Where Are My Teeth?

Reading is hard work

Thermos does his best to teach Skillet how to be a cat, but I think the fine points may be eluding him. Perhaps if they weren't reading a book about cheese things would go better.

Lightweighting

Lately for cleaning the catbox I've been using a stash of leftover grocery bags from shortly after we moved up here. They're stiffer and heavier than the ones the store gives out now (which are no less effective for carrying clumped litter). So every time I use them, I'm reminded of the continuing process of technological change. Each bag probably weighs some fraction of a gram, but when you multiply that by millions of people buying groceries every day, cutting 10 or 20 or 50 percent off the weight of your bags saves hundred of tons a year.

I've also noticed that this year's case of water bottles from Costco don't spring back as readily when you squeeze them. On the one hand I admire the engineers at the bottle-making plant, but on the other hand the Reuse part of my Reduce, Reuse, Recycle persona wonders if that's ultimately the most effective use of resources. I usually refill any given bottle half a dozen or a dozen times before sending it off to be chopped up into carpet fibers -- any pioneer or soldier of previous generations would have gone down on their knees weeping for joy to own a water container like the ones we now consume by the hundred of millions.

What if this year's crop develops plastic fatigue or goes Dali on us during a trip through the dishwasher? From the bottler's point of view that's a few more sales. And if most people -- as they do -- toss the bottle after a single use, that's less plastic used overall. But for me it rankles just the tiniest bit.

Tear down the Patent Office

According to this story Microsoft has just been awarded a patent for using different kinds of clicks -- long, short or double -- to launch different applications on "limited resource computing devices" such as PDAs and mobile phones. I would say I can't think of a stupider patent, but I probably can.

Single and double clicks, and click-and-hold have been around for what, 20 years? (Probably longer, but I don't have the details of the Xerox Star or Symbolics lisp machine interface at my fingertips.) This is just idiocy. I guess that if you were completely unaware of Moore's Law you could claim with a straight face that a Palm Tungsten E, for example, was a "limited resource computing device". The fact that it has roughly 128 times the RAM and 15 times the CPU of the original Macintosh -- which used different styles of clicks just fine, thank you-- and can display four times as much information on its screen would suggest otherwise.

And this is even before we get to the question of "non-obvious".