(I received about three versions of this warning today. This one came first, from Harvey Newstrom of Extropy Institute, and is the most detailed.)

Yahoo has added a new section to your “Account Info” that requests spammers to send you unsolicited e-mail. They have set this on for everybody. Everybody’s default settings are initially set to “yes” meaning that everybody who uses Yahoo is allegedly requesting advertisers to send unsolicited e-mail to them!

Follow these instructions to turn these settings off:

• Go to groups.yahoo.com
• Click on “Account Info” in the upper-right corner
• Click on “Edit your marketing preferences” down under “Member Information” under “Yahoo! Mail Address”
• Click all the buttons to “No” for Special Offers and Marketing Communications
• Scroll down to make sure you get all the checkboxes
• Look at the very bottom of the page fto click “No” for U.S. Mail and Phone calls.
• Press the “Save Changes” button
• Click “continue” to confirm your changes
• Click the “Finished” button

Dave Krieger, whom I haven’t seen in too long, tells the tale of his role in the creation of Krieger Waves. (This is not new but I don’t remember seeing it before.)

I feel like mentioning, for no particular reason, that The Font Bureau’s Graphite Condensed looks remarkably like Walt Kelly’s Henry Shikuma’s lettering in Pogo.

The Space Elevator Comes Closer to Reality. (And with only three popups!)

Dragging lines up seems so inelegant, though, compared to bringing in a carbon-bearing asteroid and extruding the whole thing down. Maybe next time.

At a party in 1981 I predicted that within twenty years there would be digital music players with no moving parts. I was a bit worried there until MP3 players came along. (Good thing nobody remembers I predicted that such players would dominate.) But I didn’t expect downloading into RAM; I thought the content would be on ROM cartridges.

Medical marijuana refugees in Canada. So that’s what happened to Kubby! (Link from Alex Knapp.)

In the New Yorker, a review of The Myth of the Paperless Office. (Link from Monty Solomon on a private list.)

Paper enables a certain kind of thinking. Picture, for instance, the top of your desk. . . . The piles look like a mess, but they aren’t. When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behavior several years ago, they found that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of their piles. . . .

But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that “knowledge workers” use the physical space of the desktop to hold “ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use.” The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. . . .

It is pleasant to have my inability to classify my papers ratified – rationalized? – by a scientific authority figure.

Of course a desktop (even extended to the floor) is a limited space. Perhaps the killer app for VR will be bigger offices, with unlimited space for small tables among which one can ‘walk’ to find the right pile of papers. (For better visual memory cues, the space ought to have some arbitrary shape features: tables of different sizes and heights, wall decor and so on.)

But I’ll probably still wish for an AI assistant to help organize the stuff.