The small minority of designers with an axe to grind about skeuomorphic interfaces does not deserve a shout-out. Interface design is just generally bad on consumer products, trading long-term productivity for short-term accessability. These designers who eschew skeuomorphic design rarely are proposing anything of real value aside from asthetic alterations; they don't like putting spiral binder holes on the interface, waah. If they were proposing real long-term productivity improvements and had decent arguments about how skeuomorphic details are impeding this, then I would be happy to listen, but comparing these designs vs. the sorts of designs I see the anti-skeumorphic community proposing and it just seems like they don't enjoy the asthetic.

When, exactly, does the increased information density of grids really help? Grids obscure organization, making navigating through information-dense views worse. Sure, you have more stuff, but it is more difficult to find what you want. More does not immediately mean better and increasing the cognitive load required to solve a problem is not a reasonable solution to utilize 'wasted space'.

Icons are not incompatible with list views and neither are pictures. Scrolling through a list of icons means that the user only has to focus on a single column of information. By narrowing the parameters of the search (simplifying a large, complex visual field) the user's brain is less likely to be distracted by non-useful information. This is not an anti-icon complaint, it is an organizational complaint.

To be clear, I am complaining more about sorted grids vs positional grids, where the physical location of a thing in the grid is largely static and hopefully user configurable. I do have gripes with the latter, but they are not the subject of this particular rant.

Time for my occasional rant on grids.

Grids are terrible for displaying sorted lists of item collections. Almost all of the time, we sort a collection along a single dimension; a grid positions items across two dimensions, but that second dimension holds no information about the sort being performed. If you have more than a few items, your brain has to bounce back and forth and conform to the line breaks that the computer has chosen in order to find items in the collection. Displaying a collection in a table with each collection item taking up one row and attributes of that item can be displayed in table fields (a.k.a. columns) allows for easier, more intuitive searching of the list based on those field values. It also leaves plenty of room for textual display, which fits quite well in a long, horizontal space.

Grids of icons have been a blight upon GUIs for decades. Why do they persist?

Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology - Robert Sapolsky

Here is a no-pre-requisite course from Stanford on the topic of the links between human behavior and biology. Listen and be educated on how ignorantly these people are framing the issue.

The interrelationship between biology and environment are inseparable and the value of a set of genetic markers related to violence in humans would have such a weak correlation as to predict almost nothing, but the opportunity for social misuse is huge. We should do (and are already doing) research into these relationships including relationships with violence, but we must be extremely careful about what we expect to get out of it and how we frame what the knowledge means so that the public is less likely to do stupid things with it.

Of course it couldn't possibly be that classrooms are frequently designed for the efficiency of the institution over the educational needs of students. Lecture-based education, unaccommodating clasroom policies, instruction and assistance provided by persons with almost no professional education training, uninformative grading systems, a culture of shape-up or ship-out, none of these could possibly be changed without compromising the integrity of the program. The industrial organization of education can efficiently educate students well only by reducing the diversity of student learning requirements and that is most easily accomplished by rejecting input units which fail to meet specification. Don't you dare criticize this structure as to do so would only be dumbing things down and that is unacceptable.

As long as we are looking 'big picture'.

While critiques of this sort are still a bit controversial, simply because a lot of guessing has to be performed to account for various stages of the vehicles life, they also have a systematic bias which fails to account for an even greater environmental cost generated by the support infrastructure and social changes related to an extensive road network for personal vehicles. The environmental cost of so many roads covering so much of the landscape causing runoff, requiring maintenance, and leeching chemicals, re-radiating heat instead of trapping it in chemical bonds, and creating risks to wildlife is only the beginning. Medium density 'suburban' areas far from work and shopping, with huge, mostly unused lawns are much less possible without ready access to personal transportation and the infrastructure that requires supports and in many ways encourages lifestyles which use a lot of energy and harm the environment. That doesn't even include the cost to human health, psychology, and society, which are all areas where suburbia has received much criticism.

1. Extra cost from extra electronics.
2. Design compromises to accommodate the input type.
3. Software becomes increasingly designed to utilize this input to the detriment or exclusion of other input methods.

While it is true that people have very strange perceptions of the education system and the quality of education being administered, but that says nothing to whether there is a crisis in education. I am of the opinion that the information we track about education, including the information you linked to, is bizarre and is a very poor indicator of the performance of education to produce engaged, capable members of society. Just because we are doing better than we did and reasonably well compared to other larger developed populations at preparing students to recite information in fields defined for academic study doesn't mean we are doing a good job of aiding students in skills which will help them to live happier, fulfilling, more productive lives. How good is it that we graduate people who can name eighty percent of the capital cities of the world if they don't know how to defend themselves in traffic court or have a strong idea about their interests and abilities which they might be able to exchange for income or a litany of skills which impact nearly everyone's life? If we are measuring the wrong things what does it matter how we stand against the past or others? Our education system is in crisis because we never bothered to have serious discussions about what it should be accomplishing, and while 'education reform' in the United States (privatization and standardized-test-based evaluation) only reinforces this flawed system, this doesn't mean that education reform (generic) isn't necessary

One thousand years? Seriously? If we think that the planet we currently inhabit is going to become more hostile for human habitation than any other place in the solar system in the next thousand years, what sorts of scenarios are we talking about? Even if we got hit by another major comet, this planet ould STILL be tremendously more habitable for humans than anywhere else. What sort of extraterrestrial habitation do we envision that wouldn't be orders of magnitude less expensive without leaving the gravity well?

By far, the greatest threats to humanity are certain non-malevolent activities of other humans. Might some extraterrestrial science help in solving some of the problems created by these activities? Sure. However, we need to keep in mind that sending some 'seed' of humanity to space isn't going to improve the lives of other humans here on Earth. Thinking that everyone is better off because of the 'success' of a few is the very sort of thinking which makes it more difficult to solve the social problems which are causing us to think this way to begin with. So, as much as I respect cosmologists and other space scientists, they need to set their egos aside before making policy recommendations to improve the lot of humanity.

So, you can extract the hydrogen effectively from the plant material, but now you have the energy in a form which is difficult to store and transport. This still requires producing large amounts of plant material which is an environmentally difficult-to-sustain prospect in order to capture solar energy. In the end, it has nearly all of the problems of ethanol plus a bunch of serious ones for a smallish efficiency gain.

Why do we still not have a set of generic laptop form factors where we can mix and match components? And don't give me that 'cramming a bunch of stuff into a small shell requires custom engineering' BS. Laptops are already very similar in structure with compatible devices from other manufacturers and I fully expect that there would need to be a slightly larger range of form factors for these devices than for desktop PCs since the space trade-off is a bit more demanding, but it's not a tremendously difficult problem and ethusiasts would love it.

The argument was that when there is price inflation, hoarding cash is discouraged because it is losing value. You seem to understand the concept, but misunderstood the statement.

This is a bold statement which simply fails economic analysis. When money becomes less available for settling debts, then people who have debts become less able to service them, resulting in more defaults or the requirement for larger amounts of debt which generates more virtual currency. While we teach that saving is good in personal accounting, there is a reason that economists tell politicians that saving isn't particularly good for the economy as a whole. Appropriate amounts of positive inflation encourages people to either make their currency available through purchases or by lending it at lower interest rates. Deflation encourages hoarding of money and increases the cost of borrowing, which stifles economic growth.

Your cited Minneapolis Fed analysis is laughable. Linear regressions on charts of inflation vs economic growth? Without controls for government interventions during the event? Seriously? This sort of analysis shouldn't even be taken seriously at an undergraduate level, but unfortunately documents like this get produced all the time and get dragged to defend all sorts of preconceived notions.

How is it not designed to be deflationary? Introduction of new currency is designed to get slower and the presumption is that adoption will increase. When demand for currency outstrips supply, you get price deflation and everything about Bitcoin is intended for this result. Even if we presume that there is zero 'loss' of these, if things go as planned, we see deflation. Deflation leads to hoarding, hoarding leads to deflation and it all results in a bubble. Talk to currency traders and see what they think of a currency which increases eight-fold in less than two years. They will tell you that any position in it is simple gambling; can you force yourself to get off before the music stops?

While I am skeptical about a lot of things in this project, this likely isn't as bad as one might think. This is the full serial time to build all of the components, which could be parallelized, meaning that in production they would only have to worry about the single component with the longest generation time. This is probably still quite a long time using this technique.

This is an example of social scientists challenging a 'law' of the social sciences, namely that there is no genetic reason why almost any reasonably large population of people should perform significantly better or worse than any other and any discrepency should be attributed to other socio-environmental factors.

Compare, for a moment, to the 'laws' of the physical sciences. These aren't necessarily completely accurate descriptions of the universe, but they are persistently true despite numerous challenges and the scientific community has essentially decided that they will disregard all but the most compelling challenges and that people who try to advance uncompelling challenges regarding these topics had better be prepared to be publicly shamed for it. If you look at the example of the CERN faster-than-light neutrino results where the team responsible essentially said that they got a strange result, please help them figure out how their instruments are malfunctioning, we still ended up with denunciations from all corners of the physics community.

Even though social scientists work in a field where it is difficult to be anywhere near as certain as physicists and thus they tend to shy away from the term 'law', but this is a law which is quite defensible. The history of challenges to this assertion is long and storied with very little utility arising from it; every claim of the genetic superiority of some populations over others in social matters has been handily discredited as not able to isolate genetic and social factors. When researchers try to isolate social factors, they are unable to identify genetic signals on the population level greater than the (admittedly strong) statistical noise. Compare that to the history of social engineering which uses bad research in this area to claim legitimacy and the atrocities they cause, and we have an example of a very poor risk/reward ratio. It is only fitting that social scientists should demand that people making these sorts of claims show due reverance to the political implications of their statements and back their assertions with highly compelling evidence. As many of the other comments to this article note, not only is this evidence not 'highly compelling', it is downright poor work and by this measure deserves the shaming it is receiving.

If you ask people 'do you like generally non-controversial policy X', they will support it in droves. The public's ability to understand how much things cost, how much they are willing to pay, and how they should prioritize their concerns is a completely different matter. I couldn't find it in three minutes of searching, but Pew had a poll a couple of years back where the only category the US respondants could agree on is cutting foreign aid to cut the defecit, which is only because the budget doesn't have a line item for 'waste and abuse' which seems to be how most people think we will get most of the way to making debt payments. When it comes to public policy, most voters seem to be deluded, but we are particularly gifted in the land of the free.