Isotropic is …
... my personal blog.
Unless otherwise indicated, anything I write here is simply my personal, probably ill-formed, opinion and does not represent the views, beliefs, positions, or opinions of any other person or entity.
Monthly Archives: September 2009
27 Sep 2009
Food Police
William Saletan of Slate has a good rant about the food police, spurred by a proposed tax on sweetened soft drinks. In my case, the provocation is partly scientific and partly libertarian. But mostly, it’s a shift in the slippery slope. One of my basic rules is that slippery slopes run both ways. Some of [...]
27 Sep 2009
Losing your stuff
I didn’t imagine that my “Back. Up. Your. Stuff.” post, where I said “This is just a friendly reminder that you really should consider what you’re gonna do if any of those sites shut down or for some other reason become inaccessible.“, would have validation so soon. The Rocky Mountain Bank sent confidential information on [...]
19 Sep 2009
A dark and stormy night
I’m pretty good at that “willing suspension of disbelief” thing, being able to fall down a rabbit hole into a world where the laws of physics (and physiology) don’t quite work right, cause and effect are capriciously violated, people miss the obvious and interact in ways that, in the real world, would have me slowly [...]
19 Sep 2009
Frugalista Fandango
I don’t know the Jackson Frugalista. In fact, I’d never heard of her until early this morning when a tweet saying “a Jackson blogger is getting beat up on by some lawyers” caught my eye. Since I’m also a Jackson blogger, my curiosity was piqued. Why is she being “beat up on”? You can read [...]
17 Sep 2009
Liberate your stuff
Google introduced the “Data Liberation Front” a couple days after my “Delete your stuff” and “Back. Up. Your. Stuff.” posts. The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we [...]
12 Sep 2009
Delete your stuff
This is a companion post to my earlier “Back. Up. Your. Stuff.“, where I said You possibly have a lot of stuff out in the Web, scattered among social networking sites, blogs, Flickr, Google apps … and some of you don’t have local copies or backups of it, right? [...] This is just a friendly [...]
10 Sep 2009
Grammatical dark matter
Like the gravitational influence of dark matter in the universe, there is a hidden force in the Web that causes too many bloggers, who should know better, to make contributions to the my-pet-grammar-peeves meme. This is the same force that compels commenters to make hypercorrections to posts, even to the extent of hijacking threads completely [...]
08 Sep 2009
Back. Up. Your. Stuff.
You possibly have a lot of stuff out in the Web, scattered among social networking sites, blogs, Flickr, Google apps … and some of you don’t have local copies or backups of it, right? This is just a friendly reminder that you really should consider what you’re gonna do if any of those sites shut [...]
08 Sep 2009
School phone searches
As much as I think schools should have some leeway to maintain order and safety, particularly with younger children, I’m on the side of the student here. It’s one thing to confiscate a phone until the end of the day, but to take it, search it, and turn it over to the police? The article [...]
05 Sep 2009
Truth is relative
A few days ago Georgia pastor Jonathan Ayers became collateral damage in the War On Drugs. The fact that he was a pastor with a pregnant wife provided the hook that got the story so much attention, but is mostly irrelevant to the story itself. From the video: it appears Ayers had started to back [...]
