the shoutbox

This happens to me all of the time.

Money quote:

Skeptics are used to clean and sanitize both science and everyday commerce, and the result is a system that runs better. When a skeptic approaches a new theory or claim, the objective is not to kill it, but to clean it.

I now have enough books for the next two years or so.

When people ask me what risk analysis entails, I usually tell people it’s what Jack Bauer does, which is how a professor explained it to me. When they ask how it integrates with the IST major at Penn State, I tell them it’s what Chloe does for Jack Bauer.

The famous biologist Richard Dawkins:

When you are pre-programmed to absorb useful information at a high rate, it is hard to shut out pernicious or damaging information at the same time.

An excellent, if technical, read about how dangerous ideas propagate by spreading from person to person. Dawkins is notoriously anti-religion, but it’s interesting to see how he highlights the similarities between DNA viruses, computer viruses, and viral ideas.

Perhaps the best explanation of why this might be so was offered in 1963. In “Formal Theories of Mass Behaviour”, William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type. (Many other studies have since reached the same conclusion.) A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

Why “amateur” reviews are not an exact substitute for professional critics: the same reason you’d take your movie buff friend’s opinion over that of a random group of strangers.

Some excellent games in here. Definitely the best value for your money; you can buy now and install later as many times as you want on any number of computers.

Duluth Trading Co. is like a textbook exercise in branding. Their primary market is blue-collar males—contractors, maintenance workers, ranchers, welders, mechanics, lumberjacks, etc.—and it’s reflected everywhere in their products, copy, marketing, etc. To use one of their products, you’d better be hammering in nails in sideways-falling, freezing rain for a living. Even their product descriptions are testosterone-infused:

Double-chap Fire Hose® Logger’s Pants: As tough as the men who wear them.

Leather GuardDog Watch: You may be a bush pilot, bull rider, or a bounty hunter—but you’re no brute.

The Superior Work Jacket: You work the tough jobs, in the worst winter weather, with the wind howling like it does off of Lake Superior. That puffy parka just won’t cut it. Now there’s something that can.

And so on. The copy insinuates you should be out doing the manliest of manly things to carry their Manly Tote, like fighting bears. And there’s even an illustration of a man fighting a polar bear if that wasn’t subtle enough (November 2009 catalog, page 58).

What’s amazing is I can’t get enough of it. Their products look awesome and I want that Manly Tote for all the manly toting I do on weekends.

Step 1. Ctrl+D to bookmark.
Step 2. F5 to refresh madly from now until 2009-11-27.

Repeat as necessary.

A useful thing to have in the cloud: a web-based ssh client that you can use from any browser, like Safari on the iPhone.

Every so often, I find myself entertaining the dream of a startup. This essay by Paul Graham captures in essence what I’d strive for in the tech startup world.

If we’re going to be responsible for the destruction of the universe, now is as good a time as any.