Thinking with my lungs: mnemonics takes a deep breath

November 21, 2005

I subscribe to MIT’s Technology Review and have enjoyed many articles and reviews thus far. But today’s issue brought a couple of howlers in two utterly unrelated articles, which, when read together, fit perfectly. First, Finding Podcasts Faster is a review of three new products that help users find specific audio material online. The reviewer […]

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Click-think-vote©

November 18, 2005

Tomorrow approximately 30% (maybe 33%) of eligible voters in Victoria will complete casting their ballots for the city’s mayor and councillors. (I write “complete” because voters could vote early, from Nov.14th on.) That’s a sadly anemic projection, but consider that our City-of-Victoria-the-Legal-Entity (not counting the Greater Victoria area or the entire Capital Regional District) is […]

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Let’s DISH

November 17, 2005

The Conference Board of Canada‘s annual report tells Canadians that we’re slipping in status: from being in the club of the top five world-wide (out of 24) in 2001, we’ve fallen, due to various economic factors impacting the measure of our productivity, to 12th place in 2005. Our middle class isn’t growing at the same […]

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Ain’t No Saint

November 16, 2005

Two people recently observed, after we first chatted about the weather and dogs and the cost of living, that I haven’t been blogging lately, and then this morning Stu Savory sent an email with the same observation… Hi Yule, long time no write. Unlike yours truly, Stu is a man of few words, which he, […]

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Running out of time

November 8, 2005

From the Forum for the Future, a pointer to a new book edited by Tim Aldrich, About Time. It sounds like they’re on to something: Despite the burgeoning army of machines designed to save us time – from cars and aeroplanes to dishwashers and microwaves – we don’t seem to have any more of it […]

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World Usability Day

November 6, 2005

I had no idea that last Thursday (Nov.3) was World Usability Day. Hopping around on del.icio.us (comparing who links to what I link to), I found the Nov.1 BBC article that alerted me to this startling tid-bit. Belatedly (in honour of the day), let me quote from Donald Norman’s brilliant The Design of Everyday Things, […]

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Cover Girl: what does she want?

November 3, 2005

It’s amazing how the popular media take a fairly common-sense — even dry — scientific finding and succeed in sensationalising it into some kind of alleged truism that reveals the eternal (read: biologically immutable) “nature” of the male-female relationship. Yesterday, slumming on google news (I was avoiding real work), I noticed a Daily Mail article […]

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I want to be a bad camera

November 2, 2005

The current (Fall 2005) Art Journal (LXIV, 3) includes a terrific interview conducted by Ana Finel Honigman with the artist Ellen Harvey. It’s not online, but I can’t reproduce the whole thing without running the risk of infringing on their copyrights, so I’ll try to quote / comment just around the bits that struck me […]

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Bird Flu strikes at Disneyland?

November 1, 2005

Poor Donald Duck… (Is this perhaps a symptom of what might be described as the MSM hyping things out of proportion…?)

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Less Government

October 30, 2005

No, the title is not meant to suggest that I’m turning libertarian! Recall, however, my recent …frustrations? (sic!) about the sale of BC’s Terasen Gas to Texas-based Kinder-Morgan, as well as my lugubrious commentary on the privatisation of public utilities in BC (and elsewhere). One of the gummier aspects of local politics that I find […]

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