jra's thoughts

Category: Deep Thoughts

  • 350

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    jra
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    No, not 300, that’s a movie. 350. Parts per million CO2 concentration. Pass the word. Oh, right, it’s just a number, not words… PS: This posting does not constitute an admission that CO2 causes global warming. But I happen to agree with everything that anti-carbon campaigners believe in, even if I think that global warming…

  • Long Term Data Storage

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    I was thinking about data archival the other day because David Hagan was telling me about one time when he spoke to a group of librarians and told them to expect a data gap starting in 1950 and extending until we get serious about data preservation. According to David, the time when we stopped being…

  • Too Much Travel is Bad for the Soul

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    There’s an interesting little nugget of reality near the end of the first page of Ask the Pilot this week: If I have grown more cynical in recent years, it is travel, I think, that has pushed me in this direction. Exploring other parts of the world is beneficial in all the ways it is…

  • Big Mining Machines

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    The Long Now foundation took a field trip recently. The pictures are cool, as is the irony that they went to a trade show held once every four years. Miners have a time scale closer to the Long Now’s. What does it mean that mining is a slowly changing industry? The economics of extractive industries push…

  • Banks: You’re Under New Management… Listen Up!

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    A wonderful open letter from a fellow stockholder to our new investment’s board of directors. If only it were so easy… This is what justice would look like in a society that craved social justice and capitalism in equal parts.

  • When Not In Control, People Imagine Order

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    Science Friday did an interesting story recently: New research shows that when people perceive they have no control over a given situation, they are more likely to see illusions, patterns where none exist and even believe in conspiracy theories. The study suggests that people impose imaginary order when no real order can be perceived. The…

  • Better Practices in OpenID

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    Yahoo published some best practices on OpenID, but I have one they forgot. Imran and I were talking at OpenCoffee Leeds the other day and we independently and together came up with this realization: OpenID providers should be required to be OpenID consumers first. Why? Well, the problem OpenID is trying to solve is “too…

  • A Call for Help

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    Something very wrong is going on on South Africa, and the world is missing it: “It is better for us to be here than go for reintegration. The South Africans want to kill us and the government is trying to kill us. Reintegration’s a death sentence. We’d rather die here together,” said Johnny Kaka. MSF…

  • 21 words that should change your life (but probably won’t)

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    Clarity on what’s wrong with our economy and our society, and advice on how to correct it, all in just 3 lines, and 21 words: You buy things and you don’t need. With money that you don’t have. To impress people that you don’t even like. From Aaron Stewart, “Our economic woes in three lines“.

  • The real reason for Google Books

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    I was reading about vdash and inside the presentation, I found this interesting quote: “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk (at Google). “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” That came from George Dyson, in this article on…