Text messages still overpriced

Congress, having fixed the economy and the environment and ended all war, is investigating text message prices. To be fair, they cost about 20 times more than they should, given the cost to cell phone providers of sending a text message. I think media companies are bastards who gouge us to get insane profits, while failing to invest adequate funds in journalism.

No home newspaper delivery Mon-Wed in Detroit

I guess I should have seen this coming, with the Christian Science Monitor dropping its print edition entirely.

The Detroit Free Press is suspending home delivery of its paper 3 days a week.

The downfall of journalism is tragic, and I hope society figures out a way to fill the void that dying newspapers leave. I'll keep my newspaper subscription for as long as it exists to subscribe to, but at some point I guess it'll just stop coming. I guess I'll have to start finding new places to get my local news.

Unethical pharma

Why am I not in the least surprised that pharmaceutical companies pay doctors to write favorable journal articles?

I'm in an uncharitable mood towards for-profit medicine anyway, but if doctors are going to be shills for corporations, I wish they'd admit it. If they're going to delude themselves that the huge piles of money they get doesn't affect their objectivity, then they shouldn't have anything to hide, should they?

Coffee grounds as biofuel?

Certainly, the amount of coffee grounds I compost makes me think the idea of turning coffee grounds into biodiesel is a good idea.

If Starbucks alone could process all their coffee grounds into fuel for cars, that would be good for the climate and good for geopolitics. And hopefully, good for Starbucks' bottom line.

Time Travel

Well, we may not be able to time travel in space, but we can on the web.

That video is pretty cool. It's an academic software experiment. I look forward to finding out what the interface gurus end up doing with it. At some point, time travel on the web is going to be awesome.

Checklists save lives

Just like in an airplane cockpit, a simple checklist can save the lives of hospital patients.

Particularly combined with electronic medical records, this is a great idea whose time has come. There are issues to be worked out, to make sure medical records are confidential and that appropriate checklists are used on the right patients. But medicine has become too complicated to try to do from memory.

Using Google to send secret messages

Google recently revealed something called SearchWiki, which lets you comment on various search results in Google for others to see. Among other problems with this scenario, one blogger realized you could use this technology to send a secret message. You could comment on several different search terms with different parts of your message, and it would only come together if someone searched for the right words.

Sadly, this is so widely remarked upon that the initial experiment no longer works. And I just made it worse.