The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper is one of the best books on usability I've ever read. It's entertaining, highly thoughtful, and contains a lot of timeless lessons about usability and UX. My favorite story in the book is a case study of the software bundled with the Logitech ScanMan. They used personas to understand their users and strip out all of the extraneous features, and instead concentrate on making a much smaller feature set easier to use:

What surprised us was that every one of the test subjects expressed the opinion that Peacock was the “most powerful.” In literal terms of the number of features, this was far from true. In terms of effective power realized by the user, we had increased it significantly. page 141

From TFA: Facebook officials say their service is good for people. "Facebook can be like broccoli," [Facebook spokesman] Schnitt says. "Everyone can benefit from it but not everyone will want to."

That's very unflattering. Is that really how Facebook is perceived by the people who work there?

If Brazil borrows from India, it doesn't matter if those bonds are indexed in reals, rupees, renminbi, or Icelandic krona. Brazil can just go to JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, BofA, or any other bank with a derivatives desk and buy some currency swaps. As far as Brazil is concerned the loan is now indexed in dollars. The bank doesn't want to take any risks, so they'll probably go straight to India and sell them the other side of the swap, and India would be more than happy to buy it. The bank now makes a fee without taking any risk, and Brazil and India get the PR boost of using bonds indexed in BRICs currency -- without giving up the relative safety of using dollars.

You meant Ridley Scott and not Scott Ridley, right?

It's very likely that there were more than eight 8.5+ magnitude earthquakes before 1900. The Wikipedia you reference says "(est)" after those quakes because reliable global earthquake monitoring only started in the last century. Those eight quakes are famous and, deadly, and most importantly, directly affected (and killed) Europeans. The magnitudes were estimated from historical records.

There were certainly many more large earthquakes between 1700 and 1900, but they weren't recorded.

A little more info on large quakes (including references to the sources for the data on large earthquakes since 1900) here, if you're interested: USGS list of 8.5+ magnitude earthquakes since 1900

My life got a lot easier when I adopted the rule to never write anything in e-mail that I wouldn't want forwarded. Not only does it prevent the "reply all" problem, it also prevents the problem where the person I ranted to cc:'s the subject of the rant, either accidentally or as a way to stab me in the back.

Also, one thing I discovered is that while, as a geek, I chuckle when someone sends me an e-mail ranting about some idiot who deserves it, other (non-geek) people often feel uncomfortable when they see it. I think they now feel burdened with this new information that people that they work with aren't getting along, or something to that effect. My work life got easier when I stopped making the people around me feel uncomfortable, and I bet that my fellow socially awkward geeks would also see similar results.

Because she didn't ask me -- I only found out after she bought the thing, and it was clear she wasn't in the mood to listen, anyway. This was clearly about buying status, not a computer.

I think that you and I see eye to eye on these things. I wish everyone thought this clearly about computer purchases as we do. I happen to really like Apple computers (for various reasons I won't go into). I hate that they're overpriced specifically because so many people see them as status symbols first, and computers second.

I thought exactly the same thing at the time. I only found out after the fact that she spent so much money on something that she didn't need. If she'd come to me first, I probably would have told her almost exactly what you said.

It was kind of an education for me, actually. I was under the impression that people -- especially ones with limited budgets -- were careful with their money. It turns out that people spend money in totally irrational ways.

A year before the iPad came out, a friend of mine spent well over $2,500 on a MacBook. She saved money from her $10/hr job to buy it. A year later, asked for help writing a resume to try to find a better job -- and it turns out that she didn't even know if she had a word processor installed on it. Literally all she had ever done with it was use iTunes to play music and use Safari to check her mail, look at web pages, and watch music videos.

My friend really wanted an Apple product. She lives in Brooklyn, and she sees all of the other people her age covet those Apple products, and she wanted the status of being able to take out an Apple product in a coffee shop. If the iPad had been around at the time, she would have been able to save almost two thousand dollars, and she'd still end up with a device that serves exactly the same purpose: basic web browsing and video playing, with a big Apple logo that other hip Brooklyn people will use to recognize that she fits in.

I'm not sure if this can be generalized to all tablets in general, but I think it speaks to exactly the right price point for the iPad. It was a brilliant move for Apple to introduce the iPad at a time when people were starting to have less money to spend on computers. People who hesitated about buying, say, a MacBook Air could still buy the cachet of having the latest Apple product. And it hasn't seemed to cannibalize Apple sales at all.

(Disclaimer: I've used a MacBook Pro as my main computer for years, and I really like it. That may or may not have colored my opinion.)

Does it have a vice-mayor?

I've been that jerk in the past -- the guy that everyone listened to because I was right and came up with really good software, but people hated dealing with me and basically shut up when I was in the room. I slowly discovered that if I stopped acting like a jerk, people still respected me, but they stopped putting up a fight. People even went out of their way to help me. It was a lot easier to do my job, and I'm convinced that I was actually able to produce better code because of the reduced number of bureaucratic headaches.

I wish I'd figured it out earlier.

Hmm, on the other hand, I was asked to do more stuff because people were less afraid of me. So I guess... be careful what you wish for?