Microposts

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

Wired: ‘An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All’ (via Instapaper)

A vast majority of professionals are in “emergency scanning” mode. Their self-management consists of checking for and acting on the loudest immediacies – in email, in the hallways and on the phone. Everything else is shoved to the side of the desk, and to the back of their mind. Because they’re focused only on “priorities”, and are paying attention only to the most intheir- face stuff, everyone else has to raise the noise level to “emergency” mode to get any audience at all. Sensitivity and responsiveness to input are criteria for the evolution of a species; and many an organisation has a nervous system that keeps them low on the food chain.

David Allen on setting priorities (via Instapaper)

Better Place envisages a convenient network of charging outlets and battery-swap stations that will be tied together with software that makes it possible for both the system and EV drivers to know in real time the ongoing battery range and charge level. Drivers will be able to call up the nearest battery switching or charging station in a display. Thus, they can plan their route and EV range anxiety will be eliminated.

Electric vehicles the ‘rational choice’ - The Globe and Mail

The Lost Prestige of Nuclear Physics

www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati…

For better or worse, the United States has come to depend on technological progress, and if its continuance as a society in anything resembling its traditional forms is to be assured, technological vitality must be sustained. Nuclear science is so central to the continuum of scientific and technological progress that a failure to restore its stature must bode ill for the long-term future of science and technology in America.

(via Instapaper)

Is Canada broken?

www.theglobeandmail.com/news/poli…

“We are in a continuous election campaign with no discussion of issues,” observes Ned Franks, a political scientist at Queen’s University and a leading authority on Canada’s Parliament.

If an election is called, I’d really like to ignore it, right up to the very end. But, I know I’ll be reviewing all of the platforms, reading plenty of commentary, and arguing about the issues. This would be much more satisfying if the election was actually important. The Federal government seems to be slowly fading into irrelevance.

On our ferry trip across to PEI, we caught the attention of the boat’s captain. He was kind enough to let us visit the bridge and take some photos. The setup is pretty amazing, with many radar screens and blinking devices, but all offset by a tiny steering wheel.

Yelled at by the owner of the Inlet Cafe in Mahone Bay for some spilled Owen cheerios. Not family friendly, despite the high chairs and …

Out-of-office messages are set, let the vacation begin! Two weeks on a family road trip to the Canadian east coast.

Earlier in the 20th century, governments treated public money with the same puritanical respect that people generally treated their own money in a famously frugal age. It wasn’t that these governments never wasted public money, never misused it. It was that they did everything parsimoniously.

But government waste, though infuriating for taxpayers, is a small thing. The real tragedy lies in the inexorable rise in deliberate spending. In the exponential increases cited by Gordon Robertson, across two or three decades, the most unnecessary spending was entirely intentional, duly instigated by government and duly authorized by Parliament.

Unnecessary government spending is no accident - The Globe and Mail

eHealth Ontario is controversial. But, having just copied my information dozens of times for routine paperwork, we need electronic records.

What makes these service stoppages all the more irritating is that they are unnecessary. Elected politicians can – if they have the nerve – remove the conditions that foster them. Only where cities operate a unionized public monopoly on garbage pickup are city residents potential hostages to a strike vote. And there is no good reason for these monopolies to exist.

Free the garbage hostages - The Globe and Mail

Restarting Apple Mail fixes my Notes synchronization problem with the iPhone. Repeat every couple of days.