Thumbing: blaming devices instead of ourselves

Remember when "thumbing" meant you were acting like Fonzi or hitchhiking? If you own a smart phone you might be tempted to add a postscript to all of your messages to excuse your poor typing. Don't. Spend the extra minute re-reading your note. I swear you'll sound smarter.

Here is a sampling of disclaimers I've had land in my inbox recently:

• Warning: Phone keyboards cause typos.
• typed on a phone
• Sent on-the-go
• Thumbed on a phone
• two thumbs on a tiny keyboard
• Typed on an exasperatingly small keyboard
• sent while mobile
• Typed on a phone with British spell check
• sent from big thumbs on a small phone

FYI, Typed on a flat surface with short stroke depths and no carriage returns...

Michael

Wrong Kind of Sauce

Ironic? Authentic? Neither works for me. This is a storefront of an Italian chain in Palo Alto. If it were a hotel I'd be into it. Pizza needs something different: Hot Cheese.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Law of Diminishing Returns

There is a point at which increased effort and expenditure are not commensurate with improvement of a desired outcome. In other words the value decreases while the effort increases. This recent National Geographic infographic shows this fully played out in the health care debate. The U.S. spends more than any other country on health care, yet our life expectancy is lower than many developed and developing nations. Why?

 

Cop outs for COP15

By Joel Pett, Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, Cartoonists and Writers Syndicate, for USA TODAY

A few days before Christmas I went shopping in Harvard Square to pick up a few stocking stuffers. As I came out of the T I was greeted by a group of college girls bearing posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache superimposed on his face and the canned line, "The climate sure has changed for Obama hasn't it?" Their demonizing is stupefying and revealing of this age's fickleness. It's not just the libertarians that are upset though — it seems like the whole world has decided to point its finger to the West for Copenhagen's failure. It's easy to see our fault in sidelining the issue for an overdrawn debate on marginally improved health care while the rest of the world moved on an agenda that's been years in planning. But that's politics, and as I learned this summer, the same self-serving agendas play out the world over. While we were infighting, China played their cards well and got what they wanted. The Guardian has posted an excellent account of how it went down here.