It Burns! It Burns!

Jul 4

Ukulele Orchestra of GB - The Good the Bad the Ugly (via ambergambler)

Jul 2

Standing Room

After about 8 months of work, I’ve finally launched Standing Room, my website melding music and math. You can read about it on the site’s about page, or at the official blog.

Bad Friendster, bad!

It appears that Friendster now defaults to making your profile public — even if you haven’t signed on for years. I haven’t kept up with it (and my email address probably isn’t even current), so now all my data is web crawlable. Would the sensible thing to do have been to default everyone to private?

The issue here is that they used to have a privacy settings that corresponded to “friends”, “two degrees away”, “anybody logged in”. Now they’ve swapped “anybody logged in” with “anybody on the selected continents”, and by default you’re viewable on all continents. Why couldn’t they have kept the “anybody logged in” setting and just added the continents one?

The result: I’m changing the privacy setting, deleting data, and telling friends — definitely not a net good for Friendster, or for me.

Jun 21

Driver's license & insurance Why Not

A “Why Not?” idea I came up with about linking driver’s licenses and insurance. The inspiration was from Charles Wheelan’s Naked Economics comment about how issuing driver’s licenses should probably remain a government job. I figured that you might be able to privatize the DMV if you effectively tied license issuing to a safety incentive. Who else has a better incentive to keep people safe and healthy than insurance companies?

Jun 17