sysrick.com

The 10 coolest things about The Big Lebowski. August 31, 2003 [Fark.com]

A Quick Overview of Buddhism. The Buddhist community is one of the largest growing groups of believers in the world today. It is especially gaining interest in the West where people are searching for alternatives to traditional religion. What proceeds is an attempt at giving a brief overview of Buddhist history and teachings. Please understand that Buddhism is a large and complicated area to research and because there are many different understandings of Buddhism what I've written here may not apply to everyone. Indeed, because this is really an overview I have only really scratched the surface! [kuro5hin.org]

Playing with Fractals. Fractal Recursions is one of those visually delicious sites where eye candy becomes the main course. It's also one more stunning example of the art-math-play connection. There are 30 different galleries of fractal images. My favorites, however, can be [Major FUN's Daily Briefing]

How Everyday Things are Made  [via KALIBER10000 #] [jenett.radio: dailywebthing]

The morning after the eve of destruction
This end-of-summer pause, as the headlines fly about the latest bombing attack in Iraq, is an appropriate occasion to revisit my "Eve of Destruction" post, which occasioned so much comment back in March. In particular, I look back at my summary of Thomas Powers' prescient prediction of the likely course of events following from a U.S. invasion of Iraq: "...a swift U.S. victory in a month or so. Then a couple months of calm. Then, a gradual awareness: That this project of installing a client government in Iraq, even in the sunniest of outcomes, must last a generation or more. That hundreds of thousands of American troops have now become sitting-duck targets for suicidal terrorists who will have no need to hijack a plane to access their foes."

So here we are. The daily death of American soldiers has now become so commonplace it does not merit much coverage. The postwar period has now cost more lives than the active war. I trust that the reader who mocked my use of the phrase "sitting ducks" is now reconsidering his tone; what other phrase makes sense? Iraqi democracy does not seem in the offing in the short or medium term. We are incapable of protecting moderate Iraqis from extremists; we are incapable of protecting our own troops from random assault. Major bombings, like that of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad or today's atrocity at the Najaf mosque, are on the rise.

Is it more money that we need? Since the Bush administration has made cutting taxes its top priority, it refuses even to admit that any Iraq-related expenses should be included in its budget forecasts. Is it more troops that we need? Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld insist that that's not the problem. We should just sit tight and let them handle it. They Have A Plan. I guess they're just not sharing it with us. Or with our allies. Or with the Iraqis.

There's a limited set of possibilities here: Either the government has no strategy at all; or it has one that is not working; or it has one that is so devious or immoral or inexplicable that it cannot reveal it to its own citizens.

There is a monstrous credibility gap here -- yes, the phrase is from the Vietnam era, the last time the U.S. government undertook to justify a chronically deteriorating military situation by making increasingly incredible statements. It took years for the press and the public to cotton to the credibility gap then; this time around, we ought to be a little more savvy. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

NASA chooses the top 10 telescope image of the year (great pics). August 29, 2003 [Fark.com]

Austin Postcard. Austin Postcard. Photographs, postcards, history and ephemera related to Austin, Texas. [MetaFilter]

Plant grows 40ft in three months  [via Outwardly Normal 2] [jenett.radio: dailywebthing]

Robert Anton Wilson for Governor. bOING bOING patron saint Robert Anton Wilson is running for California Governor! "After all, why should I remain the ONLY nutcase in California who ain't running," RAW says.

My party, the Guns and Dope Party, invites extremists of both right and left to unite behind our shared goals of:

1. Get those pointy-headed Washington bureaucrats off our backs and off our fronts too!

2. Guns for everybody who wants them; no guns for those who don't want them

3. Drugs for everybody who wants them; no drugs for those who don't want them

4. Freedom of choice, free love,free speech, free Internet and free beer

5. California secession -- Keep the anti-gun and anti-dope fanatics on the Eastern side of the Rockies

6. Lotsa wild parties every night by gun-toting dopers

7. Animal protection -- Support your right to keep and arm bears
More position papers will follow; we know at least 69 good positions.

I haven't been this excited about politics since RU Sirius ran for President! Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

It could happen, ya know.... Mediagab Presents - RIAA Starts Home Invasions Commercial (Quicktime)  [via The J-Walk Blog]  RIAA's violence is a little graphic.  You have been warned... ;~] [jenett.radio]

From 11 years ago!


Comic for 29 Aug 1992.
Calvin and Hobbes

Prisoners' Inventions: MacGuyver meets the prison system. Prisoners' Inventions is a small-press book comprising an illustrated guide to the ingenious folk-art-cum-contraband manufactured by artisans in America's prison system, from toilet-roll chess-sets to this "water lighter." This stuff makes a joke out of MacGuyver and Gilligan's Island's Professor -- (often) brilliant inventions, refined by thousands of inventors who have necessity in plenty, and passed folklorically from one prisoner to another. Link Discuss (via FARK) [Boing Boing Blog]

Orca in the Pacific NW. OrcaLive is a series of webcams and underwater microphones placed off of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. They are part of OrcaLab started by Dr. Spong in 1970 to study wild orca. It appears the cameras are manned and observations of behavior and movement are made here in the left-hand column. Combined, it makes for some good viewing--today alone I saw and heard different pods greeting each other, saw spyhops, stomach rubbing along the shore, and tailslaps. Ken Balcomb at the Center for Whale Research has been studying the orca around the San Juan Islands, Washington since 1976. They also have a webcam and still shots. You may remember the story of Springer being reunited with her pod. (discussed here) There is also a young male named Luna L98 who has been separated from his pod for two years. His situation has reached a crisis while Canadian officials have taken a wait-and-see approach. In the last few days, Luna was wounded by a boat propeller and has a 6-8inch long 1.5inch deep gash above one eye. Maybe Canada will act now. With only 79 individuals in the Southern Resident population, down from 92 in 1991, every individual is important. [MetaFilter]

Is Windows Media the future of HDTV?. Interesting read over at the "Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity" web site on the future of HDTV formats and an interesting test that was done pitting D-VHS for HDTV vs. Windows Media 9 Series with Joe Kane's Digital Video Essentials (DVE) calibration program. It's a technical read but some interesting thoughts also in the DVD player space and future support for HDTV quality. [Addicted to Digital Media]

Schwarzenegger: "I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman.". August 28, 2003 [Fark.com]

wacky and fun fortune cookies. You have a reputation for being deceitful and treacherous. Welcome to the odd world of online fortune cookies. This man collects them, the weird ones, that is. And sometimes there is some MetaFilter]

keeping it all bottled up. Perhaps the finest testament to the power of marketing and distribution is the fact that I regularly buy bottled water.... [Anil Dash]

“How lucky you are to be living in Italy,” people say when you move there. Alas, the idyllic vision of warm, sunny, friendly Italia suffers from on... [Arts & Letters Daily]

Comics 101. Surf's Up: Scott Tipton explores the moral center of the Marvel Universe in the form of one of Stan and Jack's greatest creations, the Rider of the Spaceways himself, the Silver Surfer. [Movie Poop Shoot]

Al Franken interviewed at Salon.com. Al Franken interviewed at Salon.com "O'Reilly went on his radio show and said that the purpose of the lawsuit was to punish me for coming after Fox. So this is the mindset of the right, that they have to punish you. Joe Wilson, the former Gabon ambassador, was sent to Niger by the CIA and came back and said the uranium claims weren't true. And when the controversy started broiling again about the 16 words in the State of the Union address and Wilson wrote the piece in New York Times, senior administration officials blew the cover on his wife, who was a covert [CIA] operative. And it jeopardized the lives not only of her contacts but every American, because she was a covert agent in weapons of mass destruction. And it's a way of intimidating other analysts who might come forward, and there's a parallel here: You will be punished if you come after us. I really think the Wilson thing is the most disgraceful action of any White House since Iran Contra. " [MetaFilter]

Hall Of Technical Documentation Weirdness [Slashdot]

This does not appear to be a joke -- I guess it proves there is a market for anything.

Always be prepared to handle life's little disasters. [Memepool]

The unkindest cuts. A close-up look at how one university system wielded its ax in response to state budget crises. [Christian Science Monitor | Learning]

Lose weight by eating every meal at McDonald's. After a month traveling, I've concluded that the best way to lose weight is by eating every meal at McDonald's.

Suppose that you go to a Whole Foods-style supermarket, at which all manner of incredibly delicious gourmet items are for sale. You spend $200 to stock the fridge. But really you ought to eat all the fruits, vegetables, and prepared foods while they are fresh. The result: massive gluttony and weight gain.

Suppose that you go to a reasonably nice restaurant, costing $20-30 per person. The menu will list an incredibly tempting array of food. It all sounds so great that you order an appetizer and a main dish. You have a tough time deciding among the main dishes and you're sad that you can't order two. The appetizer is actually big enough that you are beginning to feel full when the main dish comes. The main dish is heroic in size, the kind of feast that Homer describes the heroes at Troy as having consumed. You're not really all that hungry but you ordered it so you feel like you should eat at least half. The result: massive gluttony and weight gain.

Eat at home or eat at a restaurant. Either way you get fat.

The solution is McDonald's. If you can remember one piece of medical advice from my brother ("Don't eat anything a caveman wouldn't have eaten"), you skip the fries. For a beverage it is unsweetened iced tea or Diet Coke. So far, zero calories. All you need now is a sandwich. The bread isn't really on the Atkins diet but otherwise a McDonald's sandwich is vastly smaller and lower in calories than anything you'd get in an upscale restaurant. Best of all, the menu at McDonald's won't tempt you into excess. The sandwiches aren't all that delicious. If you're really hungry they can taste pretty good but have you ever been sad that you couldn't order both the Big Mac and the Quarter Pound with Cheese?

Market opportunity: write a book entitled "The McDonald's Diet" that explains how to lose 5 lbs/week eating only in McDonald's. By philg@mit.edu (Philip Greenspun). [Philip Greenspun Weblog]

Comic for 25 Aug 1992. [Calvin and Hobbes]

Evocative Objects.

Professor Sherry Turkle, Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, explores how our increasingly intimate interactions with technology are shaping us. In particular, the computer and the technologies extending from it are not merely tools, she says; rather, they are objects that are changing the way we see ourselves and our world in profound ways. We thus will have an increasingly "evocative" relationship with our machines, something for which we don't even have a conscious vocabulary. The advent of our "computer culture" has also created new possibilities for our engagement with each other. What is needed, Professor Turkle says, is a psychoanalytic theory to examine this along the same principles as the one attributed to Freud, which also dealt with "object relations," those objects being the roles that people play in our lives.

I have to say that thinking of robots as my "companions" in my old age pushed the limits of my imagination; this despite my love of Star Trek and its artificial but sentient characters. The kicker was considering the following:

The possibilities of engaging emotionally with creatures that will not die, whose loss we will never need to face, presents dramatic questions that are based on current technology...

This is an order of magnitude more profound than how the automobile changed our "relationship" with our social and cultural spaces. And what's more, before we can think of this, what should we make of the very idea of what we understand as a "machine" playing the role of a companion to living, breathing humans? One could say that Professor Turkle is being alarmist by drawing our attention to the challenge that this poses to our assumptions of "the irreducibility of human beings" since in all likelihood most of us are not going to have to deal with this in our lifetimes; besides, most people on the planet do have more basic needs that are going unmet. Well, technology in various forms is, for good or bad, making its way to the god-forsaken corners of the world (think satellite dishes on bull-drawn carts in Indian villages that do not have roads or running water).

Such a discourse in our often over-prejudiced cultures tends to veer into value judgements on the amorphous idea of "Technology." While judgement may very well be called for, it is premature before we have grasped what it is that we are judging. A way to get our hands around these emerging promises of technology is precisely what Professor Turkle is proposing.

Among the ways in which computers have changed our lives that we do know is the ubiquity of this vast, awesome network of information, ideas and, yes, communities of people to which we have all come to belong. When my hard-drive crashed a few weeks ago, I was told that sending it off to the manufacturer for repair or replacement would mean that I would not have a functioning machine for over two weeks. That was unacceptable, I had just begun to blog and I could not tolerate being cut off from the Internet for that long because I had barely begun to get noticed and such a protracted absence, in blog-time, could classify me as "churned." In contrast, if my car ended up in the shop for the same amount of time, I'd live with the inconvenience of a long commute to work by public transportation for those two weeks. You may judge me to be obsessed but the fact remains that my connection with the blogging "community" has come to provide enough fulfillment that I'd want to minimize my time away from it.

While I'm on the subject of blogging, here's one of the "right-on!" moments I had when reading Professor Turkle's lecture:

For some, computation offers the promise of perfection, the fantasy that "If you do it right, it will do it right, and right away." Writers can become obsessed with fonts, layout, spelling and grammar checks. What was once a typographical error can be, like Hester Prynne's Scarlet Letter, a sign of shame.

I took up blogging in order to build my writing muscles but as soon as I started I found myself staying up every night making my templates look just right, which of course they never will. While I was doing that, I'd check out other blogs and lament to all who'd listen that most blogs out there valued form over substance and, by the way, I still think that.

My other "right-on!" moment was:

Cyberspace opens the possibility for identity play, but it is very serious play. People who cultivate an awareness of what stands behind their screen personae are the ones most likely to succeed in using virtual for personal and social transformation.

Many moons ago, when I first got on the Internet, I was excited about being online as someone I wasn't. I wanted to liberate those aspects of me that for some reason I had been unwilling to show the light of day. Turns out that I only needed to do that once. I ended up going along with someone else's game, playing someone I hadn't intended to play and doing so convincingly. That's all it took to begin getting used to those hidden aspects and incorporating them into my "real" persona. Yes, I'm making it sound too easy and no, I ain't gonna give any details but you get the point...

In the industrialized, urban cultures, we've now accepted the tinkering of our personalities through psychopharmacological agents. I know the argument that this ain't the tinkering of one's personality as much as it's bringing forth the personality that has been subdued due to chemical weirdness in the brain. I'll buy that too, which is to say that it is not evident which is the "real" personality, the pre or the post. As Professor Turkle mentions in her conclusion, does this amount to reducing the mind to a biochemical machine?

So there we have it. My own, little psychoanalytic investigation is underway. I was a (very unhappy) mechanical engineer in my previous life. I like to say that I prefer being a few degrees of abstraction away from the nuts and bolts of reality, which is what computer science offered me. This distance however does give me a clearer view of reality...I think.

--aslam

[Aslam Karachiwala: methinks [mythic flow]]

An Unpatriotic Act.

Attorney General John Ashcroft has embarked on a charm offensive on behalf of the USA Patriot Act. He is traveling the country to rally support for the law, which many people, both liberals and conservatives, consider a dangerous assault on civil liberties. Mr. Ashcroft's efforts to promote the law are misguided. He should abandon the roadshow and spend more time in Washington working with those who want to reform the law.

When the Patriot Act raced through Congress after Sept. 11, critics warned that it was an unprecedented expansion of the government's right to spy on ordinary Americans. The more people have learned about the law, the greater the calls have been for overhauling it. One section that has produced particular outrage is the authorization of "sneak and peek" searches, in which the government secretly searches people's homes and delays telling them about the search. The House last month voted 309 to 118 for a Republican-sponsored measure to block the use of federal funds for such searches.

Congressional opponents of the act, on both sides of the aisle, are pushing for other changes. A Senate bill, sponsored by Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, and Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, addresses many of the law's most troubling aspects. One provision would make it harder for the government to gain access to sensitive data, including medical and library records, and records concerning the purchase or rental of books, music or videos.

[ ... ]

One member of Congress, Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat, has charged that Mr. Ashcroft's lobbying campaign, in which United States attorneys have been asked to participate, may violate the law prohibiting members of the executive branch from engaging in grass-roots lobbying for or against Congressional legislation. Legal or not, the campaign seeks to shore up a deeply flawed piece of legislation. The Patriot Act is the Bush administration's attempt to make the country safe on the cheap. Rather than do the hard work of coming up with effective port security and air cargo checks, and other programs targeted at actual threats, the administration has taken aim at civil liberties.

[Privacy Digest]

on privacy.... Dae at Dae's Demesne:  "Given all the flap lately about online privacy issues and such, here's a statement of the obvious.  ¶ There isn't any. There never was. There isn't going to be any. So, get over it already." [jenett.radio]

How do we stand for that?.

Lessons in How to Lie About Iraq... (Brian Eno). Lessons in How to Lie About Iraq... (Brian Eno) [Common Dreams]

I think that the movie Wag The Dog will be as revealing of the failures of American democracy - when public opinion can be cynically manipulated - as Animal Farm was of failures of communism. Both lead to fascist states. When the people are prevented from seeing the workings of their elected officials, when they are lied to and misled about government policy, when obfuscation is a reason for promotion rather than removal, when the name given to a program is more important than how much money is actually appropriated, then democracy is, at best, ill-served and, at worst, destroyed. I expect that these times will be looked at 50 years hence with the same sort of 'How could they stand for that?' that most of us feel when we find out that many African-Americans could not travel freely in the early half of the last century or had to enter a movie theatre through a separate entrance or had to use a separate water fountain. We can look at the photos documenting this. The ability of any citizen to freely travel this country or to get a bite to eat where they wish is really only 40 years old or so. 'How did they stand for that?' Worlds change and I feel that the approach taken by the neocons will be a loser in the long run. It is how much damage that can be done in the short run that scares me. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

Chris Lydon interviews James Gleick on his biography of Sir Isaac Newton. "Almost everything we know about apples and moons in motion and at rest, about time, space, gravity, inertia, differential and integral calculus, occurred to Isaac Newton in his early twenties, working in isolation through the London plague years of 1665 and 1666." [Scripting News]

"Gigli" drops to 63rd place in its third weekend at box office. IMAX movie playing in just three theaters makes more money. August 21, 2003 [Fark.com]

Beyond Fear: Required reading for Ashcroft's America. I've spent the past week at a writers' retreat in an undisclosed location (I'm still here!). It's been insanely productive. I've written a 21,000-word novella, rewritten two partial novels, worked on my latest collaboration with Charlie Stross, critiqued about 20 stories, read a friend's book and critiqued it, and caught up on some reading (and I've still got three days left, and still to come: nonfiction book proposal, rewrite the new novella, and catch up on other projects and projectlets).

One of the books I'm delighted to have had the chance to read here is Bruce Schneier's latest, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World. I reviewed three or four drafts of this while Bruce was working on it, and I am completely delighted with how it turned out.

In Beyond Fear, Schneier has utterly demystified the idea of security with a text aimed squarely at nontechnical individuals. He takes his legendary skill at applying common sense and lucidity to information-security problems and applies it to all the bogeymen of the post-9/11 world, and asks the vital question: What are we getting in exchange for the liberties that the Ashcroftian authorities have taken away from us in the name of security?

This is possibly the most important question of this decade, and that makes Schenier's book one of the most important texts of the decade. This should be required reading for every American, and the world would be a better place if anyone venturing an opinion on electronic voting, airline security, roving wiretaps, or any other modern horror absorbed this book's lessons first. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

"outside the bounds of rational scientific discourse". The Chronicle: 1/31/2003: The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science [via Steve's No Direction Home Page < Semi-Daily Journal < Making Light] [jenett.radio]

A slightly crazy and loveable member of the fraternity who loves to drink and do amazing things with his eyebrows!. How do you mean, "Hee-Haw, Sam Wainwright?" A collection of film synopses for english as a second language students. Some folks have taken on the herculean task of explaining idiomatic language in some popular films. It's an odd collection with some - Dr. Strangelove, Animal House, etc. being explained about as well as one can explain comedy. And others that even folks who do speak english don't really care about. [MetaFilter]

Kilgore Trout. "The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest." [Quotes of the Day]

TiVo Hacks. TiVo Hacks covers tips for changing the order of recorded programs, activating the 30-second skip to blaze through commercials, and more, by using magical remote-control codes. Then, once you take the lid off your TiVo, you will learn how to gain even more fun and functionality. You can upgrade the hard drive for more hours of recording. Log in to the serial port for command-line access to programming data, log files, closed-captioning data, display graphics on the TiVo screen, and even play MP3s. While TiVo gives viewers personalized control of their TVs, TiVo Hacks gives users personalized control of TiVo. [Safari Tech Books Online]

Gas crisis in Phoenix. Well, while everybody in the US obsessess over the power outage in NY and surrounding states, Phoenix's own crisis has... [Blogcritics]

Late bloomers choose art school for self-enrichment. People are developing artistic skills within a degree program later in life. [Christian Science Monitor | Learning]

Gadgets for surviving the next blackout. Reader Ben Bethel writes in with an excellent suggestion: a discussion about what gadgets people should have on hand for a blackout. We managed to miss the whole thing (we've been in California for the past few weeks), but we realized that we don't even have a flashlight back at Gizmodo HQ in New York (I know, I know), let alone a Honda generator. So what gear are you going to buy in preparation for the next time the power goes out? Or is there some indispensable gadget that helped get you through that you'd recommend to others?... [Gizmodo]

We're number one! We're number one!. We're number one! We're number one! From a source quoted in the article: "We have the wealthiest society in human history, and we maintain the highest level of imprisonment. It's striking what that says about our approach to social problems and inequality." (apologies for the usual US-centrism) [MetaFilter]

Wired illo: The Treasure Hunter. Canadian illustrator Kenn Brown's latest illo for a very cool feature in the August issue of Wired Magazine:

In 1694, an 80-gun British warship called the HMS Sussex set sail for southern France loaded with as much as 3 million pounds sterling and 6 tons of gold. The bounty was intended for the Duke of Savoy, a bribe to keep him allied with England in its war against Louis XIV. The Duke never did get the money. Severe gales whipped up off the north coast of Africa. The Sussex foundered along with a dozen other ships in the British fleet, taking all its riches (and the lives of 1,200 crew members) to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Ultimately, the Duke threw his support to Louis XIV, and England's battle with France raged for seven more years before ending in a stalemate.

The plight of the Sussex left behind two huge questions, the first for historians: What if the mission had been successful? It's conceivable that England would have beaten back Louis XIV and annexed parts or all of France. If so, the British government might have been less concerned with a group of 13 rebellious colonies across the Atlantic and allowed them to split off to form a commonwealth - like Canada. The other question, for the rest of us: What happened to all that loot?

Link, Discuss Read the amazing article this illustration accompanied, by Jeffrey O'Brien, here.
[Boing Boing Blog]

Garrison Keillor has written the best spoof of academic life since Kingsley Amis. Piety and self-righteous sanctimony are his targets... [Arts & Letters Daily]

IT Governance. IT Governance is one of the foundations upon which a good enterprise architecture is built. There's no point trying to build interoperability for systems in a IT environment where you can't even make good decisions about projects and policy. This month's CIO magazine has a good article on IT Governance called "Deciding Factors". The article makes the counterintuitive point that strong IT governance leads to resourcefulness. Most of the time we think of governance as something constrains and indeed, that's the case in the points made by this article. The enterprise is constraining certain activities so that the overall organization can be more resourceful. Here are the eight key practices listed in the article: [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Root Beer is a sweet carbonated beverage flavored with sassafras. Welcome to Root Beer World! Root Beer Reviews. Ask Dr. Root Beer about Root Beer Brand Names! Then ask Professor Root Beer about his reviews. And for the home brewer, a recipe for Root Beer Concentrate. More Root Beer Recipes. MetaFilter]

Joe Jennet (my blogshare patron) is starting a new blog devoted to the BlogShare virtual economic system:

 

Getting Started. I've just released the site to get it listed at BlogShares while I'm still getting it all together. More coming soon... [ShareBlogs]

The top 10 biggest box office failures. August 16, 2003 [Fark.com]

Satellite Views Of The Blackout [Slashdot]

Very cool:  induction-based cooking surfaces.   Luxine (sorry no website but great analysis by EPRI) has a high-end product.   Fast heat-up (2 min).  Cool surfaces (which is great for the cook!).  High efficiency (95% vs. 30% for a commercial gas range).  Superior performance.  I want one.  Resources:  a discussion of induction ranges at Bob Vila, ebay sales, and Induction systems has a  products and explanations. [John Robb's Weblog]

Living Simply - Whether You Want to or Not.

Posted by Candidia Cruikshanks

From Vicki Robin in Simple Living via Indigo: We must begin to talk about our consumption and challenge the conspiracy of silence. We can't solve a problem we won't acknowledge. Challenge yourself. Challenge others. Risk being uncomfortable. Risk offending others. Ask:

• Should we be able to buy whatever we can afford, no matter what the effect on others or the earth?

• Should we allow credit cards to lure us into excessive debt?

• When is personal consumption a matter of public concern?

• Who or what will set limits for us, if we won't do it ourselves?

• Does overconsumption really make us happy?

Very helpful. I have cut The Happy Tutor's pay in half. Dick Minim is on bread and water. With the money I save I am going to hire policmen to follow Vicki Robin around and stop her before she buys a second cup of coffee.

[Wealth Bondage]

The Notebook Cooler. Now that actually using your laptop in your lap means running the risk of a nasty burn, I suppose something like the Notebook Cooler might come in handy. It's designed to fit underneath a laptop and keep it cool through a combination of aluminum to conduct away the heat, ventilation holes, and two small fans. Oh, and perhaps most fittingly, it's even USB-powered. Read... [Gizmodo]