stoney

But the doubling every year claim really only makes sense over a short period of history too. Starting from the article's 27 exabytes every 7 days in 2010, tracing back in time (halving each year), you get down to about 1 byte of information being produced in 1940.

Forecasting these kinds of relationships back to the dawn of time seems a bit tricky to me - I would guess we're really seeing something like an S curve.

Maybe I'm not thinking hard enough, but it seems like a fairly straightforward question to me. Once you define what you mean by "ship" (which probably also requires defining who is answering/asking the question) then you'll have your answer. Under most definitions that spring into my head, the answer is "neither".

(though the ship metaphor doesn't translate perfectly to the Hudkins/Jenson story, since really it's more like you cloned the original ship twice, put the original nameplate on one clone, the original sailors on the other clone, then burned the remainder of the original).

It's an interesting supply and demand question. If everyone suddenly started valuing "passion" more and "money" less, then as you said, given the current pay scales then maybe lots of accountants would switch to being rockstars.

But as well as the running out of cash problem for the new rockstars, the remaining accountants would presumably be able to charge the rockstars a fortune to do their tax returns (fewer accountants = less competition), which might persuade some of the rockstars that accounting isn't that bad overall.

This does break down in the extreme case where people don't value money at all, but that doesn't seem like a very likely scenario. Sure, I have a passion for being a rockstar, but if being an accountant for 3 years could give me enough money to pay for my rockstar career for the rest of my life then I might develop a passion for accounting.

As long as by "follow your passion" you don't mean "follow your passion to the exclusion of everything else", then it seems very possible. It seems unlikely that someone will have a passion for emptying my bins, but that's not to say that the person emptying my bins can't be following their passion when they're not collecting garbage.

Many people in the western world could probably work far fewer hours, own fewer material things and therefore have much more time to pursue things that they love.

But when I close a program, most of the time I want it to go away and go away quickly. If the program hangs for a few seconds while it saves data that I've already told it I don't want on the off chance that I decide I really do want to restore it later, then I am likely to get annoyed with it to an extent that I'll stop using that program and never find out what a useful feature that undo functionality was.

I don't really know for sure, but I'd guess that in the UK salaries are a fair bit lower than rdl suggested.

And actually the categories aren't looking so bad now - the 100-250 has twice as many people as 75-100, I'd bet 100-150 has a lot of people, but none of the categories stand out as being empty (except maybe the >250k one).

I wonder what percentage of responses come from the US?

But don't forget the many millions of business critical spreadsheets powered by VBA...

I'd say it's a bit early to call Windows irrelevant - certainly one look at Microsoft's bottom line would suggest that Windows is still very relevant.

In some ways, yes, the choice of operating system is now largely irrelevant - if you mainly use web based stuff. But then again, walk into any corporate office in the world and there is a massive, massive probability that the only operating system you will see on desktops is Windows.

I find that one of the most enjoyable procrastination activities is to plan out the thing that I'm supposed to be doing. I have something I know I should do, but I can't make myself do it. So instead, I sit down and break down the big task into a number of little tasks. That keeps my procrastination demons happy because I'm not actually doing the task. Except I am, because at the end I have a list of (hopefully) much easier tasks to do. If necessary I do that recursively - break down my new list of easy tasks. Eventually it gets silly - the next task is so simple I could do it very quickly without thinking. So I do it. And then often I find that once I've done the first thing, it's easy to carry on with the second, third,... that's the momentum thing kicking in. Sometimes things don't start flowing after doing the first task. At that point I put it to one side to do another time.

Nice idea, unfortunately I don't have an iOS device.

Would love to see a longer write up of this - maybe one article about your manual data collection + analysis + insights (if that's not too personal for you!) and another article about how your app does it all for you.

I agree, when I search for "fabric" I want to see the same results (more or less) on whichever computer I'm on - logged in to Google or not.

If I want information on the fabric python library I just search for "python fabric" - works on DuckDuckGo as noted above and also works just fine on Google.

Great explanation, thanks! It's that miracle of compound interest turning up again.

Is there a simple explanation for non-economics types like me of why the linear graph is misleading and the log one is not?

Yes, living in a mostly unaffected area I find it a bit hard to connect to the scale of the event, even though it's happening on my doorstep. I can see some damage from where I am (like the river walk), but these pictures were actually very useful to bring home the scale of it.

Well the political hierarchy is something like:

- Campbell Newman, Lord Mayor of Brisbane - Anna Bligh, Premier of Queensland - Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia

I think it's pretty unlikely that you could pin the blame on any of them and they all responded well once the crisis happened.

The operating rules for the Wivenhoe dam (which is supposed to mitigate this kind of thing) decide how much water can be released and when, and that is set at the state level (i.e. by Queensland state government), so probably Anna Bligh is the easiest target in that respect.

I saw an official describe the dam operating rules as "conservative", but I'm not sure in which direction they are conservative - in the direction of minimising releases or minimising risk of overflow.

The last flood in 1974 reached higher levels in Brisbane, but I haven't seen anything explaining to what extent (if any) the flood levels were lower this time because of the dam? Would it have been even worse without the dam?

At the very least it let them control the flow a little bit so we didn't just get hit by a massive wave all in one go.

Further north there were reports of crocodiles swimming into people's homes. But not in Brisbane.

My bank in Australia, Commonwealth Bank, recently refurbished my local branch as a "flagship" branch, lots of TV advertising about how awesome the new experience is, etc. I thought nothing of it until the other day when I had to go to the bank. When I went in, someone greeted me about 5 seconds after I walked through the door, asked what I wanted, took me to the right counter and explained what I wanted to the person behind the counter (there was no queue - but that might have been good luck). I was completely blown away by the service. At the moment I don't think any deal from any bank would tempt me to switch.

So yes, I think UX innovation could add a lot of value to the generic bank experience.

I'm not sure how fair the cost comparison is. At the time, pretty much anything would have cost less in Spain - Britain was very expensive due to the high pound. A bit different now though.

I agree that T5 is pretty decent. The queues are short and there's lots of seating. Access by car is pretty decent if you're on that side of London (which most of the country is). Pretty much all I care about.

I generally try to avoid Heathrow T3 though (and T2 and T4 never seem to have flights to where I want to go).

For me it's a grey area. For a small specialist shop where I receive useful advice? I'd almost definitely pay the higher price in return for the service offered by the shop. For a bookstore where all I did was wander around on my own occasionally looking at product? I don't know. I'd like for book stores to continue existing, but I don't know if they're worth the premium.

In some ways, going to a bookstore for me is like going to a museum. I'll wander through the sections, stop to look at things that look interesting on my way around. Mostly I'll walk back out when I'm bored, but knowing a little bit more about what kind of books I might like to buy. Occasionally I'll buy something from the gift shop on the way out.

I wonder if you could operate a bookstore more along the lines of a museum? Or maybe that would be called a library.

Is there a good resource that explains the DL's approach to achieving this in a more practical way? "Train your mind not to worry" is great advice but not easy to apply without more specific guidance. He hints that his approach is called "mind training" and is a Buddhist tradition. Is that another name for meditation or is it something else?

I gave up on contacts - didn't like the idea of jabbing my fingers in my eyes every day for the rest of my life. I wear glasses all day every day, no problem. Thinking about getting them lasered.

I think it depends what's being posted. Facebook does it both ways - in a message thread it shows new stuff at the bottom, on the news feed it shows new stuff at the top. I think the key difference is where you have stuff that should be read in a logical order, it is easier to have it listed top to bottom (since the individual messages will be read top to bottom). Where you have stuff where you can pick up the thread anywhere (like a news feed) it makes sense to have the new stuff at the top where it is more visible.

> Sure, if I fired all the employees every few years I'd stay away from process too.

I think I'd do the opposite - if employee churn was high I'd want to be damn sure that well documented processes were in place so replacements could get up to speed quickly.

That poll's about a year and a half old - I wonder if it's changed much since then?

Unless you're away from your usual location for a couple of weeks, in which case this type of remote hosting is pretty darn useful (unless your primary computer is your smartphone, but not everyone has one).

> Theres no reason to force people to "donate" without bothering to talk to them or their families even once about it

I would have said a shortage of donor organs would be a reason to force this? Maybe not an acceptable reason to you, but still a fairly strong reason.