PUBLIC MARKS with search money

A lot of cafes and small restaurants will let people hang out because they attract other people,” said Yannis M. Ioannides, a professor of economics at Tufts University. “What is unusual and new is that Facebook takes access to information about these people to make its business more powerful.” He added: “The proprietor of a cafe doesn’t use personal information about me and my friends to make money.”

If it sounds like I'm saying Apache was a mistake, I'm not. Apache was a big part in the success of CouchDB, without it CouchDB would not have enjoyed the early success it did. But in my opinion it's reached a point where the consensus based approach has limited the competitiveness of the project. It's not personal, it's business.

We pay some people to be Big Thinkers for us, but mostly they just say things that please people with money. It pleases the money folk to think that the wild and crazy and unregulated world of the web is no longer threatening them. That users are happy to live in a highly regulated, Disneyfied app space, without all that messy freedom.   I'll stay with the web. 

We have to stop throwing good money after bad. It is time to instead build what the market wants: mixed-income, walkable cities and suburbs that will support the knowledge economy, promote environmental sustainability and create jobs.

For my money any tool or Web framework worth writing your code inside out for should fire up a dentist's drill, slap you around the face and repeatedly ask IS IT SAFE? until it GET's a straight answer.

In contrast to mash terracing, which attempts to passively aggregate land by building up strategically arranged earth forms that require significant time, specialized labor, earth movers,  raw building material, and  money to create their foundation, the floating island technique (should it prove successful in the dynamic Mississippi Delta) literally builds from the top down, using a more passive biotic process of roots grafting themselves into the receding aqueous ground, thereby creating a vertical mesh that builds upon itself. The islands themselves can be assembled and put in place in a single day with improvised ‘off the shelf’ materials, making them incredibly close to open-source, do-it-yourself  land reclamation within the eccentric industrial legacies of the delta. 

Some level of denial and panic may be inevitable at this juncture. More encouraging was the black humour that dominated the day, as in comments about the funny kind of economy we have nowadays, when money so rarely changes hands.

Books need to be a predictable size; they have to be manufactured to a price, stored, transported and displayed. Then they have to fit on home bookshelves. People tend to like books that are easy to read, handle, and store. We generally like and need novels to be certain sizes. If you picked up a diary-sized novel in a series one day and the sequel was the size of a family bible, you'd probably find that annoying. I know many readers won't buy hardcovers and wait for mass market paperback editions simply because the regular size of "MMPBs" fits their bookcase, or is easier to carry around.

So, production editors and typographers do a very clever job of smoothing out that big variation using white space and font sizes to get more words on each page - or fewer. They're so good at doing it that a manuscript of 100,000 words can be made into a book that is identical in overall size to one up to twice the length. Don't believe me? Pick a few books at random, do a word count, and then look at the appearance of the pages. You won't notice it unless you're looking for it.

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Page count doesn't mean a thing. It doesn't tell you how much book you're getting for your money. And, to be brutal, if your evaluation of any book is based on how many words you get rather than the impact it has on you and how well it's written - well, that's just dumb. Sorry, but it is. It's not like a pound of apples for 50 pence being better value than a pound for 75 pence. You're not being short-changed if you get a shorter novel. And left wanting more is not being short-changed. It's what good books are supposed to do.

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So don't get hung up about counting pages. A book is as long as it needs to be to tell the story. Just open it, and enjoy.

Later, while wandering through an electronic goods store, he says, "I don't want my world to stop and start at the world of money, or power."