Category: Deep Thoughts

  • My favorite things, all at once!

    Yay for old friends, economics, and technology! All at once! kc wrote a blog posting with her humble ideas on how to use IP address space tax. Wait… there’s a tax on address space? Yes, because it has become a scare quantity, because people are too lazy to move to IPv6, IPv4 address space is…

  • Global Warming is going to be an embarassment

    In 15 years, the Global Warming hysteria is going to be one of those embarassing episodes in history. Several sociology and history of science PhDs will write their theses on “how they blew it on climate change”. The latest person to risk his reputation by coming out and speaking truthiness to the enviro-powers is Freeman…

  • You heard it here first, folks…

    More discussion about marks on hard things. I suppose I should really get around to figuring out the physics of my modest proposal. The Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project does something clever, which is to start their disk with big text that swirls into microscopic text. The idea is to tempt the reader to want…

  • A Kaleidoscope of Languages

    By way of procrastinating doing my French homework, I found myself on a webpage which has the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in more languages than you knew existed (including, to absolve some of my guilt, French). That’s a little bit of hope right there. That’s a message in a bottle that says, “we might…

  • Vanity Fair on Iceland

    I became aware of Iceland’s bankruptcy through a curious route. A local geek mailing list had a posting from a friend of one of the guys on the list. She was Icelandic, and she was really in distress — able to understand how serious the situation was, unable to understand it at the same time,…

  • A Secret of the Economics of Manufacturing

    I saw this quote in an article on E-Ink: If you ever want to make a billion of anything cheaply, you print it.  What an interesting observation! With such interesting far reaching consequences: Nano Solar is on the right track, crystaline solar is not. Diamond Age-style nano-assembly is not quite a sure bet, and mass-customization…

  • A “Told You So” Moment

    One of the risks of being a person who is constantly processing information, forming opinions, and trying to predict the future is that when you get it right-ish, you tend to say, “I told you so”. Or if you are polite, you just think, “I told you so”. I’m not so polite so I blog…

  • The power of debt

    Here’s a quote that turns everything you think you know on it’s head: When the debt is big enough, it’s the debtor who has the power, not the creditor. That’s Niall Ferguson talking in Vanity Fair. It’s for stuff like that I read Vanity Fair. Well, the photos don’t hurt either…

  • Why I work for MSF…

    Here’s someone else who has taken control of his life and chosen exactly what he’s doing and why. That’s part of why I work for MSF. It occurred to me about the time Silicon Valley was getting ready for another lap (which came to be called Web 2.0) that I didn’t want to make the…

  • The New Yorker on Aid Work

    There is a really excellent article on aid work in The New Yorker. Though this is pretty much a write-only blog at this point, and I don’t really know if anyone cares, here are my reactions to the article: It is remarkably candid, but… it is too hopeless… because it focuses too much on the…