Last Straw

People often falsely assume I advoc­ate and use Apple products because I think they’re trendy or because I’m some kind of gad­get freak.

The truth is our world is awash with badly designed, badly craf­ted things. Apple is one of the few havens in a sea of people and organ­isa­tions that don’t give a fuck about the details. Atten­tion to detail is why I use Apple products:

In July 2002, Apple filed a pat­ent for a “Breath­ing Status LED Indic­ator” …They described it as a “blink­ing effect of the sleep-mode indic­ator in accord­ance with the present inven­tion mim­ics the rhythm of breath­ing which is psy­cho­lo­gic­ally appealing.”

The other day, I noticed that my friend’s Dell laptop had a sim­ilar fea­ture but with a shorter fade-in-fade-out period. Its rate was around 40 blinks per second, or the aver­age res­pir­at­ory rate for adults dur­ing strenu­ous exer­cise — not very indic­at­ive of some­thing in sleep-mode.

It’s inter­est­ing how a lot of com­pan­ies try to copy Apple but never seem to get it right. This is yet another example of Apple’s obsess­ive atten­tion to detail.

Income Inequal­ity and Fin­an­cial Crises:

David A. Moss, an eco­nomic and policy his­tor­ian at the Har­vard Busi­ness School, has spent years study­ing income inequal­ity. While he has long believed that the grow­ing dis­par­ity between the rich and poor was harm­ful to the people on the bot­tom, he says he hadn’t seen the risks to the world of fin­ance, where many of the richest earn their great fortunes.

Now, as he stud­ies the fin­an­cial crisis of 2008, Mr. Moss says that even Wall Street may have some­thing ser­i­ous to fear from inequal­ity — namely, another crisis.

Did weak copy­right laws help Ger­many out­pace the Brit­ish Empire?:

Höffner con­tends … that the near absence of copy­right law in eight­eenth and nine­teenth cen­tury Ger­many laid the ground­work for the “Gründerzeit” — the enorm­ous wave of eco­nomic growth that Deutsch­land exper­i­enced in the middle and later nine­teenth century.

Amer­ica, kick­ing ass:

Dra­matic increases in infant mor­tal­ity, can­cer and leuk­aemia in the Iraqi city of Fal­lu­jah, which was bom­barded by US Mar­ines in 2004, exceed those repor­ted by sur­viv­ors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Naga­saki in 1945, accord­ing to a new study.

Dr Busby says that while he can­not identify the type of arma­ments used by the Mar­ines, the extent of genetic dam­age suffered by inhab­it­ants sug­gests the use of uranium in some form. He said: “My guess is that they used a new weapon against build­ings to break through walls and kill those inside.”

Inbar Michelzon:

I felt very alone in the army. I couldn’t talk about the things I felt were mis­placed … I didn’t have strong views but I felt uncom­fort­able about the talk, about sol­diers hit­ting Arabs and laugh­ing. I thought every­one else was nor­mal and I was the one who wasn’t. I felt an out­sider to the group experience.

Kath­leen Wells of Race Talk inter­views Noam Chom­sky on Israel.

The arms trade, and you, dear UK tax­payer, are pay­ing to set up the deals:

Brit­ish tax­pay­ers are pay­ing a secret­ive lob­by­ing firm $10,000 (£6,354) a month to push Amer­ican politi­cians to award con­tracts to Brit­ish defence companies.

Understated, via Mis­sion Mis­sion.

The sci­ence of mor­al­ity forges ahead:

Some­thing rad­ic­ally new is in the air: new ways of under­stand­ing phys­ical sys­tems, new ways of think­ing about think­ing that call into ques­tion many of our basic assump­tions. A real­istic bio­logy of the mind, advances in evol­u­tion­ary bio­logy, phys­ics, inform­a­tion tech­no­logy, genet­ics, neuro­bi­o­logy, psy­cho­logy, engin­eer­ing, the chem­istry of mater­i­als: all are ques­tions of crit­ical import­ance with respect to what it means to be human. For the first time, we have the tools and the will to under­take the sci­entific study of human nature.

Worst flood­ing in over 80 years.