“Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them...”

“Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them...”  This morning I stumbled across one of my favorite passages from one of my favorite Richard Feynman books (Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!):

There were a lot of fools at that conference -- pompous fools -- and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools -- guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus -- THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn't a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible! And that's what I got at the conference, a bunch of pompous fools, and I got very upset.

Organic food...

Organic food ... isn't all it's cracked up to be.  I think this has been obvious to every farmer (or anyone who knows anything about farming) since the beginning of the organic food craze.  As P. T. Barnum said: “There’s a mark born every minute!”

Tag and release program...

Tag and release program ... for studying American consumers.  Ha!

“I’m feeling lucky...”

“I’m feeling lucky...”  What if quality journalism isn't?  That's the title of an article by Thomas Baekdal, and it includes an interesting use of the phrase I used for this post.  If he just deleted the first two words from his article's title, he'd nail it :)

Coming soon to a Google map near you...

Coming soon to a Google map near you ... high resolution satellite imagery updated at least three times a day.  Today the frequency of Google Maps' imagery updates varies wildly, depending on where you're looking.  At our home in Jamul, it's only a couple times a decade.  Once the Skybox imagery is integrated with Google Maps, the updates will be roughly 1,500 times more often.  This is the sort of thing that you can handily predict will be continuously improved (by adding more satellites) as demand rises, and it seems inevitable that it will.  Google is likely to application developers to access this imagery (through APIs), which will drive demand rapidly – just as APIs for the existing maps and imagery drove demand for Google Maps. 

These are amazing times we live in...

Steve McIntyre brings nuclear weapons to a knife fight...

Steve McIntyre brings nuclear weapons to a knife fight...  Though in his case, the “nuclear weapons” are all in his little gray cells.  I almost feel sorry for his target.  Mostly, though, Steve's analyses increase my appreciation for the high value of skepticism – in science and in everyday life...