I didn't kill the board, did I?

Have you all checked out the latest xkcd infographic? It's mind-blowing. Half of it makes me too angry to read on and ready to go join the Occupy protesters, and the rest of it boggles me.

Sometimes I makes me grateful for long-term planning (hurricane forecasting vs hurricane damage-savings thanks to advanced warning technologies)

Sometimes it pisses me off

And then sometimes it is completely crazy: the annual agricultural value of bees (estimated) is $220, 000, 000, 000 INSANE! and bees are dying. Are we going to pay people to pollinate things with paintbrushes?

Or the fact that the US EPA has a price on human life ($8.4 million for one person's life).

Mind-boggling.

Guys!
I just stumbled across this and thought you'd get a (cynical) laugh out of it:
The Ultimate Bigot's Calendar of the World and other stereotype mapping products...
like this:

I thought it was pretty funny.

apropos of nothing, I thought this t-shirt was great.

via Think Geek .

I fucking hate my job. There, I said it. Today it's absolutely true, too. ... particularly after being out all day with a massive headache. I want to be done with this guilt-complex of never having enough time to do the work I need to do because I'm constantly shuffling around between projects and answering unnecessary phone calls.

Also, who the hell sends e-mails at 11pm expecting me to respond for a meeting the next day?

The one week I could be spending catching up on shit, I am unmoored and confused (and out with a headache) because there's just too much going on. This is bogus.

I want all my extra-hours-worked back in days off.

/rant

EU Bans Airport X-Ray Scanners Over Health Concerns.

Based on this, the devices I've seen at airports in Canada are presumably the millimeter wave scanners?

In any case, even in the US you can opt-out of the backscatter screening, which is probably a good idea, assuming you're not already late to the gate.

Bad movie night??

The directory of the Harry Potter movies is making a Doctor Who feature film.

... and pretty much promises to ruin it

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118046098

Predictions?

Well guess the built in snow repulser field for the snowthrower I bought is going to fail tonight. No biggy though have to get snow at some point this winter.

That's odd, I consider smart phones and other micro-PC's to be very tactile. I'm very familiar with the shape and feel of my BB, and when I think about it, that's what comes to mind, not the screen. Also, people seem to really love holding and stroking, errrrr..... controlling their touch screen iThings. That seems to be a big part of it. I'd say people use their hands more for communicating now than ever before.

Lastly, if McD's was just trying to profit off temporary pork prices and chicken shortages (price increases?), why wouldn't they just make McNuggets out of pork? I bet you could bleach it and make it taste like a chicken nugget.

Pork poppers. Boneless pork ribs. McRiblets. And so on.

Slow day at work = long reads:

A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design:

There's a reason that our fingertips have some of the densest areas of nerve endings on the body. This is how we experience the world close-up. This is how our tools talk to us. The sense of touch is essential to everything that humans have called "work" for millions of years.

Now, take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit.

What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing?

I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.

Is that so bad, to dump the tactile for the visual? Try this: close your eyes and tie your shoelaces. No problem at all, right? Now, how well do you think you could tie your shoes if your arm was asleep? Or even if your fingers were numb? When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat.

To take this to an extreme, imagine that you're completely blind. Yeah, that's a tough life, but you can still pretty much take care of yourself and do the things that people do. Do you know what it's called when you lose all sense of touch? It's called paralysis, and they push you around in a wheelchair while you calculate black hole radiation.

Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it's the star player in every Vision Of The Future.

To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.

The McRib was, at least in part, born out of the brute force that McDonald’s is capable of exerting on commodities markets. According to this history of the sandwich, Chef Arend created the McRib because McDonald’s simply could not find enough chickens to turn into the McNuggets for which their franchises were clamoring. Chef Arend invented something so popular that his employer could not even find the raw materials to produce it, because it was so popular. “There wasn’t a system to supply enough chicken,” he told Maxim. Well, Chef Arend had recently been to the Carolinas, and was so inspired by the pulled pork barbecue in the Low Country that he decided to create a pork sandwich for McDonald’s to placate the frustrated franchisees.

But the McRib might not have existed were it not for McDonald’s stunning efficiency at turning animals into products you want to buy.