Every Harvard Business Review article worth it’s salt boils some complex problem down to a two by two grid. Usually something like awesomeness and profitability:

Being non-profitable and not awesome is no fun. Awesomeness without profitability might work for some organizations. Being profitable but not awesome for others. But the place to be is awesome and profitable!

With this bracing insight the authors will cherry pick some companies that match the upper-right hand quadrant and tediously stretch their turpid insight out to book length.

In reality this is a false dilemma (or technically a false tetralemma, but that’s an awkward phrase so I prefer the HBR fallacy instead).

My favorite example is Pascal’s Wager. This is a typical HBR two by two grid based on belief in God and the existence of God.

1. Don’t believe / No God, you’re fine (meh).

2. Don’t believe / God, go to Hell (infinite punishment).

3. Believe / No God, you’re fine (meh).

4. Believe / God, go to Heaven (infinite reward).

You only have one rational choice here says Pascal.

There is a lot wrong with this argument, but the wrongest thing is the HBR fallacy. There are infinitely many possible Gods with infinitely many good and bad outcomes. You might be living in a universe where the only God is the God of the Thargoids. The one real God might send you to Heaven only if you kill a gopher every Wednesday.

Nobody is going to open any doors and show you any goats.

So I'm not on Facebook any more, but while I was, just one time, I reached the end:

Add Friends to See More Stories: You'll have more stories in News Feed if you add more friends.

Holy shit I just finished Facebook. Didn't think that was possible. It was passably tolerable while it lasted but I guess I need to find something else now...

I imagine a product manager got fired every time that message was shown.

Having glued on a GoPro I try and fail to fly my new drone.

New Scientist hypes DeepCoder:

"Software called DeepCoder could allow non-coders to simply describe and idea for a program and let the system build it"

Coding is nothing but simply describing an idea for a program. As simply as possible but no simpler. Won't be really useful without an AI product manager.

The World Economic Forum has published a risk/reward matrix for 12 key "emerging" technologies. You'd think this would be pretty good, because:

"The report’s conclusions on risk are heavily based on its Global Risks Perception Survey, which gathers the opinions of the World Economic Forum’s multi-stakeholder communities of leaders from business, government, academia and nongovernmental and international organizations. Members of the Institute of Risk Management are also consulted."

For some reason IoT devices are the second highest risk. Ahead of biotechnology (we're all dead from an engineered virus), nanomaterials (we're all dead because we're now gray goo) and space technologies (we're all dead because we provoked a violent alien civilization).

The least benefit comes from Geoengineering. Because with Trump in power I'm sure we're going to solve Global Warming via emission cuts. There is apparently more benefit in Virtual Reality and even more in 3D Printing.

(Image from World Economic Forum)

If you give a browser a cookie, it’s going to ask for local storage.

When you give it the local storage, it’ll probably ask you for a list of system fonts. When it’s finished, it’ll ask you for your screen resolution.

Then it’ll want to look to see if Flash cookies are supported. It’ll probably create a local shared object.

When it’s finished with the local shared object it’ll want more things to hash. It will hash your timezone and language. It might get carried away and hash every supported plugin. It may even end up hashing the platform and user agent.

When it’s done it’ll probably want to check out your WebGL. You’ll have to tell it your WebGL vendor and renderer. It’ll probably ask you to open a HTML5 canvas.

When it looks at the HTML5 canvas, it’ll get so excited it’ll want to draw it’s own hidden image. Then it’ll want to hash the image as well.

Looking at the image will remind it that it should store the hash somewhere. So it’ll ask for local storage.

And chances are if it asks you for local storage, it’s going to want a cookie to go with it.

(With apologies to Laura Numeroff, and you may be a snowflake yourself. Learn more about browser fingerprinting.)

I think I'd be more likely to subscribe if you'd take a charger away. Most right thinking gadget vendors don't even include them anymore.

Even better than threatening to send me e-waste: skip the news bit (it's already stale) and send my Kindle a monthly compendium of analysis.

Is it just me or is the weather radar smiling at San Francisco right now?