Most of my books either end up under my bed when I'm not using them, or swap between my bed and my chair according to what I'm doing when I'm not using them. (I really need an l-shaped desk, because the half that's not where I am is useless, because my arms aren't monster-length.)

I'm also rather averse to owning stuff in general, so Ionly have a few that are special, and borrow the rest as Ineed them. (Owning stuff is so much work when you move or whatever, plus involves effort when buying them. It's not some philosophical objection, it's just not something Ienjoy/want at this stage of my life.)

Indeed. I don't feign ignorance; I am ignorant. I can use Debian GNU/Linux as a desktop to some extent: at least insofar as it's set up on my computer. I can poke at a Macintosh and until, omg, somehow something I did randomly made it work. I can yell at Ubuntu until it becomes like my Debian. But I can't use Windows at all any more; your average person knows more about how to make it work than me.

That said, I'm becoming less and less of a computer person as each day goes by, since I decided it would be so much more fun to be a luddite. But I'm still (or even more) a geek: I still check Slashdot, but only for the polls.

"Googling" is a standard term, and complaining about it is like complaining about people who fail to inflect adjectives according to gender.[*] Most phones with internet access are a bugger to use. At least, I've never been able to work out how to do it on any of mine (usually they hang). The iPhone isn't the first one to make it easy, but it's the most well-known, and they're all from about the same time.

[*]: Once upon a time---we're talking about a millenium ago, almost---you would through unsilent e's to the ends of most adjectives if they were refering to a noun in the feminine case. This is one reason why Middle English texts appear to have a lot of random silent e's thrown in for goode measure.

At least incarcerated people can get their freedom back (even if not the years they've lost). Dead people can't get their life back. Anyway, I doubt anyone (here at least) would hold America's prison system up as a model for foreign nations to aspire to. It's not as bad as the Chinese, but there's definitely scope for much improvement.

But if we use a logarithmic scale instead of a linear one...

(i.e. just because someone drew a graph that makes it look a bit like there's a relationship, just means someone manipulated the data to make it look like there's a relationship. It's one of the things you learn to do in the pesky statistics classes they make you take when you're a gradstudent so that you can get your papers published in journals. Of course, your real audience has all taken the same pesky classes and simply "unmanipulates" the data when they read the graph, so the only people who actually fall for it a commoners like you. But its commoners we get our money from, so we're quite happy.)

I can tell you north in the southern hemisphere without even thinking about it, and I'm always pretty much accurate (unless I'm lost in shopping centre or something). But this is all approximate and heuristic -- like when a good cook pours out two cups of flour and it turns out it is almost two cups of flour. Practice, not knowledge/algorithms. In the northern hemisphere, I have no idea. I can keep myself oriented, but I can't even pick south and call it "north" anymore (when I first got here, I could tell which direction was south so I just held maps upside-down, but now that doesn't help any more.) These days, I just define a particular direction as "I'll call this direction north to keep myself sane". In my current town it's actually north east, which isn't so bad.

(As for remembering directions and stuff, yeah I can do that without a problem. Possibly I'm excellent at it. Which is why I feel alarmed that I can't tell where North is; it's a bit like walking around without a clock.)