These are my links for August 25th through September 1st: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity First essay of the late Prof Carlo Cipolla.<br /> Law1: Everyone underestimates the stupid population. <br /> Law2: Stupidity is independent of other characteristics.<br /> Law3: A stupid person causes loss to others while deriving no gain or incurring [...]

Modern mobile devices (phones, PDAs, laptops, etc) could deter theft by all but the most hardened criminal, and it would only require the simplest of modifications to the firmware in many of the devices already on sale.

The iPhone has a quirk that is starting to become a hindrance. Every time the phone goes through a patch of dead air where there’s no cell signal, it pops up a dialogue box saying “network lost”. This obviously could be useful at times, but it’s bad for two reasons:

For the last few weeks I’ve been testing out some geo-tagging software on my camera. The concept is fairly simple, whenever I take a photo, the built-in GPS works out where I am and records this metadata within the photo.

On a recent train journey I overheard a conversation about someone who’d enjoyed the first class wine so much on a recent intercity journey that they had difficulty staying awake so as not to miss their destination. Staying awake is a problem for many commuters and for those whose destination is not the terminating station, [...]