Etymological Dictionary

Etymological Dictionary - "This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago."

The Gettysburg Address: Powerpoint Presentation

The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation

Patent Law

This Essay Breaks the Law by Michael Crichton

If you invent a new test, you may patent it and sell it for as much as you can, if that's your goal. Companies can certainly own a test they have invented. But they should not own the disease itself, or the gene that causes the disease, or essential underlying facts about the disease. The distinction is not difficult, even though patent lawyers attempt to blur it. And even if correlation patents have been granted, the overwhelming majority of medical correlations, including those listed above, are not owned. And shouldn't be.

He is right. The faulty rules the United States has been slipping into greatly harm society.

Is the US Patent System Endangering American Innovation? (pdf format)

See previous post:

• The Pending Problem With Patents


• The Patent System Needs to be Significantly Improved

Tags: Patent

Good Neighbors

Amish neighbors take just one day to rebuild home destroyed by twister by Steve Koehler:

Debris from the destroyed house was spread for hundreds of yards. Some still hangs in the nearby groves of trees. Fences were torn down. Wash lines snapped. Two other buildings and an outhouse were wiped away.

All were rebuilt in about a morning.

It is a remarkable testimony to the Amish spirit and credo that neighbors help neighbors in times of need.

NCAA Basketball Tournament Challenge

Once again I have created a group on the ESPN NCAA Basketball Tournament Challenge for curiouscat basketball fans.

To play, sign in to ESPN and register, if you need to, or sign into your account (using the link at the very top of the page).

Once you create your entry, you will see a link to "create or join groups." Click that link. Then enter curiouscat in the find group box. Then enter cat as the password.

Good Luck,

Recent Reading

I have been reading quite a few interesting books lately. I just finished Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson (the main theme is global warming).

I think he is a great author but this was not my favorite book of his (that would be: Escape From Kathmandu). It was enjoyable but I really most enjoyed that he mentioned the Food Factory a hidden, great Pakistani restaurant a few blocks from the National Science Foundation (a central location for much of the action), and other such details.

Other books I have read recently:

• The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach (great)
• Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (historical look at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and National Book award winner
  
• Magic Street by Orson Scott Card which I enjoyed a great deal but I enjoy everything of his so I might not be the best judge.
  
• Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson quite good.
• Neverwhere by Neil Gaimain (great)
  

Panda Kindergarten Webcast

Can you get much cuter than this? Panda kindergarden webcast

Simpsons 'trump' First Amendment

Simpsons 'trump' First Amendment

Americans know more about The Simpsons TV show than the US Constitution's First Amendment, an opinion poll says.

Only one in four could name more than one of the five freedoms it upholds but more than half could name at least two members of the cartoon family.

Great way to make a point and jab at the Americans: published by BBC. I named 4 of the freedoms but all 5 Simpson's so I guess it is true I could name more of the Simpsons than freedoms. I think it is good to poke some good natured fun at how little attention we pay to important things: including the Constitution.

By the way those 5 freedoms are: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and petition.

You have to love that "about one in five thought the right to own a pet was one of the freedoms."

Also see: John Simpson

Customer Un-Service

Budget Rent a Car Topping Off Some Bills With Fuel Charge by Keith L. Alexander, Washington Post:

To help offset gasoline prices, Budget Rent a Car is imposing an additional $9.50 charge on all vehicles driven fewer than 75 miles.
...
"This is a convenience and time-saver for our customers," said Susan McGowan, a spokeswoman for Cendant Corp., Budget's parent company. "This is being done to recoup the cost of lost fuel."
...
"It ticked me off that after I told them I bought the gas, [the fee] still showed up. I had to go in and show them the receipt and everything," he said.

Does anyone believe the Cendant spokesperson? Given that they say make sure obviously self serving false statements why would any customer believe Cendant is interested in anything but tricking customers out of money? This type of behavior in my experience shows exactly why customers feel like they are being hustled by most large companies.

I would imagine all customers realize if a company wants to offer convenience to customers they don't impose mandatory fees then require customers jump through silly hoops to get there money back. Obviously imposing mandatory fees is done to take money from customers they would not chose to give you if you offered the "service."

It is so frustrating that companies behave like this, so much more often than in a honest open way.

Does anyone doubt that what most customers would like it for you to return the car and be charge the wholesale gas rate for any gas that must be added to the tank. The rental fee can include the time this takes just like it includes the cost of washing the car. Companies providing this un-service don't deserve to be in business. I just expect rental companies to try to rip me off every time I deal with them.

Google News out of beta

Google News out of beta. I am amazed at how good a job it does using alogrithms instead of editors to decide what news stories to highlight. It certainly could be improved but it is quite good. I would like it if I could rate news sources and give them more or less weight in my results (make them more or less likely to be returned).

Facing the CEO Pay Crisis

Solving a $122 billion problem by Marc Gunther, Fortune:

A strong believer in free markets, Cox said it's not the government's job to decide how much companies should pay CEOs, or whether pay should be linked to performance. But he also said that, if markets are to work, investors need "comprehensive but also comprehensible information" about the amount and structure of executive pay. These rules represent the first major changes in pay disclosure since 1992.
...
What's more, new research by Lucien Bebchuk, a Harvard Business School professor who studies executive pay, indicates that pay as a proportion of earnings is growing. From 1999 to 2003, the top five execs at the 1,500 largest public companies, as a group, took home $122 billion in salary, bonus and stock. That's not chump change.

Related posts:

• CEO Pay: Obscene
  
• The 5 most Outrageously Overpaid CEOs
  
• Excessive Executive Pay
  

Google for the S&P 500

Google: S&P 500 wallflower, Only 15 firms in the benchmark are worth more than Google. So how much longer will it have to wait?

Well I certainly thought they would add it last year, I was wrong obviously. I think S&P also made a mistake in not adding it. So now, I think it will be added in 2006, we will see.

Google Braille

Google's famous logo in braille - they made it the logo on their site in honor of Louis Braille's birthday. Pretty cool. They are getting some bad publicity recently but still they continue to manage to get an amazing amount of great publicity.

10 Stocks for 10 Years - GOOG, TM, PTR...

Ender's Game: Back to the Drawing Board

Ender's Game: Back to the Drawing Board, quoting Orson Scott Card:

Warner is still strongly committed to making Ender's Game into a great movie, and we agreed to another year or so of option, starting with a new script written by me (a page-one rewrite not based on any previous script, including mine).

Curious Cat Orson Scott Card Books

Google and AOL

Yow. Don't Jump the Shark, Google, by John Battelle:

First, I can't believe Google actual did what is claimed (my guess is, that it is a misunderstanding).

If Google is going to give certain AOL ads different treatment (showing them when their best algorithm shows other ads have a higher value), that would be stupid (the degree of stupidity would depend on the degree of favoritism they give, in my opinion - and not a linear scale).

It is possible to give AOL a better deal without altering the algorithm - such as Google taking a smaller slice of the profit on AOLs adds. So if normally the advertiser has to pay Google a 30% fee and Google made AOL only pay a 20% fee for the same dollars from AOL and the same ranking algorithm (if it were maximized for showing the highest overall value ads - as opposed to the highest Google profit ads) then AOL would get "priority" placement but within an overall optimized system. In this case you keep the algorithm in place for showing ads as if Google were taking their normal cut but then when "charging" AOL a discount is given (or Google "pays" the normal charges to the advertiser as the Washington Post article seems to indicate).

Essentially Google accepts less. They could also optimize the algorithm for Google's profit but I imagine they don't do this now. Otherwise volume discount agreements would not be worth much. Of course, I haven't given this much thought I might be missing something obvious.

But even if Google made that decision, stupid moves are not all "jump the shark" stupid. I agree that it is not the right term to use.

Also see: Google to Buy 5% Of AOL for $1 Billion

Very Cool Illusion

See this amazing illusion. Maybe you shouldn't believe what you see with your own eyes.

Sissel Ball Chairs

Sissel SitFit Plus

SitFit-Cover 13"/33cm

Or the more radical: Ball Chair
shown in photo. This might be a good gift for someone who has almost everything, what are the chances they have one of these?

Sissel exercise ball

The New Rich-Rich Gap

The New Rich-Rich Gap by Robert B. Reich:

In recent years, the top fifth of American workers has held 85 percent of the country's wealth. What I didn't predict was that the three tiers would change shape so dramatically. The top and bottom tiers are growing, and the middle shrinking, much faster than I expected. Symbolic analysts now make up more than a fifth of all jobs in advanced economies, up from about 15 percent 15 years ago. Their incomes in developing economies are soaring, relative to other workers'. In China, the wealthiest 5 percent now control half of all bank deposits. India's symbolic analysts are becoming a new national elite.
...
Yet unless the advanced economies invest more in education and basic R&D, they could lose their global lead in science, engineering and high-value-added production within a few decades. China and India are now graduating more engineers and computer scientists than are emerging from American and European universities. At some point, national symbolic analysts in advanced economies will lose ground.

The changes are happening much faster than I thought they would. And I think the predictability of what will happen going forward is becoming much more difficult. The system has a capacity for huge and rapid change.

Ireland Saving Microsoft $500 million in Taxes

US Multinationals Overseas Profits: Ireland's patent income tax-exemption may fund over 5% of Irish Government annual spending in 2006

houses an obscure subsidiary of Microsoft Corp. that helps the computer giant shave at least $500 million from its annual tax bill.
...
The Wall Street Journal said in its report that a Microsoft Dublin-based company that is used for routing patent a royalty income from overseas operations, paid the Irish Revenue $300 million in taxes last year.
...
In 2002, US companies reported $149 billion of profits in 18 tax-haven countries, up 68% from $88 billion in 1999, according to Tax Notes, which analyzed the most recently available Commerce Department data. This compares with a 23% increase in total offshore profits earned by US multinationals during the same period-total profits of US multinationals'’ foreign subsidiaries around the world stood at $255 billion in 2002.

Wealth of Nations

Quoting Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, emphasis added:

But in the present state of Europe, when small as well as great estates derive their security from the laws of their country, nothing can be more completely absurd. They are founded upon the most absurd of all suppositions, the supposition that every successive generation of men have not an equal right to the earth, and to all that it possesses; but that the property of the present generation should be restrained and regulated according to the fancy of those who died, perhaps five hundred years ago. Entails, however, are still respected, through the greater part of Europe; In those countries, particularly, in which noble birth is a necessary qualification for the enjoyment either of civil or military honours. Entails are thought necessary for maintaining this exclusive privilege of the nobility to the great offices and honours of their country; and that order having usurped one unjust advantage over the rest of their fellow-citizens, lest their poverty should render it ridiculous, it is thought reasonable that they should have another. The common law of England, indeed, is said to abhor perpetuities, and they are accordingly more restricted there than in any other European monarchy; though even England is not altogether without them.