Umalu

The author of this article Googled the ingredients of a banana split to prove to his mother that the ice cream flavors she was offering to his children were not the "correct" flavors for a banana split. While I yield to none in my admiration for Google and its wondrous search engine, I shudder when I see what today's Cliff Clavins are doing with it.

Catan "serves as a model for solving contemporary problems such as trade imbalances, nuclear proliferation, and climate change." Huh? Catan is a GAME! You play with your friends! It is fun! Its creator was trying to improve the gameplay of Monopoly, not solve the world's problems. Why oh why must journalists strain to tie everything in with their conception of the zeitgeist.

I have a hard time with articles like this that generalize over such a broad and variable base. Some big companies are great, some are terrible, and most are in between. And once you're in that big company, a lot depends on who you work for and what your group does, so you'll find that some areas are great to work in, some are terrible and most are in between.

And what makes this even more infuriatingly variable for the generalizer is that it is unlikely you and I would even agree on which of these companies, or departments within companies, are the great or terrible ones. So much depends on who you are, what you want and what you need.

For a different perspective on this, check out "The Grass is Indeed Greener: How I gave up dreaming about the big city and learned to love the suburbs". http://architectureandmorality.blogspot.com/2010/10/grass-is...

As a denizen of an email-centric corporate culture, my daily email volume is in the 200 range (not including spam, which is filtered out).

Interesting to contemplate a government with no secrets. Is complete transparency a total pipe dream? One wonders whether a government committed to complete transparency would be even more effective, as people would be more willing to trust it, less cynical about it, and politicians and bureaucrats would know that what they did was public and therefore be less likely to descend into the gutter. And that transparent government would be immune to Wikileaks. Just a thought....

Amazon's choice: (1) host Wikileaks and risk getting shut down, or (2) drop Wikileaks, get boycotted. If choice (2) is as bad as choice (1), something I guess the boycotters hope for, then Amazon's choice is a Morton's fork: two equally bad outcomes. Why don't the boycotters stick their Morton's fork where it belongs: into those who wrote and enforce the laws they object to?

Google correctly translates "Hello world" from English to Latin as "salve mundi". The Latin-English part is clearly an Easter egg. Nice.