Painfully Obvious.

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When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle‐aged, what life is all about… I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.

Kurt Vonnegut
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Kurt Vonnegut dead at 84. Cat’s Cradle was the first book (the first book book) I opened and started reading of my own volition. I was 14. The person I am, right now, sprang from those pages.

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People seem to think that by posting in threads and agreeing with other people they are changing the world. They are not. They are posting in threads online. The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. Being outraged online is a form of entertainment, and refreshing a thread to receive a hit of consensus packs the thrill of genuine activism without requiring any sweat.

Tycho Brahe
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Your goal: invent a terrorist plot to hijack or blow up an airplane with a commonly carried item as a key component. The component should be so critical to the plot that the TSA will have no choice but to ban the item once the plot is uncovered. I want to see a plot horrific and ridiculous, but just plausible enough to take seriously… Terrorism is a real threat, but we’re not any safer through security measures that require us to correctly guess what the terrorists are going to do next.

Bruce Schneier
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Here’s something I worked on for a few hours just to amuse myself. I’d develop it further, but I can’t see how this has any sort of practical use (also note the caveats at the top of the script). So here it is: a web page desaturator. Takes all colors in linked stylesheets and turns them into grayscale versions. Here’s a demo using a page from the Prototype site. Firefox only.

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If you have a reputation for being a Machiavellian, you aren’t one. That was Machiavelli’s view, at least. The key to all successful power‐mongers, he argued, is the appearance of innocence, and a reputation for honesty and benevolence. Underneath, of course, you’re stitching the system up. So it doesn’t take a genius to realise that if Niccolo were around today he would laugh heartily at the idea that Karl Rove is a master of the art of ruthless politics.

Andrew Sullivan
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Junior! The Wendy’s Guy. During my freshman year at UT, I went to this Wendy’s far more often than the Surgeon General would have recommended. Junior is one of my strongest memories of living on the UT campus.