Paul Graham and Reihan Salam have been popularizing the term "ephemeralization", originally coined by Buckminster Fuller, to describe this process whereby special-purpose products are replaced by software running on general-purpose computing devices. ... Ephemeralization offers an alternative explanation for the puzzling growth slowdown of the last decade. Every time the software industry displaces a special purpose device, our standard of living improves but measured GDP falls. ... The real lesson here may not be that the American economy is stagnating, but rather that the government is bad at measuring improvements in our standard of living that come from the software industry.
This assumes, of course, that you accept the face-value explanation of the movie, and not an alternate theory.Inception as explained by the OS X folder system.
[via Kottke]
I've noticed a further manifestation of this compulsive behavior as regards installing software on my machines, and I've called it the Critical Customisation Cost (CCC, henceforth) of software. Put simply, there's a cost (not just financial, but rather psychological and emotional) associated with installing third-party software on a computing device, and there's an associated threshold above which the CCC is so high that it outweighs the benefit of the functionality offered by the software.
His list of symptoms fits me to a T, among them:
- Balking at an app because its menubar (status bar) icon isn't monochrome, or generally homogeneous with the system-supplied icons (or, even worse, is confusingly similar to one of the standard ones).
- Returning to one of the factory-installed desktop wallpapers after only briefly trying a custom one, and repeating this process every two months.
Michael Polanyi proposed that the primary task of the scientist is to believe wisely. Himself a chemist, he had a great love for evidence and for due scientific process, but as a philosopher he recognized that evidence and process were the creations of the human imagination and, in turn, so were also human beliefs.
In a dramatic late-night appearance in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Obama declared that "justice has been done" as he disclosed that American military and C.I.A. operatives had finally cornered the Al Qaeda leader who had eluded them for nearly a decade and shot him to death at a compound in Pakistan.
The forces attacked the compound in what Mr. Obama called a "targeted operation" that left Mr. bin Laden dead. "No Americans were harmed," Mr. Obama said. "They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body."
The root word for "spiritual" has changed through the various ages, from translation from Hebrew (ruwach) to Greek (pneuma) to Latin (spiritus):
Even though the root concept of spirituality is rooted in the wind — God's breath, the physical manifestations of God's interactions with the elements of earth — the word has come to mean exactly the opposite of physical.
But,
Ancient spirituality was physical. God was not yet this immortal, invisible, inconceivable mystery: God could walk in a garden. God could be a pillar of fire, real fire. God could talk in a cloud. God had two hands. God had breath.
And He has breath. Breath that gives life, words that restore it, and love that redeems it.
For you Star Wars/economics nerds out there.
Doesn't the Empire take a huge economic loss from the lost productivity of an entire planet?
Chick-fil-A announced it will open 90 new stores this year and at least one of them will be here in the San Francisco Bay Area.Yeah, I'll probably be camping out in line.
If you're like me and you already hate fire ants, you probably don't need to read this article on how Georgia Tech researchers have published research findings on how fire ants can form watertight rafts that can float for months.
...are actually pretty true. Via Shawn Blanc.