ProcessAgentPart

At the nine hours capsule hotel, the answer is apparently one.

Quite seriously, though, I do love the look of this little room.

Something about this makes me feel as though anyone falling asleep here could easily wake up in orbit around Jupiter.

This may be the best web tool I have ever used.

One of the difficulties with open-source software is the sheer number of fingers that work their way into the pot. It’s hard to have an overriding design vision in a distributed development environment. I’m a huge supporter of open-source software, but rarely find myself actually using it. This mouse is the only reason why that I’ll ever need to point to:

Believe it or not, that little nub you see on the left side of the device (top of pic) isn’t a button. It’s a joystick.

I shouldn’t be too snarky — I imagine if someone actually devoted the time to learning how to use this thing it could be useful. The FAQ says you can learn it in as little as two days. But really, isn’t there something wrong with the idea of an input device that takes two days to learn?

It also seems to me that charging $74.99 for such a beast goes somewhat against the grain of the open-source movement (especially given how cheap it looks). That’s $5 more than Apple’s Magic Mouse! Shouldn’t they just have released the design specs and let everyone build their own?

Source here, via Engadget.

The Cascade Policy Institute, which Wikipedia tells me is a “non-profit, non partisan libertarian” think tank, has released a study informing the world that driving has a direct causal link with GDP. Yes, that’s right! If American’s for whatever reason start to drive less (say, for example, by choosing to live closer to their jobs), then over the long term, “GDP will drop by about 46% of the rate of VMT [vehicle-miles-travelled] decline”. Unfortunately, a quick Google search didn’t pull up the paper, but really, doesn’t this explain so much? For example, between November 2007 and October 2008, Americans drove nearly 100 billion fewer miles than over the same period a year prior. And what else happened during that time, starting around December 2007? We entered a recession! Finally, it’s all explained. We had a global recession because, for some reason, people drove less. The financial implosion? One can only assume that Lehman would not have collapsed had we just kept on driving.

Regardless, now that we are armed with this knowledge the way out of the recession is clear. We need people to drive more! There are so many ways we could do this. We could force people to live farther from work. Or we could increase the length of the roads (perhaps the stimulus package should have gone to making straight roads curvy). Carpooling could be made illegal. And those of us who live take public transportation or (gasp!) walk to work should buy a car and drive, even if it’s just a mile or so.

It’s our duty. Otherwise, this recession will never end.