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POPSIs Google Making Us Stupid? Thinking makes my head hurt! Carr, the author of the piece, illustrates his point using a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, where HAL, the supercomputer, begs Dave not to terminate him. Ironically, as I was reading the article, a car commercial came on TV, parodying that same scene to advertise its GPS. And I had only just seen the ending to 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time a few days ago--just that one scene--so I fully appreciated his point. Talk about deja vu! Or maybe I just imagined it all...
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POPSFive GREAT Reasons To Vote Against Barack Obama
Let’s think about this one for a moment. FICA, the social security and medicare taxes, are set at 15% of the first $102,000 and then they go away. The employer pays half, unless you happened to be self-employed. In that case, you pay the whole thing. So, if the democrats erase the cap, that is an automatic 15% tax increase on all money earned over $102,000. There will also be the tax increase from allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire. And there will be the tax increase on the “rich”, defined somewhere between $120,000 and 250,000. So, how big will these tax increases actually be? More than 15%, less than 30%? Maybe. Maybe more. Nobody knows because Congress writes the laws. And that means Pelosi and Reid. He has four other terrific and amusing reasons. The courts, the snottiness of the Obamabots, etc. Read it all. 5 Great Reasons To Vote Against Obama ~ by Howie Carr http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view/2008_11_02_Five_reasons_to_vote_against_Obama/
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POPSTechnology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds. Paul Saffo, the futurist, says he could divide the technology world into two kinds of people: engineers and natural scientists. He says the world outlook of the engineer is by nature optimistic. Every problem can be solved if you have the right tools and enough time and you pose the correct questions. Other people, who can be just as scientific, see the natural order of the world in terms of entropy, decline and death. Those people aren’t necessarily wrong. But the engineer’s point of view puts trust in human improvement. But over the course of human history, writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.
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POPSPollie Waffles 2 Pollie Waffles Polly Waffles, Obama Waffles http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/8F9DFFE3-788D-4A3C-833F-B69FD5051A83/
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POPSWhy Google Releases Half-Baked Products Basically, Nick Carr is arguing that Google is exploiting something like the long tail in its product releases. It may only have a few hits--products like Gmail, for instance--but the cost of development is low enough that even a marginal traffic bump to its ads makes new features worthwhile. Hence all the Google products that seem to be languishing in semi-obscurity, like Knol, Android and Open Social.
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POPSNothing to See Here Move Along Shades of the Empire... and the media is a partner, nay an enabler of any agenda that advances socialist causes and is a willing partner in anything that is detrimental to the same..
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POPSNFL Player IQ by Position This assessment roughly corresponds to the averages revealed, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, by an NFL personnel man in Paul Zimmerman's "The New Thinking man's Guide to Pro Football," which are: Offensive tackles: 26 Centers: 25 Quarterbacks: 24 Guards: 23 Tight Ends: 22 Safeties: 19 Middle linebackers: 19 Cornerbacks: 18 Wide receivers: 17 Fullbacks: 17 Halfbacks: 16 The average scores in other professions look like this: Chemist: 31 Programmer: 29 Newswriter: 26 Sales: 24 Bank teller: 22 Clerical Worker: 21 Security Guard: 17 Warehouse: 15
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POPSNanotech regulation under the spotlight The report concerns regulations in Australia, but nanotechnology that may have benefits that can cause problems or 'side effects' to be either overlooked, or ignored. It's easy to overlook a problem if there is no test for it, and often we may not know what to test for. Then there are both short term and long term effects. It's easy to ignore the possible long term effects, if some of the criteria examined are cost effectiveness and profitability, Perhaps a case of too many bells and whistles, making researchers deaf. For some reason i was just reminded of Pierre and Marie Curie.
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POPSThe power and the glory The market for energy is huge. At present, the world’s population consumes about 15 terawatts of power. (A terawatt is 1,000 gigawatts, and a gigawatt is the capacity of the largest sort of coal-fired power station.) That translates into a business worth $6 trillion a year—about a tenth of the world’s economic output—according to John Doerr, a venture capitalist who is heavily involved in the industry. And by 2050, power consumption is likely to have risen to 30 terawatts.
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POPSIs Google Making Us Stupid?
Does surfing the Internet trigger attention deficit disorder in our brains, so that we have to struggle to focus enough to read in depth or for longer than a couple of minutes at a time? Must we flip through the Internet as quickly as some people flip through TV channels, afraid, or unable, to pause long enough to read more than a few paragraphs--if that much? The author of this article (which you should read in its entirety if you can concentrate that long) relates how difficult he found it to sit down and read a book again, and notes: "In an era in which everyone has a truth and the means to fling it around the world, an era in which knowledge is increasingly broad but seldom deep, maybe that's the ultimate act of sedition: to pick up a single book and read it." I still read books, but not as many as I used to prior to being caught up in the world wide web life. Lately I haven't even read the free e-book that I receive in emailed installments. Blame it on Google-- :?
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