[Walddk]

Gerber & Flannery with Capp and Fishbein in hot pursuit.

Curlers are also pretty useless with the hairstyle I have

Roland

[MickyB]

I agree that Curlers are useless, but they do have cool shoes - one slides, one sticks! Genius!

[kenrexford]

Cell phones.

[Aberlour10]

beer in plastic bottles

[keylime]

I strongly lean to the beer in plastic concept; however the worse is the silly "arthritis friendly" pill bottles that take twice as much effort to open.

BTW, Danish cartoons are GREAT. Bring on the cheese and cookies!

[slothy]

(Rechargeable) Batteries....

My sister's boyfriend not going away for weekend after all...

You have to see this Other Post (maybe) to 'understand' this

[pclayton]

Those friggin plastic anti-theft devices they wrap CD's (and about everything else) in.

They landscape is dotted with scars from the lacerations these things cause.

[Walddk]

sceptic, on Mar 16 2006, 08:56 PM, said:

handbags

Not so sure about that. Now, if only someone would invent the light that's turned on automatically when a woman opens her handbag. That invention would be worth millions!

Roland

[pbleighton]

Cell phones

Peter

[barmar]

pclayton, on Mar 16 2006, 02:30 PM, said:

Those friggin plastic anti-theft devices they wrap CD's (and about everything else) in.

I agree, I detest those things. And sometimes they're used for the cheapest things -- I had to go through one of them to open a wrist rest pad that cost $5-10.

Someone else could make a fortune selling a device designed to open them easily.

[helene_t]

The qwerty keyboard layout.

Short Message Service.

Piercing (well, I do like earrings, maybe I have double standards).

Football (at least soccer is extremely stupid, don't know about American football).

[aisha759]

The remote control (hehe) will probably get women's votes on that one

[Limey_p]

Quote

Football (at least soccer is extremely stupid ...

We men need outlets for our stupidity. And bridge will only take us part way there.

Isn't football better than the alternative, hitting each other with sticks and rocks?

Andy

[jikl]

Beer served in polystyrene cups at the cricket, truly awful.

Regarding the qwerty keyboard, anyone noticed how typewriter can be written completely on the top line of the keyboard, always heard and believed the rumour that this was to help the salesmen sell them in the early days by showing how easy it was to use.

Sean

[cherdano]

helene_t, on Mar 17 2006, 10:24 AM, said:

The qwerty keyboard layout.

You should be glad you don't have to deal with qwertz layout (and write code or TeX with it).

Arend

[bearmum]

"Childproof" tops on medicine bottles -- MOST 6 year olds seem to thve no trouble mut arthritic fingers can't manage them

[Fluffy]

cherdano, on Mar 18 2006, 01:13 AM, said:

helene_t, on Mar 17 2006, 10:24 AM, said:

The qwerty keyboard layout.

You should be glad you don't have to deal with qwertz layout (and write code or TeX with it).

Arend

I had to use qwertz once.... damn that was tough, but not as much as using turkish keyboards hehe.
We spanish put our stupid special letter in a corner at least, sure you won't find any special character like '¨' or '@', but at least all the letters are where they should.

[Gerben42]

Do you really think a keyboard would be easier if they were ordered ABCDE ? Probably not.

I agree that QWERTZ kezboards are horrible! I hear that Dvorak's are good for coding.

The worst invention of all time is Religion.

[hrothgar]

Gerben42, on Mar 21 2006, 03:29 PM, said:

The worst invention of all time is Religion.

I wouldn't go nearly that far... I've seen a couple very interesting papers that argue that susceptibility to believe in religion is evolutionary advantageous. (Take a look at the work of Edward O. Wilson at Harvard).

Here's a simplified version of Wilson's thesis: Many primitive societies require social structures that permit the rulers to mobilize the masses on large projects (building and irrigation system, collection the crops, waging war on the neighbors, etc.) Religion succeeds admirably. Personally, I think that this is a quite powerful observation

From my own perspective, I don't think that the traditional "Left / Right" divide provides a particularly useful way to study the political landscape. I prefer to apply an equally simplistic model that compares top down hierarchies with self organizing systems. Each structure has some very specific advantages.

Top-down hierarchies feature a small decision making caste and a large number of drones that implement the decision. These systems are operationally efficient. Its relatively inexpensive to reach a decision. Once the decision has been reached, its relatively easy to implement. The down side to a top down hierarchy is that their decision making process isn't particularly robust. There are relatively few checks on the system, so if the leader makes a mistake.... Self organizing systems are based on a very different philosophy. Information is widely distributed. Individuals reach their own decision. Society chooses a path based on some kind of polling mechanism. Once again, there are advantages and disadvantages to this type of system. The main advantage is that the decision making process is extremely robust. (The book “The Wisdom of Crowds” has some great information regarding the accuracy of distributed decision making). The down side is search cost. You need to spend resources to distribute information to all the members of society and lots more to conduct a poll.

Where life gets interesting is attempting to match decision making models to different societies over time. I'd argue that top down models are very well suited to primitive societies. These societies are relatively poor and don't have surplus resources to spend implement a distributed system. Equally significant, the problems that these societies face are relatively simple ones. Optimizing the search path isn't especially critical. Compare this to some more modern societies. The cost of search has fallen in absolute and relative terms. The economies are much more wealthy. The civilization can afford to spend a lot more money on search. Tools like the Internet are extremely efficient in distributing information. Finally, the stakes are a LOT higher: Issues like global warming, population, and nuclear weapons have the potential to extinguish human civilization. Making a mistake has become a lot more costly.

I'd argue that there is an inflection point at which the top-down hierarchy switches from being evolutionarily advantageous to being outright dangerous. Unfortunately, you can't just swap from one decision making model to another. Recall, there are large groups of people out there hardwired to believe in top down models and they're well organized. These individuals see distributed decision making models as a genuine threat to their “way of life”. I suspect that we aren't just dealing with a cultural virus/meme here, rather than there is genetic component as well.

People often throw around words like “Clash of Civilizations” and “Kuturekampf”. We're going through a very significant one right now, where some of the major “top-down” systems like fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam are wagging war against the more “liberal” sections of society and turning any excess vitriol against one another.

In conclusion: I agree with you that “religion” is highly problematic at the moment, but we shouldn't ignore the organizational advantages that it once provided. I suspect that we'll need another thousand years of history to recognize whether the advantages that religion provided during Babylon and Egypt outweigh the costs that its imposing on society today.

[Gerben42]

Thanks Richard for this very interesting post. It might well be that the success of the first major civilizations like the Egyptians with their Pharaoh-who-is-God, was related to religion. This is of course very different from modern religion, one sees how hard it is to see if something was a Good Idea ™ in the long term.