I’m also fond of this post, discussing what’s going to happen when people start outlawing abortion.
Once we outlaw it, we’ll have penalties for women getting abortions. Let’s say a woman gets an illegal abortion, and something goes wrong (it rarely happens now, but is more likely with back-alley coat-hanger disasters). She can’t go to the hospital, because she’ll get arrested. So, she bleeds to death.
Abortion isn’t murder, but outlawing abortion is pretty close to negligent homicide.
Lance Mannion has a great post on product design and manuals. The gist is this: the reason you can’t understand the product manual is that it is trying to explain something that is overly complex, and therefore as hard to describe as it is to do.
I found this to be the case in my manual writing for things like Novell Evolution: when I had a hard time explaining something, it was often because the process itself was too complex. Fortunately, I had access to the developers and I could file bug reports (“This dialog box is totally insane”) that people actually listened to.
I guess I’ve been lucky.
Two recommendations:
The Affair, a rock band from Brooklyn. But not like every other rock band from Brooklyn. Worth a listen.
Bulleit Bourbon was the clear winner in taste tests conducted among friends recently: better than Woodford Reserve, Overholt, Michter’s Rye, and Eagle Rare. It’s got molasses and vanilla notes that make it gentle, but enough oak and fire to make you drink it slowly. I liked it enough to apply for a job with their marketing company, Colaneglo Synergy.
First: 85 percent of US troops in Iraq say that the war is mainly to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks. There are no words.
DeLong quotes Krugman’s pay-only column about how Bush and his lackeys equate disagreement and warnings as disloyalty, and how that’s lead to bad programs badly implemented, and thence to the predicted bad results.
What hurts me the most is that this kind of incompetence, even though it hurts and kills people, is not a crime.
I often run into people I haven’t seen in awhile, and they say to me, “You weren’t kidding about that mustache.”
No, I was not. Nor am I kidding about the existence of a store called “Lucky Wang.”
But check out this live-action Simpsons video on YouTube. If you hadn’t noticed already, YouTube is rapidly becoming a major time-sink.
Went to a wedding in NYC this weekend. Reception at the University Club, a place so far uptown it seems, as they say, like Boston. They don’t allow sneakers in the lobby– if you’re casually dressed you have to use the service entrance/exit. There are some concessions to modernity, though: they have admitted women since 1987, and of course there is an up-to-date globe in the library, next to the one which still lists Prussia and Siam.
This afternoon, the American Museum of Natural History. The first floor still has the dusty dioramas, but the fourth floor is incredible: plenty of emphasis on evolutionary theory and the development of paleontological science.
Bookdwarf and I, along with her sister and brother-in-law, will be insulting the Oscars for the remainder of the evening. I’ll be talking, she’ll be talking and blogging.
Erin Flynn is a Cambridge-based illustrator and artist. Incredibly interesting drawings.
My first thought was “oooh, job opportunity in the biotech industry!” But GenAid Cloning Services is not exactly hiring.
Secretly Ironic 