Equivocality

Consider: a Bluetooth headset implanted just under the skin + appropriately slick voice-command software = telepathy. I wonder who is going to sell it first?

The idea that there is some sort of split between “head” and “heart” is very old, dating at least back to the ancient Greeks. But does this distinction really exist? Does each human really possess two different methods of seeing the world and making choices? Recent psychological research suggests that there are.

Who is researching the intersection between economics and social networks?
I’m quite serious, someone has gotta be doing this, it’s like “duh,” and thanks to Ian for phrasing it this way. So if you know of research on this topic, please contact me. I probably want to read all of it.
Yeah, ok. Sometimes I’m just geeky. [...]

Not just the ability to have many books at the same time, but the actual books themselves, stacked vertically, the titles popping out at me every time I walk past, begging to be read. After that, probably hot water. Hot water, and good food. “Solid food,” I’ve begun to call it. Did you know that most of the world eats mush? Or rice. Mush with rice is also popular.

I was in Oman last week on a camping road trip down the coast. It was more difficult traveling than I have experienced recently, much harder than developed Russia or Dubai. But I do love the undeveloped countries for all sorts of reasons, and it was really nice to get off the beaten tracks [...]

St. Petersburg is gray and opulent. It’s splendid and magnificent, a beautiful imperial city that even 80 years of communism and eight months of sunless winter can’t completely disguise. It’s also falling apart, slightly shabby, and strangely ordinary at street level. It wants to be grand, but it isn’t, not quite. Something isn’t quite [...]

The government is killing people and systematically blacking out all information. I am toying with the idea of taking this as a personal insult. I am trying to figure out if there’s anything to be gained by encouraging myself to consider such problems on a day-to-day basis. I am wondering exactly how big my sphere of give-a-shit is, or should be.

Why do boxes of Q-Tips continue to have a warning on them about not sticking them in your ear? The manufacturers surely know that this is what everyone does anyway. I mean, it feels so good!
These people are worse than the cigarette companies.

Boom fucking boom. That’s the sound of a V1 rocket engine igniting. A huge orange flame shoots out the end of the big rusty tube. I run out of the workshop and put my earplugs in to watch. It’s loud. I think I heard someone say it’s 150 decibels. The ground is shaking. You can [...]

I have finally put up a few more pictures from this trip, as opposed to last trip. It will take me a while to get through the backlog, as flickr tells me that I currently have 7470 photos online, not all of which you’d actually want to see in one sitting.
But today I have hand [...]