It’s not that I am particularly interested in tracking Amazon’s bad behavior, but as a consumer who has become somewhat invested in their infrastructure, I do like to know all I can about the folks with whom I do business. Ethics matter. In this particular case, according to the lawsuit, Amazon raised its percentage of its take on Kindle accessories, from 8% to 25%, and then tried to bully a supplier, M-Edge, into paying more money for a period of time leading up to the change. When the supplier balked, Amazon threatened to de-list their products.
All posts in life
I have my great uncle’s Sheaffer pen and pencil set. Both have his name inscribed in the gold band that circles the middle of each pen, Bill Mayfield. I never met the man, but he clearly had good taste. He had a Sheaffer set and he married my Aunt Ann. Nothing more needs to be said.
One of the things most overlooked in discussions about search and searching is the fact that adjacency, also known as happy accidents, plays such an important role in some forms of thinking, and living. Yes, being able to drill down into results is something I want to be able to do, but I cannot enumerate now how often my own intellectual development was forwarded by a book that I found that wasn’t the book for which I was looking but the one next to it, or one shelf up, or one bay over, or one aisle over, or … “what’s this corner of the library full of” over.
Sometimes the web delivers similar results, and this is one of them:
Now I know what I am getting for birthday presents for family this next year. Laudun Cosmetics: Passion is what drives us.
From a notebook I kept in 1991, I find Capella’s Sevel Liberal Arts inscribed on the first page:
The Facts You Need to Know
- Music Theory: for singing hymns
- Geometry: for measuring things
- Arithmetic: for adding things
- Astronomy: for knowing what day it is
How to Use the Things You Know
- Grammar: for getting it right
- Rhetoric: for putting it in letters
- Logic: to explain things clearly
I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian, but you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school. As President, I'll end Obama's war on religion. And I'll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage. Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again. I'm Rick Perry and I approve this message.
This one has to be seen to be believed: Rick Perry on how gay people apparently undermine America.
During the holidays, I am re-working my home office a little bit to fit a bit better for the way I work and to have the kind of look that excites my imagination. One of the things I realized flipping through various catalogs is that, yes, the current fashion for natural materials does speak to me. Then again, I have always like the look of wood, stone, and glass. It’s what makes Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses so appealing, his respect for those materials and where a synthetic material is called for, it’s glass so that again the natural world can shine through.
I am lucky that my small office already offers so much of one of those materials, glass. Though only eight feet in length and width, one of those walls disappears thanks to a six foot square sliding door. Another wall has a three foot square window. The wall opposite the sliding door does not exist but is simply an archway giving onto a small hallway leading from the garage to the kitchen. On the opposite side of the hallway is a six foot square window giving onto the dining room. Above my head the roof slopes up to a four foot square skylight.
Right now, the walls are covered in a light tan that Sherwin Williams calls “Ecru” and which is almost ubiquitous in the house, a neutral tone we introduced to cover the bright white walls when we first moved in and which was meant to buy us time to think about more significant uses of color. The floor of my study is made up of white marble tiles with patches of gray and pink in it. I would never have chosen anything like it, but it is marble and it is already there. Why not live with it until winning the lottery makes money no object?
Until then, we are trying out some smaller changes, to see what effects they produce. And so with some Flor tiles en route, I just requested a tile sample from the American Cork Products Company: Iris Mocha.
The comet Lovejoy flew through the sun’s atmosphere a few days ago and survived. The event was captured by a whole fleet of Terran spacecraft: the comet’s survival was an open question. The NASA story has all the details, as well as Lovejoy’s history.
Wish your LED Christmas lights didn’t flicker? So do a lot of other people.
For those who love magic/illusions, the profile of Teller, of Penn and Teller, in the Las Vegas Weekly is a lovingly observed piece.
Window Farm
I think Lily and I should build one, or more, of these. Link.
Lily was counting down by one hundred this morning on the way to school and, without me realizing it, she continued by zero to count into the negative numbers. When I realized what she was up to, I started asking her about negative numbers: what happens when you add to them? When you subtract from them? After a initial stumble or two, she quickly got hold of how things worked. I asked her how she figured it out so quickly, and she responded, “Zero is a door, daddy.”
I’m always looking for printing options for photographs, especially around the holiday season. There’s a great review of the various on-line services on an Ars Technica forum thread and someone else has recommended Photos Printed on Canvas for, well, photos printed on canvas.
I rather like Patagonia’s Common Threads Initiative. They want to be a part of the four Rs of reduce, repair, reuse, recycle. Their commitment is to make clothing that lasts a long time and to repair it when it breaks. I recognize that their clothing is costly, compared to others, but if they can get their consumers to re-think the nature of consumption, perhaps the idea can spread up and down the tiers of the marketplace. I could almost imagine not despising the fashion world if it’s cycles were longer.
I did say almost.
Gandhi, besides being an adherent of simple living and nonresistance, also devoted himself to creating what he believed to be a perfect diet. The diet, later named the “Gandhi-diet” meant a diet which was environmentally acceptable, based on economical (low-cost) products, and healthy (allowing the body to perform at its best capabilities; thus keeping digestion in mind). The diet, on which he worked for 35 years, constantly re-evaluating and improving it for himself, consisted of:
- 1 litre of cow or goat milk
- 170 g cereals
- 85 g leafy vegetables
- 140 g other vegetables
- 30 g raw vegetables
- 40 g ghee
- 60 g butter
- and 40 g jaggery or sugar
- fruits according to one’s taste and purse
- 2 sour limes (juice taken with vegetables or in water, cold or hot)
- salt according to taste
