I wrote something of a rant against greenwash PR that seems to reach a crescendo for Earth Day every year.  It was intended for EcoGeek, but didn't run there.  I posted it on the p s proefrock architecture blog, and ended up with a huge spike in my readership, at least for that moment.

Since I've been identified as a green writer, I am on a bunch of ( Read more... )

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a "consumer," what William Gibson memorably described as "something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes ( Read more... )

"It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don't have to like it. And if you read ( Read more... )

I'm finding it much easier to keep up with LJ after the big pruning I did, now that I'm not trying to use it as an RSS reader. tlatoani hoped I would keep something about my writing on LJ, instead of moving everything to the business blog, and there may be a couple other readers of mine here, so here are links to some recent articles of mine ( Read more... )

Haven't posted anything by Bruce Schneier for a while, so here's a quote from the latest CRYPTO-GRAM for consideration:

"On the face of it, Joseph Stack flying a private plane into the Austin, TX IRS office is no different than Nidal Hasan shooting up Ft. Hood: a lone extremist nutcase. If one is a terrorist and the other is a criminal, the ( Read more... )

I've gone through and whacked virtually all the external feeds for this account from my Friends List. There's no need to keep trying to use this as a half-assed RSS reader, and there's a lot of cruft that could be better dealt with elsewhere in a real reader ( Read more... )

I'm sure I don't understand a tenth of this, but this is fascinating stuff. In deferece to friends lists and people who aren't following me for physics, cosmology, quantum mechanics and suchlike stuff, I am putting this ( behind a cut )

Someone went and took a TON of pictures of the only old, ex-Soviet LUN ekranoplane sitting and slowly rusting on the edge of the Caspian Sea (at least I think it's the Caspian where they built and tested these things, hence the old intelligence term "Caspian Sea Monster"); I didn't try to transliterate the Cyrillic to see if there's a reference to ( Read more... )

Caught this commentary on Marketplace a few weeks ago. I think it lays out some good observations about aviation security, and how to do it.
There are two ways to do aviation security: either look for bombs or look for terrorists. Looking for terrorists is easier. Out of 100 passengers, there can be at most 100 terrorists. But among them, these ( Read more... )

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