Alternately, you could try using larger icons. Then a whole lot of people on Slashdot and elsewhere complain that your user interface looks "childish".

On the face of it, this seems incredible. However, it's been pointed out that most radio stations that feature hip-hop and rap had middle-aged white men as program directors. And the hip-hop artists I've met, whether amateur or professional, tended to feature either religious themes in their music, or radical leftist politics, and tended to strongly dislike "gangster rap".

It ought to be possible to find some independent corroboration. I poked around They Rule, which diagrams relationships between members of boards of directors, but I couldn't find CCA or the larger music studios listed.

Only if you've internalized the concept of the number line.

Counting is concerned with discrete values. Measurement is concerned with continuous values. Consider counting sheep in a pen. You'd be using integers -- it doesn't make sense to talk about a fraction of a sheep, except as a joke. Each sheep is understood as a discrete entity, and the number of sheep will be a particular value from a discrete range of values. Now, imagine measuring out some rope. Say you measure out ten meters of rope. You know it's not going to be exactly ten meters -- it will be a little less, or a little more. You can trim off half a meter, a quarter, or any fraction, down to the limits of your perception. You understand the length of the rope to be a particular value in a continuous range of values.

In fact, underneath the unifying metaphor of the number line, we're still talking about different sorts of numbers. Integers are understood as a subset of real numbers, but there are reasons to make the distinction. It's been no small puzzle, to mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists, whether the underlying structure of reality ultimately resolves to discrete values or continuous values.

Years ago, a friend of mine worked for 'Ask Jeeves', which boasted natural language searches. It wasn't doing well in competition with other search engines; the assumption was that their natural language searches didn't work well enough to attract people to use it. My friend told me that, from their internal metrics, they knew that almost none of their users actually even tried to use natural language search terms; they just put in a few key words and hit "Go", just like they do with any other search engine.

Picking out the key words in a phrase to use for a search is a simple cognitive task that even small children can master, and it's actually easier than composing a complete, natural sentence. Most of a natural sentence is there to provide social context and cues about intentions that are irrelevant noise for a machine -- and often, we'd prefer to do without the extra work of providing that information.

Given how many times I've seen people in IT complain that they consider patching software, without extensive internal testing, to be an unacceptable security risk, and how often I've seen the same people deliberately use weak, shared passwords, I'd say there's some need to keep reinforcing the basics.

I don't know why this result is surprising. I thought it was generally understand that counting (there are 10 sheep) and measurement (this fence is 10 feet long) were distinct concepts. The point of the number line is to establish a relationship between the two concepts.

Come to think of it, it should be obvious that a number line relates two distinct concepts, just from the form they usually take. A number line, with its regularly spaced markings perpendicular to the main line, has a form similar to that of a line graph, which shows a relationship between two distinct variables.

That figure really surprised me -- that 79% trust the military, down from 80% in 2002, which is to say it's basically unchanged. It's apparently the most trusted social institution in the US listed in that survey.

I don't know what to make of it, but it does seem rather ominous.

As a socialist, I want state authority to be a direct expression of popular will. A state authority that is not an expression of popular will is not a state authority I want to "do more".

I'd rather Congress did more, if the "more" is understood to mean things like redistributing wealth through progressive taxation, providing desirable social services, and defending civil liberties. I'd rather it did less, if the "less" is understood to mean things like financing invasions and occupations, concentrating wealth through regressive taxation and subsidies to corporations, and undermining civil liberties.

The US Congress, in its present form -- i.e., the entire complex of legislators, staff, party functionaries, lobbyists, donors, PACs, and so on -- is so tied to the interests of the 1%, that it's starting to fail to even maintain the illusion of balancing competing social interests. It is not a direct expression of the popular will.

How to make it a more direct expression of the popular will, or alternately, how to construct a form of government that is, is no small question. But to begin with, I believe it's necessary to avoid the trap of accepting the idea that bigger or smaller government is, in itself, the issue, or even a meaningful question.

Among other things, a form letter suggests laziness on the part of managers.

There is such a thing as competent management, and much of the work of a competent manager is assessing the abilities, potential, and morale of individual members of the team. Firing people by form letter suggests that the managers aren't doing that assessment. They're likely hiring people, then ignoring them, and if they're ignoring them, they can't distinguish between a useless team member and an underutilized team member with great potential.

I was about to post that world peace and extinction are the only two we can be certain are physically possible.