Living by the precepts of Getting Things Done requires sorting things into one of four piles: Delete, Do, Delegate, Defer. Which is fine, as far as it goes, although you do need to stay on top of Delegate and Defer. The problem is that Google, and in particular GMail and Reader, make it so very ea...

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“People often assume that I must be some extremely moral person because I didn’t take advantage of the lottery,” he says. “I can assure you that that’s not the case. I’d simply done the math and concluded that beating the game wasn’t worth my time.”

Wired's story Cracking the Scratch Lottery ...

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I’m the kind of person who likes to do a little research, especially when reviewing books. Not for me the put-down (X fails to consider the reverse-Reimann manoeuvre and yet expects us to take his analysis of post-causal hermeneutics seriously) that is so easily countered (Y obviously didn’t get as...

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Listening to Lord Bragg and his guests discussing random and pseudorandom numbers taught me a thing or two, and raised a couple of “issues”. One, trivial, can be dismissed at once: why was there no discussion of the amazing prescience of the shuffle function on so many people’s iPods? Because it interests no-one except the iPod listener. Trickier was the way the various guests seemed to skirt around the predestination issue. In answer to the general question of whether, if you knew all the existing preconditions of a coin-toss, you could predict the outcome, the answer seemed to be a less than convincing “Well, you can never really know all the preconditions.”

OK, but ...

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Here’s a lazy journalistic trope: o·pin·ion / əˈpinyən/ n. a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge. I know of no other way to approach an “Opinion” by someone called Doug Saunders at The Globe and Mail in Canada. Saunders writes breathlessly about havi...

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