Pragmatically speaking, if we imposed a tax on the 50 billion places now hawking small plates, handcrafted artisanal cocktails with antique bitters, house-cured salumi, and featuring servers who call the customer “dude” or “bro” while texting on their cell phones, we could probably put enough dough in the state till to end obesity for generations.

I will never fully understand why people drink diet soda, eat low-fat cheese or use anything other than unsalted butter in cooking.

You know that charming little cafe on New York’s Lower East Side that just closed after a mere six months in business—where coffee was served on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie? The one that, as you calmly and correctly observed, was doomed from its inception because it was too precious and too offbeat? The one you still kind of fell for, the way one falls for a tubercular maiden? Yeah, that one was mine.

Many think of a content management system as a magic bullet that solves all of their content woes. Unfortunately the cost of a CMS is greater than its price tag. Before making a decision about whether to adopt a CMS, or indeed which CMS to choose, you first need to be aware of the hidden costs.

Beware the off-the-shelf system.

$248 million for furniture at the new Homeland Security headquarters.

$75 million for “smoking cessation activities.”

$25 million for tribal alcohol and substance abuse reduction.

$850 million for Amtrak.

$75 million for salaries of employees at the FBI.

And by “wouldn’t expect” I mean, “have come to expect and accept as the price of getting laws passed.”

Vegetarianism also may have some negative effects on sexual desire. Vegetarian diets tend to correlate with higher rates of zinc deficiency, which is closely associated with lower testosterone levels and depressed sex drives. Vegetarian women are also more likely to develop amenorrhea (loss of periods), a condition that’s usually accompanied by low testosterone, vaginal dryness, and poor libido. Finally, the notion that overweight people are less sexually active isn’t entirely accurate (for women, at least): A recent analysis published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology shows that overweight women might, in fact, be slightly more active.

This is the same organization that is attempting to label fish sea kittens, under the auspices of bringing attention to the cruelty of eating fish.

Sarah Hartwell on the cultural taboo of eating cats:

Cat flesh only becomes economical where the cat is fed on scraps or where it eats rodents. Otherwise the expense of rearing cats for consumption makes it an expensive delicacy. There is not much meat on a cat unless it has been specially fattened. Stray cats which rely on their own hunting or scavenging skills are generally very scrawny.

Includes a lovely recipe from 1529, “Roast Cat as It Should Be Prepared”.

Purchased in June, the trip was supposed to be my last California event. The one thing I felt I should do, while there, while near Carmel-By-The-Sea, CA.

He died in February of 1989. I was six-years old.

My mother, sister and I were living in Rahway, NJ, in a cramped bedroom that a co-worker of my mother’s, also a single mom, gave us for help with groceries and heat and chores. We’d been moving from home to home ever since he left. We looked for deals: one bedrooms in nice neighborhoods, two bedrooms in bad ones, studio apartments when things got tight. For a few months we lived in the basement of an uninhabited mansion in Teaneck, NJ. Life had a consistency of difference.

The story shifted, nearly every year. He died in a dozen different ways. Plane crashes, car crashes, heart attacks, pneumonia. Too young to know what really happened, I’m sure they thought. My mother and his parents slid around the truth looking for something comforting to tell his son. Nothing comforted, but even when you’re young, you can tell when comfort is just as much about the comforter as it is about you. You play along.

After his mothers’ funeral, his father buried a year earlier, his brother Ken showed me the police report. Too many pills, prescribed for a bad cold, downed with alcohol, ruled a suicide, they’d found his body laying in a hotel room in Carmel-By-The-Sea, CA. Some one hundred and nineteen miles from my apartment in San Francisco. Closer than I’d been to him in a decade, since I last saw his ashes in his parent’s home.

Pretending his death had an effect on me is as invalid as pretending it didn’t. I never knew him well enough to miss him, but knew of him well enough to miss the idea of him. I know other people had fathers. I can imagine what a life with one would be like, but it’s about as distant to me as imagining a life wherein I’m a zerba-riding mercenary on the plains of the serengeti. A passing dream with no relevance to the day to day.

Still, I bought the ticket, was drawn to buy it, was happy when I did.

But there’s also that awkward moment, when someone, amazed at my height, wonders aloud if my parents were tall too.

Well, my mom is six-foot. My grandfather was six-five.

And your dad?

Forgot about him.

Silence and the inevitable don’t really know. Move the topic. Hope they don’t pry. If they do pry, make sure to present the topic as casually as possible. If they see it doesn’t bother you, they won’t feel obliged to say, “Oh, I’m sorry” and there won’t be that weird look that wonders if you’re broken or not.

It was much worse when I was a kid. Sometimes, they’d try to hug me.

I’ve collected stories, stared at pictures as much as I imagine I’m supposed to given the events. I asked questions about him, as my contract states I should. A programmer, just like me. Started young, like me. Loved Macs. Strange how that’s perhaps the only thing I think about. One of the few memories I have of him. His original Mac at that little desk in the alcove of the only home I ever shared with him, him hunched over doing some form of magic to it, being invited to look but not to touch. Strange how all these little facts may mean I am father’s son, how it doesn’t matter, but does. Macs, code as a genetic heritage. How small a bond I have with this memory of a person.

And this back and forth in my head creeps up every now and again and I’m left with an unused ticket to a place I assumed I needed to go, but ultimately never did. And I’m left with these pictures at five in the morning and a keyboard and some cigarettes and that nagging sensation that I’m supposed to be less or more attached to him than I am.

And I pace a bit, and I write something to get it all out and it doesn’t make it better or worse.

It just makes it what is.

What you don’t play can be more important than what you do.

Thanks, Neven, and Merlin.

About 2 months ago Twitter changed the order of your Follower list. It used to list your followers, in order that they joined twitter. Now it lists the people that just followed you.

Soon the users figured out that ‘people that just followed you’ was a gold mine of people that just took the action of following someone. Open up a few profiles, follow the 10 people that just followed them. Repeat until you have 13k followers.

Part the second:

It’s hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year.

Unintended consequences are something of an art form in interface design. Small things can affect behavior, not just in your user, but across an entire community. Everything from button placement, to type size, to what features are exposed where, creates an environment that either encourages or discourages certain types of behavior.

About a year ago, I did a quick consult on a forum UI for a friend. Like many communities, the forum had a simple feature to mark a given user as either a “friend,” someone allowed to message you and whose posts where marked in a special way, or an “enemy,” someone who couldn’t message you and whose posts where hidden.

His first draft exposed the feature in an utterly sane way. Two links, next to any user’s name. “Add friend,” and “Make enemy”. Fast access to a useful feature. I’m sure he didn’t give it too much thought.

My first criticism? Kill the enemy link. Hide the feature somewhere deep in the UI. Get rid of it all together if he could.

It wasn’t just that the feature existed, but it’s prominent placement made knee-jerk reactions too easy. Someone post something you don’t agree with? There’s a nice quick way to get rid of them. Over time, the community would grow increasingly negative, myopic, and exclusive. All because of one link.

This may seem non-sequitur to the examples above, but they all sit in this neat boat of thinking about more than just usability when designing.

Everything is a trade-off. Everything has a consequence.

In 1952, there was no precedent in presidential elections for the use of television “spot” advertising—short commercials that generally run between twenty seconds and a minute. Governor Thomas Dewey, declaring spots “undignified,” rejected their use in his 1948 presidential campaign. In 1952, most campaign strategists preferred thirty-minute blocks of television time for the broadcast of campaign speeches.

Like most absolutely evil things, we have an advertising wonk to thank for it:

The idea for the spots came from Madison Avenue advertising executive Rosser Reeves, who had created the M&M “melts in your mouth, not in your hands” campaign. Reeves convinced Eisenhower that spot ads placed immediately before or after such popular TV programs as I Love Lucy would reach more viewers, and at a much lower cost, than half-hour speeches.

The Eisenhower ad is amazingly positive, which led me to wonder when the first negative political ad aired. Daisy, Johnson’s infamous ad from his 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, seems to be considered the winner of that race, though I think a few of the ads from 1952 could easily be called negative. Just not, “We’re all going to die!” negative.

While I’m down in this rathole, here’s a fun-fact I did not know:

The increasing use of negative political advertising has been promoted by two unrelated legal touchstones. First, the Communication Act of 1934 made an important distinction between candidate ads and product or service ads. It stated that broadcasters could refuse all deceptive advertising except for political commercials. Second, the 1976 amendment to the Federal Election Campaign Act allowed private individuals and political action committees or PACs, to spend unlimited amounts on behalf of candidates.

Ah, laws. Is there nothing they can’t accidentally do?

Entitled Acupuncture treatment for pain: systematic review of randomised clinical trials with acupuncture, placebo acupuncture, and no acupuncture groups, [the study] appeared in the BMJ two days ago and was performed by Madsen et al at the Nordic Cochrane Center.

This particular meta-analysis examined studies of acupuncture for pain. The results were thirteen trials, with a total of 3,025 patients between them.

What were the findings?

In essence, zilch, nada, zip.

Well, not quite. Although it is statistically significantly different than zero, it is barely so. Indeed, it’s so small that that it falls below the minimally accepted threshold for a clinically noticeable reduction in pain.

That’s not to say a “just being a placebo” is necessarily a bad thing. The placebo effect is incredibly powerful, and in the right cases, can be harnessed for real benefit to people in pain.

There’s a full chapter devoted to the effect in Michael Brooks’ 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, though, for the lazy or those lacking an Amazon Prime account, a summary is available in the article that inspired the book:

Don’t try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

The article is a great read if you have an hour. The book is a much better read if you have a weekend.

The fact is, in the eyes of the media, Apple is the corporate equivalent of Barack Obama — a company that can do no wrong. Even in Silicon Valley, where much of the press corps are pretty much glorified cheerleaders (think of all those slobbering cover stories about the Google guys) Apple’s kid-gloves treatment stands out. Reporters don’t just overlook Apple’s faults; they’ll actually apologize for them, or rationalize them away. Ever seen reporters clapping and cheering at a press conference? Happens all the time at Apple events.

They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.

Like designers, if you give a programmer a problem with parameters, they’ll apply every bit of genius they have to solve it in the best possible way. If you tell them how to do it, you’ll suffer the wrath of an angry God.

If you’ll excuse me, I need to print this up in 170 point Helvetica and staple it to various people’s foreheads.

Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.

As a side-note, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to saying “President Obama.” He’s just Obama, and probably always will be.

“What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was? No windows, no unnecessary trappings. Just the Web.”

First person to submit the iPhone wins.

You simply can’t have a system which rewards nastiness over niceness and which offers no consequences for those who commit cowardly anonymous attacks and then act surprised when people don’t know where to draw the line.

I’m never sure what to think of the vitriol of the online world. There’s a bit in me, unshakable, the bit that donned a green mohawk in high school, smashed around in pits and fought cops, who threw rocks at the windows of midwestern skinheads and wrote manifesto’s in every notebook he ever head, that will not let the more civil bastard in me win. Passion, above all things, he says, is a sign you’re doing something right. Even when it’s something horribly wrong.

It’d be nice if passion only inspired positive reactions. If all the good it caused could be distilled, the bad it’s done removed. But they’re a pair. A set of conjoined twins; Kill one, you risk the other.

When I read bits like Carr’s column, or about why-in-the-fucks like Arrington’s spit take and death threats, there’s the bit in me, civil and educated, that stares slack-jawed at the stupidity of clearly loony people.

But, while I abhor the death threats, that stupid kid in me cheered the guy who spat. Something in me loved the protest of it, the simplicity of the action and all that it said. It wasn’t violent, no one’s life put at risk, but it was honest and fast, and probably said everything the man wanted to say. It was passionate.

And a bit of me excused him for that.

In Carr’s list of “utterly reasonable demands for a more civil universe”, he requests:

If you’ve ever considered spitting on someone because you don’t like something they’ve said online, kill yourself. Seriously. Do it now. The world will be a better place without you.

And there’s this bit of me that thinks that if you’re not willing to spit on someone, maybe you’re doing something wrong.

Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought ‘I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers?

I fully admit to finding this funny.

Home means different things to different people. Among U.S.-born adults who have lived in more than one community, nearly four-in-ten (38%) say the place they consider home isn’t where they’re living now. But there’s a wide range of definitions of “home” among Americans who have lived in at least one place besides their original hometown: 26% say it’s where they were born or raised; 22% say it’s where they live now; 18% say it’s where they have lived the longest; 15% say it’s where their family comes from; and 4% say it’s where they went to high school.

Maybe it’s the nomad in me, but I’ve always thought of home as a place you go searching for.

Scandal represents movement, the audible cracking of the ice. And yet it is all an illusion, for beneath the rapidly moving train of gaudily hyped “breaking news,” beneath all the grave and breathless stand-ups before the inevitable pillars of public buildings, beneath the swirling, gyrating phantasmagoria of scandal lies a kind of dystopian stasis. Everything changes and nothing does.

It is not information, it is politics. If we have learned anything this past decade it is that “the people,” that vaunted repository of public good—”the people always find out”—the people are willing and able to live with quite a lot. They read, watch television, grunt a pox on all their houses, and turn back to their dinners. Thanks to the efficiency of our age of scandal we now know as never before what the public is willing to live with.

I’d counter that the recent election more than proved the public, at least the American public, has a more delicate relationship with scandal than Danner paints.

Still, Danner’s essay at times makes points quite large. Points worth considering.