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.
Category Archives: Life-Society
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 [...]
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 [...]
30 Aug 2009
I’m not depressed, I’m adaptive
Scientific American has an interesting article: “Depression’s Evolutionary Roots“. This is not to say that depression is not a problem. Depressed people often have trouble performing everyday activities, they can’t concentrate on their work, they tend to socially isolate themselves, they are lethargic, and they often lose the ability to take pleasure from such activities [...]
28 Aug 2009
Big Media time travel
I just ran across this comment-reply by Nina Paley on her post Your Children Are Not Your Children. I suppose if the Star Trek replicator ever comes into being, the Faberges will try to litigate it out of existence, to preserve their old business model. The Faberges will have to time-travel to the Future to [...]
25 Aug 2009
Is the sky falling?
How many of the 12 questions in The Science Knowledge Quiz can you get right? Go ahead and try it now — it’s quick and easy. For more detailed and statistically sound analysis, check out Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, which I posted about last year. It states “[...] many Americans do not reliably distinguish [...]
19 Aug 2009
A Visit From DEC Corporate
I filled out the annual Customer Service Survey, dropped it in the mail, and forgot about it … until one day a nervous Field Service Engineer and a Concerned Corporate Suit showed up outside my office. Background This was back in the day when the numerous DEC (later bought by Compaq, then by HP) minicomputers [...]
16 Aug 2009
Hurricane Survival Checklist
WAPT 16, a local Jackson, MS, TV station, offers a Hurricane Survival Checklist [1] I’d like to add a few more hints. Please feel free to add more in the comments. First, consider additional smaller kits tailored for you office and car. If you’re caught at work or on the road, these kits can tide [...]
16 Aug 2009
Whither LazyWeb and Hoosgot?
While cleaning out my feed reader, I ran across the feed for Hoosgot, which apparently has shut down. In April 2008 I said “I’ll whine about them here just in case some ghost of LazyWeb still exists and answers before I get around to researching them myself.” and later added in an update “Also, I [...]
