Taking a cab home from work late tonight I had a second to reflect on an interesting coincidence: my office is now located (we’ve moved recently which brings up a different but equally funny note; I’ve changed office 5 times since coming to Singapore, but I’ve only changed jobs twice… I guess since I’ve managed to put a stop to my habit of moving house once a year that was going on for 12 years now that I own a house, somehow that curse has been transferred to moving office way to often… And now that this parenthetical reference has dragged on so long that, like a freshman reading Kant, you can’t remember what the main sentence was talking about we return you to your normally scheduled programming…) in the building next door to the building that housed my office when I first moved to Singapore in 2004.
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…could ruin your whole day
The reason we care about [GPS accuracy] is because GPS is used now to land airplanes and the difference between 3.8 meters above the runway and 3.8 meters below the runway could ruin your whole day.
Robert X. Cringely, in WAAS up? [cringely.com].
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The Great Dictator speaks
In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone.
The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way.Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate;
has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in:
Charlie Chaplin, as Hinkel in The Great Dictator
machinery that gives abundance has left us in want.
Our knowledge has made us cynical,
our cleverness hard and unkind.
We think too much and feel too little:
More than machinery we need humanity;
More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness.
While the Earth might not be rich enough to provide for us all anymore, there are just too many of us, the speech is good.
Via Intrepid Flame [intrepidflame.blogspot.com] quoted from Renegade Eye [advant.blogspot.com].
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Delayed identical twin
The birth of a delayed identical twin is not going shake western civilization.
Gregory Stock, in a 2003 TED Talk [ted.org]
The quote is from at 8:35. Talk about a brilliant turn of phrase. By replacing “clone” with “delayed identical twin” the whole argument is re-framed. Identical twins are not identical; different fingerprints, different hair swirls, different people. Thinking of clones that way make a lot of sense. The whole talk is good, refreshing, a positive view of a subject normally dominated by dystopian sci-fi scenarios.
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Steal these photos! Again!
All my public photos on my Flickr account [flickr.com] are released under the Creative Commons, Attribution License [creativecommons.org]. This means that no one has to seek my permission to use the photos for any work, be it commercial or non-commercial. A lot of people do send me email via Flickr to tell me they have used a photo or to ask if I would be OK with them using one in a certain context.
It’s always fun to google myself or use Flickr’s click-through records to see new places that an image has been used. In addition to a number of blogs, my photos can be found on a few travel related sites (here [sacred-destinations.com] and here [travelmuse.com]), and there are currently 76 of my photos on Wikimedia Commons [commons.wikimedia.org] a few of which are actually used on Wikipedia pages. I even had one photo published [confusion.cc] as the cover of a text book. But today I came across, for the first time, one of my photos on a site I actually use (albeit a page I would not have come to without the Flickr click-through reports). I signed up to Dopplr [dopplr.org] last year, long after I visited Moscow, but one of my Moscow photos is now the backdrop for the Moscow Page [dopplr.com]:
NB: you can see the original photo on Flickr [flickr.com].
NB2: the original “Steal these photos” [confusion.cc] post was way back in 2005!