I propose that rather than calling all women Ms. (Miz) and losing the information about their marital status, we should instead also begin to use different titles for men that indicate their marital status as well.

Master is a term “used as a courtesy title before the given or full name of a boy not considered old enough to be addressed as Mister”, (Three quarks for Master Mark!) so I suggest that we use that to refer to young unmarried males, perhaps abbreviated as Mas. if there’s no established way to abbreviate it. I’m not sure what we should call married men, but the first term that comes to mind is Old Man, which could be abbreviated as Old.

I just picked up the latest twist on micropayments from locke61dv…. My problem with requiring micropayments before showing content to the user is that it places information behind “walled gardens” and leaves it inaccessible to those who cannot pay. Besides, it just creates annoyances and headaches… it’s very frustrating if you can’t look at your favorite web page because you have to feed the meter again. Ultimately you’ll probably just go visit some other web page that doesn’t require the effort.

indieKarma isn’t so much about micropayments as microdonations. The content is there, free to read and enjoy… it just displays an ad banner inviting you to join the indieKarma network, an ad which disappears once you join this microdonations collective. From then on every time you visit a web page that is part of the network, they get 1 cent from you. This is probably less objectionable than Google ads, really, if they can make the ad banner less annoying. Right now it’s very annoying and pops up on every web page on your domain name if you put it in your website template. Once they tone down the annoyance level I’ll be happy to put it on one or two of my new sites which are under development.

In the meantime, go sign up now! The first 5,000 users get $1.00 free to use with the service.

In other news, I thought my computer was breaking this weekend, b/c audio was only coming out of one speaker… but it was a false alarm. It turned out that somehow I had just panned my speakers all of the way to the left in System Preferences. How do preferences change themselves like that? I don’t remember doing that and I can’t imagine why I would do that.

At any rate, in my panic over possibly having to leave my laptop at the Apple store for repairs, I bought an MP3tunes subscription, so that I could back up my music. MP3tunes is a music locker service which allows you to back up your entire digital music collection to a website, with unlimited space, and then allows you to stream remotely, sync your computers with the website, etc. If you know your internet history, the last time Michael Robertson tried to start a music locker service at mp3.com, he got sued into oblivion… here’s to hoping this one doesn’t run into legal trouble. Interestingly DVD Jon is employed by MP3tunes, so that company has more than one troublemaker under its roof.

I am waiting for:

(1) Kiko, an online calendar, to get iCal syncing. Once it does, I am going to start using it… unless of course Google Calendar or some other service gets iCal syncing first, in which case I’ll use that, but Kiko seems to be the closest. I really need syncing… the only reason I use Gmail is that I can use it with my POP mail client, Thunderbird, which means I can access it when I’m offline. (Note: I won’t *necessarily* use iCal, I may switch to Sunbird or something, but let’s face it, Sunbird is not getting the attention it needs, and Chandler is so alpha as to be ludicrous. There is no good open source calendar, at least for Mac OS X.)

(2) Songbird, an open source media player that is supposed to integrate with websites, to get a working Mac OS X build. Once it does, I will switch away from iTunes, b/c Songbird supports Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and everything else natively.

The best way to find out when these features come out is probably to watch their respective blogs… but I’m not really interested in anything that they have to say on their blogs until they have these vital features. Phooey… I guess I’ll subscribe to their feeds anyway.

There are increasing numbers of quality books available online at no cost. So many, in fact, that it is a mistake to go looking for them, since if you try to read them all before doing your homework, your homework will never get done.

Here are a few online books that I have read in recent weeks instead of being productive:

* Monster Island by David Wellington – This excellent zombie novel features several unusual twists on the genre. The main antagonist is a man who figured out that pre-zombies get their brains damaged when they die, and that’s why zombies are retarded when they’re re-animated. The solution? Hook yourself up to some medical equipment to ensure constant blood flow to the brain throughout the dying process, and re-animate as a smart zombie!

* Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi – The aliens in this book are a bit too omnipotent for me… I think they have a bit of the Superman problem, i.e. “How do you make overpowered heroes interesting?” There are no real bad guys in this story, and a somewhat disappointing lack of conflict. Nevertheless, the premise is fascinating, the storytelling is excellent, and there is enough character development and plot twistiness to make the book worth reading.

* God’s Debris by Scott Adams – Another case of “Philosophy 101” syndrome, which Waking Life also suffers from, but Waking Life is my favorite movie of all time, so that doesn’t immediately prevent me from enjoying God’s Debris. I think the lack of character development annoys me. Waking Life, the Socratic Dialogues, and many other excellent cases of philosophy masquerading as fiction have well developed characters with personalities and souls. The way I see it, if Scott Adams is just going to produce cardboard cutouts, he might as well have written it as non-fiction and dropped the narrative style. That said, I liked the ideas in the book, and I’m interested in reading the sequel.

* Continuity – A comic book about a girl who can’t sleep because horrible things happen when she does. I’m just unclear on why she doesn’t have any good dreams that produce good things (except possibly at the end?).

* Transmetropolitan #8 by Warren Ellis – I’ve read this and several other Transmet comics… Warren Ellis was enlightened enough to let this fan-posted comic remain online. I recommend anything Warren Ellis has ever written.

It’s a good thing Daylight Savings Time doesn’t “spring ahead” until after April Fools Day, otherwise everyone would think it’s a horrible joke.

CORRECTION: I wish it were just a horrible joke, so that I could go back to sleep.

Can anybody help me understand exactly what Digital Universe is supposed to be? According to Cnet it’s framing itself as a Wikipedia alternative.

At any rate, Lessig just joined their advisory board, so they merit a second look.

Some of you probably already know this, but here’s the truth: I’ve never used a medical drug in my life, except for anaesthesia during operations. Among other things, this means that I do not take antibiotics when I become ill.

One justification for my decision is that antibiotics are slowly becoming useless. What this means is that when you need antibiotics the most, they’re not going to be there to help you, but I’ll be fine because I’m used to fighting off diseases without the aid of antibiotics. If more people were like me, and antibiotics were reserved for life-threatening situations, then antibiotics would work better, and we wouldn’t have as much drug-resistant bacteria. Moral of the story: don’t use antibiotics unless your life is in danger, and maybe we’ll all live to fight another day.

Actually, there’s a less moralistic moral to the story: ban the use of antibiotics in feed for livestock, as suggested in the Slashdot comments. Bruce Sterling explains one way that bacteria get their drug resistance:

The runoff of tainted feedlot manure, containing millions of pounds of diluted antibiotics, enters rivers and watersheds where the world’s free bacteria dwell. In cities, municipal sewage systems are giant petri-dishes of diluted antibiotics and human-dwelling bacteria. Bacteria are restless. They will try again, every twenty minutes. And they never sleep.

Scary, and ewwwww.

Can you folks do a sanity check on this article from the Guerilla News Network for me?

Step by step, Iran is being set up for war. What difference does the provocation make? The determination to consolidate the oil reserves in the Caspian Basin was made more than a decade ago and is clearly articulated in the policy papers produced by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) The Bush administration is one small province away from realizing the its dream of controlling the world’s most valued resource. They won’t let that opportunity pass them by.(Annexing Khuzestan; Battle-Plans for Iran)

Does this make any sense? GNN is making specific, falsifiable predictions, which makes this article interesting even if it is incorrect.