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	<title>notabilia.us</title>
	<link>http://notabilia.us/blog</link>
	<description>occasional musings on things of interest</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 23 Nov 2011 06:21:24 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>The Individualist Fallacy</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Why do some people believe in laissez-faire capitalism, opposing wealth redistribution or limits on the ability of the rich to unfairly exploit their existing economic power? Self-interest is obviously the dominating factor. You don&#8217;t meet a lot of poor capitalists, and everyone knows that rich socialists are consciously rejecting their best economic interests. But in [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/the-individualist-fallacy/</link>
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		<title>David Deutsch&#8217;s Cosmic Take on Knowledge</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This amazing cosmic conception of knowledge starts at 6:15. Billions of years ago, and billions of light years away, the material at the center of a galaxy collapsed towards a super-massive black hole. And then intense magnetic fields directed some of the energy of that gravitational collapse. And some of the matter, back out in [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/david-deutschs-cosmic-take-on-knowledge/</link>
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		<title>A Call to Sustainable Action</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In the past few years, global warming has failed to reach critical mass in the mainstream consciousness, even as (or perhaps precisely because) the evidence has become increasingly clear that we have passed the tipping point after which it is impossible to avoid exponentially synergistic positive feedback effects that will lead to an unimaginably hellish [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/a-call-to-sustainable-action/</link>
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		<title>Piracy</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I hope the following is a reasonably good summary of the intellectual property dilemma and what forseeable courses of action there are. I wrote it a few months ago and decided to post it after talking to some people about the recent JSTOR case. &#8211; &#8211; Today, vast numbers of people obtain music, movies, software, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/piracy/</link>
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		<title>Idea Dump</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Since I believe in freely sharing ideas for the benefit of everyone, may the best execution win, I&#8217;m going to share a couple decent non-revolutionary low-risk/low-reward ones that have been nagging me for a while now. Yell at me if I haven&#8217;t done at least one within a couple months. Soulver meets Etherpad Soulver is [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/idea-dump/</link>
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		<title>Collective Action and the Future of Humanity</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In a previous post, I argued for the irrationality of voting. I have since discussed this issue with a number of people and brought up analogous collective action problems where individual action is irrational, like carbon emissions reduction, and contrasted them with problems where individual action is a moral imperative, like meat-eating. Is it wrong [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/collective-action-and-the-future-of-humanity/</link>
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		<title>Semantic Market &#8211; An Exchange for Everything</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Investors have exchanges for lots of things, like stocks, currencies and commodities.  They place buy and sell orders indicating what they want to exchange and at what price, and the exchange automatically executes a transaction whenever compatible buy and sell orders are outstanding. (I&#8217;m not an investing geek, so forgive me if this is somehow [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/semantic-market-an-exchange-for-everything/</link>
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		<title>Dangerous Beliefs</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Inspired by this prompt, I&#8217;m going to publicly state some random politically incorrect beliefs of mine. Beliefs that aren&#8217;t rationally justified should be roundly ridiculed if the person who holds them asserts even their slightest applicability to a real problem.  Irrationality is not just silly, it is dangerous and the number one thing holding back [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/dangerous-beliefs/</link>
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		<title>Books</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Sometimes I lament the fact that the Internet killed my appetite for long-form writing. I still like books and I buy a lot of them, but the majority sit unread on my bookshelf as a reminder of what I think I should read. Then I realize that there&#8217;s really nothing special about book-length writing. I [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/books/</link>
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		<title>Some Profundity from Richard Feynman</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The question of whether or not, when you see something, you see only the light, or you see the thing you&#8217;re looking at, is one of those don&#8217;t-be-philosophical things that an ordinary person has no difficulty with.  Even the most profound philosopher, sitting eating his dinner, has many difficulties.  What he looks at perhaps might [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/some-profundity-from-richard-feynman/</link>
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		<title>My Musical Genealogy</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Some time ago, I created a pedigree tree that shows the musical genealogy of my former piano teacher, Monica Tessitore. It represents teacher-student relationships as arrows going from top to bottom, converging on the subject of the tree. These links don&#8217;t really mean that much because inheritance (of ideas/ideologies, style, technique, etc.) in music education [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/my-musical-genealogy/</link>
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		<title>Kurzweil&#8217;s Sixth Epoch: Waking Up the Universe</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The inventor, futurist, and singularitarian Ray Kurzweil is a genius of the first rate, and one of his most intriguing ideas, expressed in his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, is that the past and future history of the universe can be divided into six epochs.  To futurists the first five epochs are unsurprising &#8211; [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/kurzweils-sixth-epoch-waking-up-the-universe/</link>
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		<title>Is Facebook Bad?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Over the past few months, I have increasingly begun to worry that Facebook is not merely a benign way to connect with friends, but in fact troubling evidence of significant societal changes in our attitudes about social interaction, privacy, and more.  When I say Facebook, of course, I also mean social networking websites in general, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/is-facebook-bad/</link>
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		<title>YouTube Scrobbler GreaseMonkey Script</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Today, I found an answer to one of my longest-standing wishes, the ability to scrobble YouTube videos on Last.fm, and I&#8217;m so excited that I want to share it.  With this GreaseMonkey script (that page has screenshots), you can scrobble any YouTube video you are listening to by manually entering the information.  (You will, of [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/youtube-scrobbler-greasemonkey-script/</link>
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		<title>WebMynd Releases New Must-Have Search Plugin</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In early 2008, the company WebMynd released a Firefox plugin that archived screenshots of your browsing history so you could visually navigate through your history to find pages you have visited.  I tried it out and thought it was a nice idea, but I didn&#8217;t find it useful enough to make it worth the large [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/webmynd-releases-new-must-have-search-plugin/</link>
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		<title>Google Finally Adds Offline Support to Gmail</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Today, Google added long-overdue support for offline message-caching in Gmail using their Google Gears browser plugin  (read more at TechCrunch). The importance of this for Google&#8217;s business strategy cannot be emphasized enough.  Gmail is one of Google&#8217;s most widely used services and one of their top brands, and they were really lagging behind competitors such [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/google-finally-adds-offline-support-to-gmail/</link>
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		<title>How to Rapidly Add Twitter Followers</title>
		<description><![CDATA[After seeing Kevin Rose: 10 Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers in TechCrunch, I decided I&#8217;d get around to writing this.  I recently did some work for a web startup that resulted in me bringing their Twitter account&#8217;s follower count from 0 to well over 300 in about five hours of work, more than 1 [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/how-to-rapidly-add-twitter-followers/</link>
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		<title>Resolutions</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I have many things on my todo list for the indeterminate somewhat-near future, but two of my new year&#8217;s resolutions that will involve regular effort during 2009 are: Read 50 books.  Recent discussion about the effect of web-surfing on the brain&#8217;s text-processing made me realize that I don&#8217;t read books much anymore.  The ability to [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/resolutions/</link>
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		<title>Idea for a Counter-procrastination Software Aid</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Like most people, but probably to a greater degree than most, I am a serial procrastinator.  We all must find a way to gain the willpower to do our work first, and what we want to do later.  I am not that strong of a believer in self-improvement material when it comes to procrastination, because [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/idea-for-a-counter-procrastination-software-aid/</link>
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		<title>Is Joe Wurzelbacher Related to Charles Keating?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I am attempting to answer this Genealogy Challenge regarding the potentially significant relations of (Samuel) Joseph Wurzelbacher, &#8220;Joe The Plumber&#8221; mentioned in the last presidential debate.  More info and polish to come as I find more and if I find anything definitive. Robert M. Wurzelbacher, Sr. is listed at age 5 in the 1930 Census [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/is-joe-wurzelbacher-related-to-charles-keating/</link>
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		<title>JavaScript in Emails</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Obviously, no one runs JavaScript in emails for security reasons.  But wouldn&#8217;t it be nice to be able to have AJAX in emails, thus meaning one could, for example, accept a facebook friend request without having to navigate away from the notification email?]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/javascript-in-emails/</link>
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		<title>Thoughts on Note-taking Software</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I recognize this post is rather rambling and unpolished/unedited; I just wanted to get some thoughts down. There are many decent notetaking programs for Linux, including NoteCase, KnowIt, BasKet, Wyneken and others; other solutions such as a wiki, text-file, Tomboy notes, or sticky notes can be used. However, none of them are built specifically for [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/thoughts-on-note-taking-software/</link>
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		<title>Minimum Wage</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I was thinking about how minimum wage laws are essentially a redistributive tax because by requiring corporations to pay minimum wage for jobs that would not be paid minimum wage in an unrestricted free market, they are probably forced to slightly decrease the wages of non-minimum wage earners. I think much of the media narrative [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/the-minimum-wage/</link>
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		<title>Phantom Vibrations&#8230; In My Pants</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Isn&#8217;t it interesting how once you&#8217;ve used a cell phone with vibrate mode, you occasionally feel something vibrating in your pocket when nothing really is? At least, that is what now happens to me.]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/phantom-vibrations-in-my-pants/</link>
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		<title>E-Textbooks on the Horizon?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve been wondering lately about how the college used textbook market might be able to be further optimized, but one thing I hadn&#8217;t thought of is the obvious possibility of using e-book readers.  Some interesting links on the subject I came across today: Amazon to Target $5.5 Billion Textbook Market with New Kindle?, TechCrunch E-Textbooks [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://notabilia.us/blog/e-textbooks-on-the-horizon/</link>
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