I found this post by Coyote Blog to be a rather fascinating first-hand experience of what it is like to be stung by a scorpion (apparently an Arizona Bark Scorpion).
It reminds me of a less severe case than the person that ate a very poisonous mushroom and lived to tell about it.
I thought this short article was illuminating, especially since health care once again will become political fodder in this upcoming decade as provincial governments blow their entire budgets on it.
Justin has an excellent post (with examples) about how people that do not make careers out of certain professions (i.e. film-making) are able to produce professional-quality material.
(Just as a parenthetical note, the first example video Justin posted is why I stopped playing Counter-Strike back in 2002 [aimbots], and I think this was the last “real” computer game I spent a lot of time playing… ahh, the youthful days!)
This also rings with Anthony’s theme that knowledge advances generally do not come from “professionals”, but rather it is amateurs that have done the advancements.
Scott Adams (author of Dilbert), as I have stated before, is a genius.
Anybody wanting to make a million (or billion) dollars has a generic blueprint for doing so, just by reading his latest article.
The future could be utopia, because everyone will easily find what they need, from love to careers. Or it might be the end of civilization because capitalism depends on barriers to entry, and those will disappear when everyone can find whatever resources they need.
It will likely be neither. The trend has been that wealth concentrates, so the people that get rich from these things will likely be able to live very well. The good news for the people that don’t create such services (or products) is that the information is very likely to be made available for nearly nothing. Just as an example, even if I was earning a minimum wage job, I still have very readily available access to Wikipedia and Google. You formerly had to pay about $100 to get Microsoft Encarta (a lesser encyclopedia for those that don’t remember) on a CD on your home computer.
All of these inventions serve to lift the economic boat for everybody.
It also rewards those people that are able to piece together disparate items of information – if Google can’t do it, then your own knowledge will be market-beating.
A good 10-minute coffee break video on the perspectives people have on time, the impact it has on our education system and youth, and family structure.
I believe it’s good to be future oriented, but it is also good to know when to shift to a present orientation and enjoy life for a few hours/days/weeks before getting back to the grind of future orientation.
I also generally agree with the view that the “digital re-writing of minds” is happening, but it won’t characterize itself in society the way that most people think it will.
I always thought what would happen if everybody was given an “encyclopedia chip” in their brains that contained a continuously up-to-date version of Wikipedia, and anybody with this chip can also “update” it by just thinking mentally. I still think society will be committing gross errors based on things they think are “facts” but are really not. One example would be the mistaken impression that a pedophile lurks around every elementary school playground, but when enough people think (or mention) something, it slowly evolves to become “fact” even when it is not.
This guy’s valuation exercise is pretty much correct, but the market’s ability to remain irrational is longer than your ability to remain solvent.
I found this article to be highly enlightening – how to make maple syrup.
This pretty much sums up all of my thoughts on smartphones (web-enabled mobile phones).
I’ve played with friends’ Iphones and Blackberries and other phones and thought when it comes to content creation and ability to crank out material on a keyboard that they don’t at all compare to a netbook. The only missing solution that currently impairs me is the internet access – I have to find free wireless hotspots (Starbucks is very reliable for this), but with the introduction of cheap highspeed mobile USB sticks, this problem might be alleviated and worth the $50/mo cost for the service. It might even replace Shaw Cable, which is getting at that price range, although I don’t know what the capacity of an internet USB stick is when doing applications like Bittorrent.
Reading this article on the New York Times about how increasing unemployment in the Japanese economy is causing people to move out from their company-subsidized housing into “capsule hotels” while people try to find work elsewhere. The even more amazing feature is the cost of living in such a unit is relatively high (about $640/mo), but this is less than residential housing available elsewhere in Tokyo.
I ask myself whether this could happen over here – the minimal example that we have in Canada of a residential safety net is non-market housing, and the costs of that are a percentage (typically 30%) of income. Such housing is much larger than the 30 square feet (plus common areas) in the capsule hotels.
I am trying to not make a moral judgment whether this is a “good” or “bad” system – instinctively, however, I would think that in the USA, people would revolt before letting this happen to themselves. The Japanese culture appears to be more docile to adverse circumstances.
Happy New Year – I hope 2010 will be as good as 2009 was.
I will toss out a few random links for the day:
1. R-Squared wrote an entry on what he learned from maintaining his (much more popular than mine) site – taking out the energy and oil-specific content, his points mirror exactly what I experience here in Double Blind. This is especially true for the “Trying to predict which essays will get a lot of hits is futile” – the items that have gotten a lot of attention here I would have never guessed after writing.
One reason why this site is not popular is because I have not given it a specialization – it is a general site that takes my rants and raves of the day. I’ve carved off the financial side and British Columbia politics elsewhere, however.
2. Justin writes a travel blog entry about his 3 night trip in Okinawa. The part about the different types of salts was fascinating to read about, and I am awfully curious with respect to the taste.
3. Alex Tsakumis never holds back his opinions, and I have very much enjoyed his commentaries that he had in the newspapers. Now he is online and reviewed 2009 and has a fairly good summary – some bullet points I’d disagree with him on, but he is a very entertaining read.