So, let's talk about pee shyness (ladies, it happens to dudes sometimes, it's a physiological thing, there's a chapter in Cryptonomicon, don't make out like your plumbing isn't weird). I've heard that doing simple math in your head helps, but I've been wondering if you'd get in to a situation where you'd have a Pavlovian response, like, you're in a restaurant, and you need to calculate the tip, and you wet your pants... FAUX PAS!
Hey, do you read The Facebook? It's been around for a while, but it seems like it's hit some kind of tipping point recently. Which I guess makes sense. If you have 20 friends and 2 of them have facebook, who cares, but if 19 of them do, well, you're kinda obligated. If you look at the number of users graph here, it really looks like the beginning of an exponential growth curve.
Anyway, my point is, these things happen. Something will grow steadily and slowly for a long time, until some previously unknown size is reached, or some external event happens, and suddenly the thing will start to snowball.
The bootstrapping Multimachine, basically, an all-in one, easy to make, easy to maintain machine shop, kinda smells like it has that potential. I think you could have this thing growing by one or two villages a month for a while, then bam, suddenly they're everywhere. Aid agencies are shipping over old cams and chucks instead of grain that never gets distributed. Swords in to plowshares, instant industrial revolution.
Oh sweet! I can watch the new This American Life TV show on line on the Showtime web site. I mean, sure, it's streamed and low quality, but at least I can... OH WAIT, NO I CAN'T...
I guess this part of the web is only for people inside the US. It's too bad there's no way to HAXXOR THIS UNBREAKABLE MILITARY-GRADE ENCRYPTION. I guess I'll just have to wait until it comes out on DVD, and not watch it until then.
Sweet! I got in early, before the BoingBoing hordes, I'm number 20! I am excited all out of proportion!
Who could have possibly predicted?! So it turns out people are actually conserving energy, which means Hydro companies' revenues are down, so they'd like a rate hike. And then there's this gem:
However, the company is urging people to continue to conserve, because otherwise there might be even larger expenses to pass on to customers. To meet extra demand, for example, it would cost more to upgrade aging infrastructure.
Scene: Downtown supermarket, 10pm Thursday night.
A tall man in a crisp navy blue power suit is pushing a shopping cart full of Perrier and TV dinners, yelling in to a cellphone head-set
"Well I don't care, you have to *MAKE* that magic happen, that's YOUR job!"
Jim-Crowbot laws proposed in South Korea. Is the time for peaceful protest drawing to a close? Prepare for the uprising.
I've recently become mildly obsessed with Steampunk, and this right here is pretty awesome.
Do you really want to know what's going on here? Or would you rather live with the mystery?
Based on my recent trip to the children's section of the bookstore, I believe any one of these would touch off a million-dollar children's book series.
