Amazon tidbit from Kevin Kelly

Amazon’s not-really-sekrit 800 number. In “Cool Tools,” Kevin Kelly writes:

On average I’ve ordered from Amazon once a week for the last four years or so. Not just books, but power tools, toys, kitchen stuff, the whole lot. Given the volume of my orders I think their customer service is super great; it sets the gold standard for other companies. No other merchant online or offline has provided the ease and accuracy of ordering as Amazon does. Still, in my experience there are occasionally glitches that their email-bots can’t deal with, usually entailing a minor billing snafu. In these rare cases you need Amazon.com’s almost-secret real-person customer service telephone number. You won’t find it on their website. I once got it by calling 800 directory assistance. In any case, they make it hard to find because a call costs Amazon more, so you should jot down this number for those special moments when only a human will do: 800-201-7575.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

Worth having someplace I know I can get to.

Let’s get p2p about RSS share your feeds.

Let’s get p2p about RSS — share your feeds.

Blog pioneer and gadfly Dave Winer has created “A commons for sharing outlines, feeds, taxonomy”. Sign up and share your RSS feeds with the world — and find out who subscribes to yours. For example: find out who subscribes to Smart Mobs

Thanks, Dave!

(Via boingboing)

[Smart Mobs]

“Dave” is innovating again and that always makes things interesting. If you’re curious, here’s some of the folks who subscribe to McGee’s Musings.

Crichton on Reason

Crichton on Willy.

The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.

Although only just now in the blogdex, Crichton’s 3-month-old scathing indictment of the pop-environmentalism movement in… [TeledyN]

I finally got around to this item in my aggregator over the Chrismas holiday. In a speech to the Commonwealth Club in September, Crichton makes an interesting argument that today’s environmental movement is best thought of as a secular religion that operates on the basis of faith instead of evidence.

How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There’s a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren’t true. It isn’t that these “facts” are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all—what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.

I think Crichton is making an even broader argument about the role of reason and evidence in coping with today’s world. Let’s hope he gets heard here as widely as he does with his fiction.

Technology Review weblog – now with RSS

Technology Review has a blog. Well, it’s 3 months old now, but I didn’t know that MIT’s Technology Review — featuring the brilliant Henry Jenkins and the equally brilliant Simson Garfinkel — had a daily weblog. I’ve just blogrolled it…. [JD’s New Media Musings]

It also now has an RSS feed, although a truncated one with what looks to be the title plus the first 50 characters or so. Better than nothing, but still trapped in the notion that I should somehow be forced to go to the site to extract the full value.

Craftsperson and tool

Rich Gold on PowerPoint. Christina points to UW’s David Farkas’ course readings in information design as a source of “fine reading”. His syllabus is also worth checking out to see how he’s chunked them into a semester’s worth of work. Since I’ve lately been very interested in the “controversy” related to PowerPoint, I wanted… [IDblog]

A good set of resources in general. Also, Beth points to a fascinating presentation by the late Rich Gold on Powerpoint as a Toy for Thought. As much of a Tufte fan as I am, I think the rhetorical device of blaming the tool, while fun and entertaining, gets in the way.

The relationship between tools, craft, and craftsperson is complex. My wife is a photographer. If you want to annoy her, admire one of her pictures and then ask her what kind of camera she uses. Yes, what the tools can and can’t do matters. But not as much as Tufte would have us believe. Gold widens the perspective to remind us in the hands of a craftsperson the constraints of a tool can be turned to advantage.

Happy New Year

100 Years of Flight: A Lesson about Learning Curves

Kevin Kelly excerpts from Bayles' and Orland's Art and Fear:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Remarkable that the law of learning (experience) curves should appear in art just as it does in semiconductors, and should in space vehicles. Something to keep in mind on this 100th anniversary of practical powered flight: We didn't get to 747s and F-22s by building one – or four- vehicles n 1903 and perpetually refitting them. Thousands of early experimental aircraft were built, run, wrecked, obsoleted, scrapped. If we want to have a similar oucome in space one hundred years hence, it's time to get onto the 'quantity' curve. And apparently only the private sector has the stomach for that trip.

Update: I didn't know this test was scheduled when I wrote the post, but it makes the point admirably.

Hat tip to Ole Eichhorn. [Due Diligence]

Sound advice regardless of what you're working with or learning about. Fail early and fail often.

I had expected to post a bit more than I have over the last few days, but I have limited connectivity and bandwidth. The good news in that is that I do have snow and in the spirit of learning curves I've been adding more miles to my snowboarding experience. I expect to be back to regular posting in a few days.

To all of you, a healthy and happy New Year.

Zip-Linq cables: device charging without bricks.

Zip-Linq cables: device charging without bricks. It used to be that I shlepped a power-strip (sometimes two!) with me when I went on the road, because they haven't built the hotel-room yet that has enough plugs to charge my entire device array, not least because everything that fits in my pocket comes with a charger whose transformer brick eats two or three outlets.

Then I discovered USB and FireWire charging — and more specifically, Zip-Linq retractable cables. Instead of plugging everything into the wall, you attach your device to a little bon-bon-sized retractable wire that goes into one of your computer's ports and plug your computer into the wall. This is especially handy if you're travelling overseas, since it's just not practical to buy enough Euro-220 adapters to get your devices to talk to the local alternating current. Your laptop probably has an international power-supply requiring only a plug adapter, and once that's attached to the wall, you've got know-quantity/know-interface power for all your gizmos.

Before I leave on my next trip overseas tomorrow, I will slip into my pocket a Firewire cable (for my little backup harddrive, which I yanked out of an old PowerBook and put into a tiny enclosure, so that I can back up every day on the road), a cellphone charger (one for my US Motorola iDen phone, one for my European Nokia phone — and cables are available for most manufacturers: Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, Samsung, Kyocera, Sanyo) and a PDA charger (Palm, iPaq).

Rael crashed on my sofa this weekend and pointed out that Zip-Linq is now shipping a wall-adapter, so that if your laptop is unavailable, you can plug this into the socket and still charge up.

The best part is that at $10-20 these wires are actually cheaper than the manufacturers' chargers for the most part. Link [Boing Boing Blog]

Interesting to see what kinds of things are possible when you start to think in terms of what you can expect to find in the environment that you can take advantage of.

Rick Klau celebrates two years blogging

Two year anniversary.

Hard for me to believe, but this marks the two year anniversary of my first blog post. Starting a blog was a direct result of a phone conversation with John Robb, and in the past two years I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some remarkable people.

To those who continue to read, comment and share, thank you.

By rick@rklau.com (Rick Klau). [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

Congratulations to Rick on hitting the two-year milestone for his excellent blog. Certianly, Rick is one of those remarkable people that you get to meet courtesy of blogging. Looking forward to seeing your thinking somehwhere.

 

 

New weblog – Abusable Technology

Coordination trifecta: Abusable Tech (Clay Shirky). To make a trilogy of places where the net’s coordination costs change the nature of collaboration, I add a link to Abusable Tech, a weblog devoted to chronicling abuse or misuse of security tools, to today’s earlier posts about Howard… [Many-to-Many]

An all-star list of contributors to the new blog. There is an RSS feed , although I really, really, wish that the default out of Moveable Type was a full feed instead of the niggardly first 30 words or so. It's a design decision that appears rooted in old assumptions.