At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although I enjoyed Bill Bryson’s other book A Short History of Nearly Everything, I actually didn’t know that when I picked this book up. I had heard the other book as an audio book so I didn’t remember the author’s name. Also, it was nearly 10 years ago. My interest in Bryson’s book came from the media blitz he did to promote it - including NPR’s Fresh Air and, if I’m not mistaken, The Colbert Report. I put it on my TO READ list here on GoodReads and waited for a chance to read the book. That chance came when I flew to Florida for a family visit. However, now that I know it was written by him, it explains the style of the book.

[caption id=“attachment_6217” align=“aligncenter” width=“496”] German Kids using inflationary money as blocks in 1923 - Bitcoin is supposed to be immune to this[/caption]

Boing Boing pointed me to a few Bitcoin articles and then there was another one on Ars on 6 May. I’d be pretty surprised if you haven’t heard about Bitcoin; it’s been all over the news because of the crazy bubble the Bitcoin exchange rate was having recently. But, just in case, Bitcoin is a currency that exists entirely electronically. This is true of nearly all currencies nowadays (none of them are backed by anything but faith in the countries that issue them). The supply of Bitcoins is only increasing to a certain amount and then no more, preventing inflation. It’s main benefit is supposed to be that it’s completely anonymous. So is cash, but you can’t use cash online.

When I wrote my second fatherhood post, the one about Disney Princesses, I speculated that perhaps the problem most people had with the Disney Princesses was not the movies, but how the company marketed to kids. Since Scarlett is only one, my only exposure to the princesses has been through my own childhood and adulthood love of Disney movies. This Boing Boing post about the princess from Brave, Merida, proves the point - it’s the marketing that gets under everyone’s skin. Here’s the change from the movie version on the left to the marketing version on the right:

In response to the fact that most of the spam comments on my site are on older articles and given that historically no one has commented on posts older than a couple years anyway, I’m enabling Wordpress’ auto-close on comments for posts older than 2 years.

Remember earlier this week when I said the gun control debate was now pointless? Apparently the State Department wants to pretend that what I said isn’t true. In a complete misunderstanding of how the Internet works, they have compelled the website holding the CAD designs for the 3D gun to remove the CAD file.  The reasoning is that leaving it up would be exporting munitions (since everyone all over the world can go to a web page) This, of course, ignores the fact that it was already obtained over 100 000 times and is already on Bit Torrent. Oh well. I guess pointless moves are better than nothing in their eyes.

One of the biggest trends on flickr is to start a 365 Project. This usually means taking one self-portrait a day for an entire year. This project is often misunderstood by those outside of flickr, especially since they’re used to the selfie-culture of MySpace and Facebook. It’s not a vanity project. A 365 Project is about taking the adage about becoming a better writer through writing every day to photography. It also has a special bonus of teaching the photographer what it’s like to be the subject. Many of us photo-geeks are behind the camera way more often than we’re in front of it. Sometimes we struggle with how to communicate to our subjects how to achieve the vision we have in our head. By being both the photographer and the subject, we learn to appreciate both points of view.

On 30 April of this year I came across an article on Eater about how restaurants can deal with No-Shows.  I didn’t even know this was a big enough thing that restaurants have multiple strategies to deal with it. Every time I’ve made a reservation to a restaurant, I’ve gone. I set reservations because I (or I and my wife and whoever else is involved) have decided to go out to eat and want to be sure we’ll not have to wait too long to be seated.  Or, in the of exclusive restaurants, ensure we’ll actually get a table.  I could understand people not showing up because of a life event - someone gets sick or dies. But I don’t understand the mindset of making a reservation without an intention to attend. Additionally, the biggest reason I make reservations is, as stated above, to ensure I get a table in a reasonable amount of time. Nearly every place I’ve ever made reservations at has a line out the door and even with a reservation I sometimes have to wait 15-30 minutes for my table. That said, they wouldn’t write this whole article if there weren’t a bunch of people skipping out on reservations so I wanted to answer their suggestions.

[caption id=“attachment_6194” align=“aligncenter” width=“449”] The Liberator - the world’s first working 3D Printed Gun[/caption]

I’m sorry Obama, Sandyhook victims, and everyone else. You’ve already lost the gun issue. Not because of politicians, but because of technology. We have working 3D printed guns. It’s over. On 6 May my RSS feed reader was ablaze with articles about the working 3D-printed gun including this article from Ars, another article from ars, and one from Boing Boing. This is the same guy who previously created the ability to hold more bullets in semi-automatic guns using 3D printing. The articles all made sure to mention that the CAD files that were uploaded for this new gun had a section that was purposely made of metal to ensure it could be detected by magnetometers. Only one article mentioned that this was a bull-crap attempt at not getting too much flack from anti-gun people.  Because there’s no reason why someone who got the CAD files couldn’t change that to be made of plastic and have a nearly undetectable gun. The gun only fires a few rounds, but under the right circumstances that could be more than enough.

My favorite thing about being a first-time father is watching Scarlett’s mind develop and acquire the skills necessary to be human. Anyone who paid a passing attention in biology class knows that humans are born more immature and less capable than almost every other animal.  It has to do with walking upright shrinking the female pelvis while the ever-growing brain required a larger head. The result is that kids have to be born before their heads would be so large we’d be exploding from our mother’s vaginas like a horrible, horrible version of Alien. (As it is, quite a few women need an episiotomy to have a safe childbirth) And I’m not the only one to find this transformation into humanity so incredible as to refer to babies as not quite human. Jonathan Coulton mentions this in a throwaway line about his living situation while recording his song, The Presidents:

[caption id=“attachment_6176” align=“aligncenter” width=“449”] Citi Bank is one of those too big to fail banks[/caption]

Matt Taibbi wrote a story on 1 May about how there is a possibility of the end of banks that are too big to fail. The biggest issue I have with the way the financial crisis has been dealt with is the complete hypocrisy. Now, I’m not so naive as to fail to realize that politicians just say what they will and hope that people don’t look at what their saying either because of party bias or the media doesn’t cover it so they can worry about the latest media tart’s exploits. After all, the biggest retort to every bit of legislation to help the vulnerable (whether that be the environment or the poor) is that the free market should be allowed to work.  Well, in a free market a lot of banks would have gone bust and perhaps we would have learned out lessons. Of course, the big difference this time is the money involved. Money can turn any politician into a hypocrite instantly. So I’m glad to read in this article that some politicians are attempting to pass a law that would require the riskiest of banks to hold more money in reserve. Because I understand why the government has to bail out the banks - we don’t want a global collapse to lead to the end of our awesome first world luxurious life. But rather than need a bail out or financial collapse, what if we just had a system where banks could fail and it wouldn’t destroy the system.  Taibbi goes off on a huge tangent about how the content of a Standard and Poor white paper on this bill means that Wall Street is actually scared of the bill.  It’s a good read if you don’t have blood pressure problems. Unfortunately, the article ends with the prediction that it probably won’t even make it out of committee, but at least someone is trying.