We still need to do this!

Shameless, destructive self-promotion
Originally uploaded by thetable

It can't go on. Tour group after tour group staring at South Hall day after day, desperately trying but failing to spot the bear.

Let's help them and promote ourselves at the same time.

thetable

I just had an amazing insight (actually, Bockwurst pointed me to it):
There's this desk at Ikea called "Hannes" (http://www.ikea.com/ca/en/catalog/products/70077576?ddkey=ProductDisplay).
But then, my nickname in a lot of places is "thetable." So that means that I am a table in more than one way.
OMGOMGOMG!

Set operations on email lists

I think someone should write an extension for Mailman or Majordomo to allow set operations like union (without duplicates) and intersect on mailing lists. Essentially things that SQL would support.
For instance, you have one list interns@company.com and another sf@company.com. To avoid having to maintain lists like interns-sf@company.com, you'd just write an email to interns%sf@company.com to reach all interns in the San Francisco office.
The API should be easy to remember, since people would manually compose these "queries" as part of the to-address in their email programs. Alternatively, there could be a web frontend (with live result preview, if subscriber lists are public) to make it easier to compose queries.
Another useful operation: rand(20,everyone)@company.com to send an email to 20 random people out of the whole company. There are definitely use cases where it would suffice to reach a few random people to answer a question without having to spam a huge list.

Now go implement it.

search nothing day

I had the idea of a "Search Nothing Day", analogous to the Buy Nothing Day as a protest against the dominance of big search engines and their collection of data.
It would also be an interesting experiment if we could get through a day without using search engine as a navigational tool (i.e. actually remembering or bookmarking URLs that we use).
It would obviuosly restrict business and research quite a bit.

something about gravity and mobility and the internet

Why the six Ds didn't happen

When computer networks hit popular culture, the notion emerged that space as we know it would - to some extent - collapse. Instead, we find ourselves in a cyberspace in which we, like entangled quantums, are able to stand in immediate contact with people ordinarily far away.

To speculate why the spread of the Internet did not bring about demassification, decentralization, denationalization, despacialization, disintermediation and disaggregation, it is useful to think of electronic communication as a cause for increased mobility, rather than the elimination of space.

Some phenomena, for example in today's economy, resemble gravity in phyics.

internet makes people, entitites more mobile

this mobility (less stickiness to physical places) enables people and entitites to gravitate more quickly