Fire and Knowledge

If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can’t be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?

—Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1981; orig 1936), p. 116.

I recently learned how to automatically increase dates in excel. Here’s how to do it:

1. Put the starting date and the first increment in two rows (ex: Row 1: 5/1/08 Row 2: 5/2/08).
2. Select the two rows.
3. Move your mouse to the bottom right corner of the second row. The cursor should turn into a plus sign.
4. Move the plus sign down until the dates have incremented to where you want.

This can be done for days, weeks, months, years, etc.

What do you think — do corporate lobbies subvert democracy, or are they a necessary part of our political process and economy?

There’s a difference between a corporate lobby whose clout is based on money alone, and a group of like-minded individuals—whether they be textile workers, gun aficionados, veterans, or family farmers—coming together to promote their interests; between those who use their economic power to magnify their political far beyond what their numbers might justify, and those who are simply seeking to pool their votes to sway their representatives. The former subvert the very idea of democracy. The latter are its essence.

—Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (2006), p. 116

Johann Hari has written up his experience with Provigil, a “smart drug” that increases memory and concentration.

Next time you need to ask for a donation, consider modeling your request on this awful piece of work:

Seeing that nobody donates nothing (logical and normal). Lately I consider that I cannot be eaten the keyboard to live, so I have begun to make a Web of contacts, which she is very generic and that each one finds something that fills in its day to day, friendship, love, a site of char them, cotilleo, marujeo, not, that is not centered in the love like the majority, but that is generic. Of there, I hope to be removing something from money that cheers a little to me and perhaps it causes that I follow with projects of free software. Asi that I leave the page here that is, hoping that if sees in lack something, any thing that could be improved, that suggests it.

MonoCalendar is free software. Your you do not have to pay nothing to use MonoCalendar and you did not find spyware, adware or some other publicity in MonoCalendar. Like in any type of project, to make MonoCalendar it has been long dedicated time, and still more, pays a dominion, a servant, Internet, light and any thing that can arise. For that reason, it is thanked for to all that that can help very with a donation by peque&ntiled;a that is, please, you do a small donation so that projects as this they can exist. Thanks.

Now doesn’t that build confidence and motivate you to donate? I’m sure you can’t wait to help offset the costs of dominion and servitude.

Things that matter most
Must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.

—Goethe, as quoted in Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More With Less (1998), p. 164