pandoricity

I often claim to live in the present; the past is a foreign land, and many will know how I feel about those. One of the many implications of this attitude is that I forget... and unfortunately, this includes forgetting 'ideas', which tend to blaze through my awareness only to fizzle in the atmosphere of my ongoing lethargy. When I went to write this post, I finally remembered a meta idea . Oddly, however, I'm intensely proud of having ideas. So, in one more effort to build not this pride upon sand, I thought I'd try to 'open-source' my brain, spending my limited enthusiasm for an idea by writing it on the indestructible clay of the internet instead of merely being intensely distracted for a few hours. What odds that this will be the last post I make on this blog? * Anyway, today's idea, which isn't all that exciting after all that waffle: Auto-completion seems to be pervasive nowadays, what with phones and word processors finishing words, and G...

Ambiguity of the week: How do I get this banana to work?

I always had this idea that we were a trifle self-absorbed when we studied history. Spending most of the time on the last century or two seemed wrong, and what there was of earlier times seemed to have huge gaps in the narrative. (let's forget about nationalistic obsessions for now) But somehow - probably the influence of xkcd - I realised that our scale was odd. After all, if we measure in years, human history is irrelevant (100,000 / billions); what we should be thinking about is the amount of human experience in those years. Perhaps we might see that all the waffle about the dramatic rate of progress is not so much a factor of industrialisation and western-society magic, but more about the number of people around. Thus, a hand-wavy human history where the intervals are normalised by considering the number of people living at the time. The interesting part is the dates - the rest is just me having fun. Apologies for the embarrassingly Eurocentric view. Not sure what I thin...