Stumax.com

Remember when billionaires used to give back to society by building parks and libraries and stuff? Good times.

While the Republican Party focuses on winning elections, the Kochs want to realign American politics, government and society around free enterprise philosophies that they hope to spread more broadly.

A key to accomplishing the mission, from the Kochs' perspective, is countering super PACs and other big-money groups funded by rich liberals, as well as allied public sector unions and academic and media elites. The Kochs’ allies feel that those forces have worked together for decades with Democratic politicians and government bureaucrats to institutionalize the philosophy that heavy regulation and taxation of business is the only way to ensure an equitable society.

The Kochs concluded that defeating this well-funded left-wing infrastructure requires tracking the professional left in real time – a capability they realized they lacked after the 2012 election.

Source: The Koch intelligence agency - POLITICO

This may be my favorite dialogue ever:

Brian Schmidt won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on dark energy, and then he took the prize to Fargo to show off to his grandmother. As recounted to Clara Moskowitz at Scientific American the airport security people were a little put off by the way the giant piece of gold sucks up all the x-rays:

"They’re like, ‘Sir, there’s something in your bag.’

I said, ‘Yes, I think it’s this box.’

They said, ‘What’s in the box?’

I said, ‘a large gold medal,’ as one does.

So they opened it up and they said, ‘What’s it made out of?’

I said, ‘gold.’

And they’re like, ‘Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?’

‘The King of Sweden.’

‘Why did he give this to you?’

‘Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.’

I spent some time following Zach Holmquist's lead this morning:

That was all I needed to have the lightbulb go off, and to motivate me to finally cleanup my TextExpander Snippets. No more ;; or ,, confusion. All I had to do was simply split groups of snippets into period separated by objects and functions.

Having a system makes easy work of repetitive tasks, and having a taxonomy makes large amounts of information easier to work with. Setting up systems and taxonomies can be daunting, especially because good organization schemes often don't reveal themselves until a certain critical mass of objects have been developed, at which point it often feels easier to just go with the ad hoc taxonomy that you started with. But it's worth spending some time to get your system in order. The productivity pay-off can be huge.

I go back and forth on the Apple Watch, but my first reaction was "I don't get it." Why would I pay $350 for something that doesn't do anything significantly different from my iPhone? Especially when I don't wear watches anymore? Why am I not excited about this? Do I just not get it?

This perspective helps clarify my thoughts: Where Steve Jobs called computers a bicycle for the mind, Jorge Arango calls the new Apple Watch a unicycle.

Unicycles share a few features with bikes, so you’d be forgiven for thinking they are similar. They are both human-powered and use similar components—wheels, pedals, saddles, etc. However, they serve very different purposes. Bicycles amplify human energy to allow the rider to travel farther and faster. Unicycles, on the other hand, are not transportation. They are entertainment. We stare in bemusement at unicyclists not because of the distance they cover and the speed they sustain, but because they can remain upright in a tottering one-wheeled metal pole with a seat on top. (Sometimes while juggling knifes!)

Read the rest. It's pretty bang on.

Oh, and FWIW, I think Apple Pay is probably the most underrated announcement from Apple last week. That's the thing that has potential to drive significant changes in behavior. If I had to bet, I'd say Pay will outlast and outperform Watch.

(via Bob DuCharme on the Taxocop mailing list; free registration required to read the article on FT.com.)

When you're on the inside of any system, it's hard to see things from other perspectives. But companies and organizations are starting to realize the benefit of making the effort to organize around how customers think of the information domain.

But a couple of years ago Mike Mack, Syngenta’s CEO, took the bold decision to switch tack. He realised that while the previous organisational map made perfect sense to scientists, Syngenta’s customers – ie farmers – looked at the world with a different lens. Most notably, they did not usually wander into an agribusiness store and say: “I need fungicide.” Instead they just said: “I want to grow better rice.”

So Mack reorganised the entire company into eight divisions defined by crops, not chemistry. Thus if you walk around the greenhouses, labs and offices near Windsor today as I recently did you will see chirpy labels saying “rice” – not “fungicide”.

What would it mean to flip the taxonomy at your business? Internally or externally? If we did that where I work, I suspect we'd streamline a lot of processes that we usually struggle with.

UPDATE 9-13-14: Bill Schrier says pretty much the same thing about governments: People Live Horizontally but Government Organizes in Silos

Daltonize.org: Daltonize in Google Chrome

I was musing that there must be a browser extension for people who are color blind that would render a page in black & white. (As you do.) I found this one, which looks pretty cool. There must be others...

Presenting Chrome Daltonize! as one step towards solving the issue of color-accessibility on the Internet – a Google Chrome extension enabling users to daltonize the image content of websites.  Daltonization is a technique of exposing details to color-blind users, enabling them see what they otherwise would have missed.

From Gaping Void's recent email: Instill Confidence.

"I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little, indeed, to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation..." That's Meriweather Lewis writing in his journal. It was his 31st birthday and he was in the middle of leading the Corps of Discovery across America on a mission of exploration and scientific discovery. Meriweather Lewis. Of Lewis and Clark. Not feeling terribly confident about his accomplishments.

We're all dorks, aren't we? We'll all find ourselves in some circumstance where coolness escapes us. If it can happen to Tom Brady...

Wow.

According to research done by AuthorEarnings.com, self-published books account for 31 percent of Kindle electronic book sales, compared with 38 percent for the "big 5" publishing houses, and added that self-published authors earn more in Kindle royalties than Big 5 authors, combined. And self-published authors are now earning nearly 40 percent of all e-book royalties on the Amazon.com Kindle store, according to research by AuthorEarnings.

via Self-published books nearly a third of Amazon Kindle sales - Puget Sound Business Journal.

I've had this piece open in a Safari tab for months and I regret that I've taken so long to read it. Adapted by Frank Chimero from the talk he gave at the Build conference in November, 2013, What Screens Want is an outstanding essay, both visually and conceptually. Ostensibly about responsive design and web and interaction design generally, the piece ends up getting at the heart of what this design is all about: making technology work better for humans. It's about how we're current trapped by a vision of the web that's about commerce and transactions and not at all about making the world a better place.

We used to have a map of a frontier that could be anything. The web isn’t young anymore, though. It’s settled. It’s been prospected and picked through. Increasingly, it feels like we decided to pave the wilderness, turn it into a suburb, and build a mall. And I hate this map of the web, because it only describes a fraction of what it is and what’s possible. We’ve taken an opportunity for connection and distorted it to commodify attention. That’s one of the sleaziest things you can do.

If you care about creating a better internet, take the time to read What Screens Want. It's well worth it.

File this under Hashtag Facepalm.

I fired up MarsEdit this morning to type up a couple of posts for this blog and found that my password kept getting rejected. It took me a while to realize that the Google Authenticator plugin that I had added to make my logins more secure was (properly!) keeping MarsEdit from connecting. The fix was easy once I figured it out. Here's how you do it:

Log in to your blog and go to your user profile. Scroll down just a bit to Google Authenticator settings. Make sure that "Enable app password" is checked, and then click "Create new password". Copy the password and then click the "Update Profile" button at the bottom of the page. (I missed this step the first time I tried and MarsEdit wouldn't connect.)

Then, in MarsEdit, right-click on your blog and select "Enter password..." from the contextual menu. Enter your regular username and the app password that you just generated. Voila! You can now access your blog securely.

While I was searching for how to fix my missing Dropbox contextual menus yesterday, I came across these handy links:

If you're a Path Finder 6 user, Thanh Pham has figured out how to make an Automator service that will let you share a public Dropbox link from Path Finder's contextual menu. More often than not, I find that I need to share files that aren't in my Public folder already, so I don't know how much I'll use this, but it's handy to have a bit of Dropbox integration in Path Finder nevertheless.

Bloodrop is a Dropbox droplet that I might find slightly more useful. Simply add the droplet to your dock and then drag any files you want to share on top of it. Bloodrop will copy those files to your Dropbox public folder and place links to those files in your clipboard. Easy peasy.

I discovered yesterday that my Dropbox contextual menus had disappeared. I have no idea when it happened. It might have been when I installed Mavericks... that's how little I use that feature. But when I need it, it's damned useful.

It took me about an hour of poking around the Dropbox forums (which were no help, ultimately) and trying various queries in DuckDuckGo to figure out how to get the menu options back. Hopefully this post will save others a bit of troubleshooting time.

I should have figured that Rui Carmo would have the answer. Here's what he said:

If you lose Finder icon overlays and context menus, quit Dropbox and do this:

sudo rm -rf /Library/DropboxHelperTools
killall Finder

…and restart Dropbox. It should ask for an administrator password to reinstall the Finder plugin, and all should be well.

Bingo. That worked! And (weirdly) it restored my ability to get proper public file links so I could finally find my Dropbox user ID.

Sheesh.

Amazing. This actually works: use your own fingers (or someone else's, I guess) as temporary reading glasses.