Structured Procrastination
Not all procrastination is bad. One can efficiently structure it to be productive. It may in fact be key to great work.

Elements of Style Now Online

I've always depended on Elements of Style as a grammar book. It's now online.

'Nerds make better lovers'
- so claims this article.

Free Mac mini Desktop
Recently I've been making this pitch to my friends and their friends:

Hi friends and friends of friends! We're close to getting a free Mac mini Desktop, and we're sure we'll get it with a little help from you.

Yep, we're kuripot, they say. Recently we got free DVD rentals. So my partner Helen and I have been watching a lot of movies these days. If you want to know how, email us and we'll share the info with you. Good things are meant to be shared. :)

So here's the 'title belt' I'm going for this time: Free Mac mini Desktop! Of course it's a promotional stuff, but you don't have to eat their marketing bull$%17 nor spend a dime. How? Just choose the trial subscription of eFax, for instance, and cancel it before it expires if you think you don't need it. There are other offers, like the Blockbuster DVD rental that I got. But you decide for yourself.

So the promo is for FREE Mini Macs! No kidding! we've joined and we think you should as well... even if you don't need a Mac. :) Get it here:

http://www.FreeMiniMacs.com/?r=14202315

Thanks for your help in advance!

peter


PS
If you're still skeptical, my middle name is 'skeptical' myself. :) Isn't the deal too good to be true, I asked. Doesn't Economics tell me 'There's no such thing as free lunch'? Isn't it just another pyramiding scam? So I did research on this. Well, it turned out that the deal, IN FACT, is real. It's coming from a marketing company that's been handing out free iPods. See, for instance, the accounts from Wired Magazine and New York Times:

http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,64614,00.html?tw=wn_story_page_prev2

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0A13F63A540C758EDDAB0994DC404482

After reading those accounts, please tell me if the deal still doesn't make any economic or marketing sense. Ok?

Reductio ad absurdum in computing
This Kerneltrap interview with Richard Stallman notes of a technique (called 'dependency-directed backtracking') in programming that basically deploys reductio ad adsurdum:

'You make some assumptions, and with those together with some given facts you draw a conclusion. You may reach a contradiction; if so, at least one of your assumptions that led to that contradiction must be wrong. You also record which combination of assumptions actually related to the contradiction, so you can deduce that that combination of assumptions cannot all be true. Then you backtrack by changing assumptions, but you never try a set of assumptions that includes the combination that you know are contradictory.'