problems of the Star Wars universe. I’ve never been a big Star Wars fan, myself. These are only some of the reasons.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Facebook Etiquette Question
OK, I’m an antique. I’ve got a Facebook account, but I still haven’t figured out why, other than as another phone book for contacts with people that I want to contact. I was told by Burton Lee that I had to have an account to be in the 21st century but (again) he never quite explained why.
I can understand that it’s sort of a way to blog and have your own on-line community if you don’t have a real…you know…blog. And because I do have a real blog, and one fairly highly rated on Technorati, among other places, I don’t have time to build Facebook pages.
Anyway. What is the protocol for having Facebook Friends? What is a Facebook “Friend”? Because I get a lot of requests from people I haven’t met, and have never heard of, and don’t even have friends in common with, to become their Facebook Friends. I have several pending “friends” both with and without mutual Facebook Friends, and I just don’t know what to do with them.
I may be old fashioned, but in my day, the word “friend” meant something. Has it lost that meaning?
[Update a few minutes later]
You know, if someone of whom I had no previous knowledge requested to be my Facebook “Friend” with an explanation of who they were, and why, I’d be more inclined to at least consider it, but when it’s just a response from a click on a button that says, “Become a friend,” I’m not very inclined to say, “Great!” “More Facebook Friends.”
Is collecting FFs some kind of weird status symbol?
The Show’s Biggest Star
The Beverly Hillbillies’ truck. Jethro was way ahead of his time, when it came to souping things up.
The Landline Problem
I’ll give up my landline when they pry the receiver from my cold dead hands, but many people are just fine going cell-only, which could cause big problems down the road for the telecom industry.
I think that we have a generation of people who have no experience with quality phone service, and think that when calls get dropped, or you have trouble hearing the other person, that’s just the way it is, so they don’t know what they’re giving up. It’s going to be interesting to see how we continue to improve broadband if there is no cross subsidization from voice.
Kodak
…seems to have weathered the transition from film to the digital world.
Every Man
“…would give up his brain for a decent size.”
That was the subject of one of the myriad spam emails I get encouraging me to enhance…something or other. I have to believe that women get them, too.
Anyone who responds to such idiocy had no brain to give up in the first place. It’s as stupid as the ones that tell me that no one can resist buying a new watch. Watch me.
Cost Effectiveness
Bjorn Lomborg says that if global warming is a problem, there are much cheaper and faster solutions than carbon reduction.
Asteroid Impact Craters
Some great pictures from space, which is the best place from which to see them.
But we still don’t seem to be taking the problem seriously:
NASA is charged with seeking out nearly all the asteroids that threaten Earth but doesn’t have the money to do the job, a federal report says.
That’s because even though Congress assigned the space agency this mission four years ago, it never gave NASA money to build the necessary telescopes, the new National Academy of Sciences report says.
Because space isn’t important. Even when it is.
More Climate Engineering Thoughts
From John Tierney.
If we really do have a climate change problem, this seems like a much better solution than a command-control economy. But it doesn’t provide the watermelon socialists with an excuse to run our lives.
Geoengineering
Could “cloud ships” solve the problem (assuming that there is a problem) with “global warming”?
I do find this both amusing and frustrating, though:
The Copenhagen Consensus Centre, which advises governments on how to spend aid money, examined the various plans and found the cloud ships to be the most cost-effective.
They would cost $9 billion (£5.3 billion) to test and launch within 25 years, compared to the $250 billion that the world’s leading nations are considering spending each year to cut CO2 emissions, and the $395 trillion it would cost to launch mirrors into space.
That’s an absolutely insane (and economically and technologically ignorant) number for the latter. The only way to get it is to assume that a) the mirrors are very massive, b) they are made entirely out of terrestrial materials and c) that launch costs would not be reduced in any way by launching that much mass. I’m not saying that “space mirrors” are the most cost effective solution, but I’d like to see their basis of estimate, because that number is nuts.