jra's thoughts

Month: October 2008

  • 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…

  • Behind the Scenes of Google Chrome

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    Some stuff I discovered playing with Google Chrome: View source works on the various “internal” pages (i.e. the home page, the about:stats page, etc) so you can see how the magic happens Read the comments in the home page to see how absolutely nutso over-the-top the programmer was about load time. He obsesses about the…

  • How to ride a bus

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    Marina and I could have used this useful training film before we arrived in England. It seems the film needs to be updated some to reflect the current state of the privatized English bus system: First, be sure to find out which company has bought the route you want to ride from the government. Be…

  • The Market Goes “Underground”

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    Here’s a lesson about social policies, politics and economics. In Gaza, tunnels used for smuggling goods have become the major supply line, and an industry in themselves. The market will provide, it will always provide. The question is, how do you use the power of the market to get the other results you want? In…

  • 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.

  • Shame and Aid Work

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    This is a story a bit like mine from Chad, though we were not faced with bandits/rebels/soldiers directly. The feelings of shame and regret she has are related to the complicated feelings I had on leaving Chad as well. In my case, we had nothing to be ashamed of — we took good care of…

  • 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…

  • NSA is Spying on MSF

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    Here’s a story that’s, unfortunately, not a surprise: KINNE: And over the course of my time, as we slowly began to identify phone numbers and who belonged to what, one thing that gave me grave concern was that as we identified phone numbers, we started to find more and more and more numbers that belonged…