Two things that jumped out at me this morning:
1) Glenn Greenwald’s piece on the new WMD conspiracy theory currently making the right-wing rounds. Here’s a hint: any theory which requires the complicity of hundreds if not thousands of government workers on all parts of the political spectrum is utter BS. Doesn’t matter what theory you’re talking about, that’s just basic human nature.
2) This excellent video (slightly NSFW, profanity):
The pet food fiasco gets worse: Pet Foods May Have Been Intentionally Poisoned.
Imported ingredients used in recalled pet food may have been intentionally spiked with an industrial chemical to boost their apparent protein content, federal officials said Thursday.
That’s one theory being pursued by the Food and Drug Administration as it investigates how the chemical, melamine, contaminated at least two ingredients used to make more than 100 brands of dog and cat foods.
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Chinese authorities have told the FDA that the wheat gluten was an industrial product not meant for pet food, [Stephen Sundlof, the FDA’s chief veterinarian] said. Still, melamine can skew test results to make a product appear more protein-rich than it really is, he added. That raises the possibility the contamination was deliberate.
As I said to a friend today, I’m not quite ready to start feeding the cats organic raw foods only. But if the news on the pet-food front gets any worse, I might just do that.
And maybe it is time to start rethinking how much “industrial” food we buy for the household humans, as well.
What is a lolcat?
The funny folks at I Can Has Cheezburger? have the answer. Or they would, if their server hadn’t gotten Digged into limbo. Luckily, they’ll be back soon, and better than ever, on a new server.
Recently, we started using Basecamp at the office to manage some current projects. It’s working out well for some things — to-do list management and assigning tasks, for example — and it’s certainly easier to use and has a much faster learning curve than Microsoft Project. Yet I am also very frustrated by the limitations — trying to actually edit a document in their whiteboard means giving up a lot of functionality that I take for granted, for example — and this was compounded by some server-side outages I ran into while working. Each outage was relatively brief (a minute or two, maybe), but it was no fun to be kicked out of flow and brought to a complete standstill each time they happened. I eventually finished the document in MS Word and dropped the finished text into the whiteboard, rather than risk further interruptions.
In short, as far as I’m concerned, this aspect of Web 2.0 is not as great as it’s cracked up to be. And according to Wired‘s Michael Calore I’m not the only one who feels that way:
In general, I found that the browser is perfectly suitable for a variety of daily office tasks — e-mail, writing and editing stories. I also lived through several technological breakdowns that had me pounding my desk in frustration, wondering what the hell I had gotten into.
Yep, that sounds about right.
But there’s more to this than the purely personal issue of having to unlearn years or even decades of computing habits. What frustrates me the most about the whole Web 2.0 ‘the browser is the application’ paradigm is how essentially unoriginal it is.
A lot of very talented and dedicated people are spending countless hours (and investment dollars) solving problems that have already been solved, and in some cases, solved very well. Look at TurboTax, to pick a handy tax-week example. It’s a great, absolutely best-of-breed application. How much time and treasure did it cost Intuit to port TurboTax to the web? What new stuff could they have done with those people and that money instead? We’ll never know.
What I would really love to see is people spending all that time, talent, and money on solving the problems that have NOT been solved yet. Search technology, for example. We’ve made some big strides in text-based search (although there is still much do do there too), but searching around graphics, video, or audio is lagging far behind. Or if you want to focus on web-based technology, can someone please come up with a cross-platform web conferencing system that doesn’t suck? Or, as Bruce Schneier pointed out in another Wired article, how about solving some of the security issues that still plague the computing world?
Wouldn’t it be great if Web 2.5 were about solving new problems, instead of re-solving the old ones?
how can a mentally ill person walk into a store and buy semi-automatic guns with no questions, background check or wait period but an average “joe on the street” can’t walk into a drug store and get a couple of drugs to ease post nasal drip without having to show proof of i.d. and getting their name, address and phone number put on a national medication database to make sure that they don’t buy more within a certain time period.
something is really freakin’ wrong with our society.
Yes. And it’s our complete refusal to deal with mental illness in anything resembling a sane fashion (pun intended). Either mental illness is a joke, or it’s not “real”, or it’s a sign that the person is not to be trusted. There’s almost no middle ground.
And then to make matters worse, people who dare to speak up and talk about their struggles with mental illness do so at the risk of losing their ability to earn a living. It’s small wonder that the few who do generally wait until they’re rich enough, famous enough or respected enough that people are willing to overlook it. Someone less rich or successful who is open in the workplace about their illness risks losing any ability to further their career at that (or any other) company — the ADA notwithstanding. That’s a really good reason to keep your mouth shut and let the stereotypes perpetuate.
With everything else going on this week, the news of Kitty Carlyle Hart’s passing is likely to pass unnoticed, and that’s a shame. She was the kind of woman the world needs much more of.
She was known for her grace and charm, but by her own account she was slightly eccentric, a trait she treasured because she believed it gave her a lot of leeway.
She practiced singing every day, exercised every morning (and was the first to tell anyone that she had beautiful legs, which she did) and believed that discipline was the key to life. In her last decades, she became a popular lecturer. She often told her audiences, “With a soupçon of courage and a dash of self-discipline, one can make a small talent go a long way.”
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“I’m more optimistic, more enthusiastic and I have more energy than ever before,” she said just after her 79th birthday. Energy, she said, came from doing the things she wanted to do.
“You get so tired when you do what other people want you to do,” she said.