Short version of this interesting article in The Atlantic: Do one thing at a time. Avoid multitasking. Technology that enables multitasking is bad; technology that encourages multitasking is horrid.

I can’t say that I can argue with the premise, especially with the neuroscience–I’m just not qualified to take that on. But my gut feeling is that what he calls the evils of multitasking is what I experience at the end of a day where I say to myself, “I was so busy today; how is it that I got so little done?”

That said, as a card-carrying technological utopian (and the card isn’t made of antediluvian paper, nosirree), I can think of several times when multitasking is not only beneficial, it is right and proper. Listening to a podcast or good music while walking long distances. Putting on just the right mix when watching the stars, the ocean, or just the world passing by. A little distraction when a poker game isn’t going quite the way you want it to, and to focus your entire attention on it will be to play badly.

I recently picked up a Palm Centro smartphone, about which I’ve been intending to write an extensive review for a month–but I’ll say in passing that the way in which it wormed its way into my life so quickly was precisely the ability it provides to grab snippets of the Internet while doing something else. An opponent asked me last night when the minting dates were of my Morgan dollar card protector; I found them out (1878-1904, and 1921) while grabbing a smoke break. That’s information I want to know, but wouldn’t have made a note to track down hours later.

Maybe it denied me the full enjoyment of that nicotine hit. Somehow, I doubt it.

My fraternity has a traditional game that’s been played for decades, called Flaming Laballa. It’s a little bit like handball, except that it’s played with a tennis ball. Oh, and the tennis ball is soaked in lighter fluid. And then set on fire.

The part about using your hands to bat around the ball, though, that’s the same.

The game is best played while drunk, and near very large snowbanks.

In that spirit, I pass along a video of a pyromaniac who clearly should be one of our members.

After where I’ve been for the past week, I found this hysterical:

If anyone can tell me what the hell Alert DC meant with today’s “emergency alert” message, I’m listening.

From: “Alert DC”
To: “Alert DC Users”
Subject: Message from Alert DC
Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:28:27 -0500

The exercise drill has ended at George Washington University (1900 block of F St., NW) and streets will be opening soon. A hot wash will also be conducted.

This probably says more about me than anyone really needs to know: I just grabbed the shuttle from my casino-hotel to another nearly identical casino-hotel, because I knew that one was a block away from the 24-hour Starbucks.

Monologue held by my cab driver, as a minivan nearly swerved into us on the Strip:

“Man, the guy’s talking on his cell phone. No wonder. We should do it here like they do it in New York, make it illegal to talk on the phone in cars. Big fines for the driver. That would be much better. [taps on Bluetooth earpiece] Hello? Hey, what’s up?”

Another way to read these signs: “This door handle will never work. In non-emergency situations, it’s an IQ test. In emergency situations, it’s a Darwin filter.”

Who are the people who are authorized to cause an emergency brake application when no emergency exists? Because that must be a damn cool job.

Currently finishing up a one-hour layover at 30th Street Station in Philly, in the midst of an exhausting trip home from Vegas: hotel shuttle to airport cab to redeye flight to Minneapolis to two hour wait on the tarmac to Philly airport to SEPTA train to 30th Street to NJT train to casino shuttle to home. Yes, I left Vegas and the last stop on my trip is a casino before I get home. No, I’m not going to play there.

Anyway, I’m fried and I’ve got time to kill, which is why I’ve blogged more today than I generally do in a month. What got me to pull out the laptop again is one of my favorite things about Philly: there’s a trumpet and clarinet duet playing Christmas carols here at the train station. Skilled amateurs from the sound of it, and there’s no open case soliciting donations. The sound is filling the room and bouncing off the fifty-foot ceiling, and sometimes you can even hear the woodwind.

Random musical performances are all over Philly, and I’m glad I’m here for this one. It’s thoroughly charming, and I say that with no snark whatsoever. It’s good to be home.

Editor’s note: apparently, there’s a drafts feature in WordPress, which is why this post has been lying around since I wrote it in June. Oops.

So I received an electronic chain letter last week, in the form of a blog meme that’s been passed along to me. Apparently, if I break the chain, I’ll have seven years of breaking mirrors and walking under black cats, so I’m sorta stuck.

Five people I’m tagging to continue with this nonsense:

1. Ralf Bendrath, who could stand to publish something lighthearted on his blog once in a while
2. Rik Panganiban, because I’d like to hear more about his First Life
3. Terry Ryan, in the hopes he’ll stop writing about ColdFusion long enough to amuse me
4. Jess Silver, because this request will make her grumpy, and she’s always amusing when she’s grumpy
5. The Right Reverend Matthew Thornton, because it’s about damn time he started blogging

The set of random questions:

What were you doing ten years ago?

I was in Norway and Sweden for the Quinquennial Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, and to do some consulting work for Idetorget in Stockholm. That trip amusingly ended with me giving a presentation, on three hours’ notice, at the Stockholm World Trade Center where I was the only presenter not speaking Swedish. To this day, I have no idea what my introduction was.

What were you doing one year ago?

In Atlantic City, playing poker.

Five snacks you enjoy

I tend to avoid snacks, mainly because I have a bad habit of treating any size bag as a single serving. That being said: Triscuits, chocolate-covered pretzels, Combos, popcorn, Nutrageous candy bars

Five songs to which you know all the lyrics

The Red and the Blue (three verses)
Hail Pennsylvania (three verses)
Power in the Bonds (five verses)
Home, from The Adventures of Betty Boop
Afterglow

Five things you would do if you were a billionaire

1. Approximately $100M into the Porten Family Travel and Entertainment fund, with a whole-hearted attempt to ensure the fund expires on the same day I do.
2. Purchase a very large house in Washington DC, with about 20-30 bedrooms. Set aside an annuity fund to keep it staffed and the larder full. Short-term housing to be provided to anyone willing to present on issues of science and technology to the other guests and the public, with the intention of creating a year-round floating Pugwash conference.
3. Bequests to the Pugwash Conferences, Student Pugwash USA, International Student/Young Pugwash, ISODARCO, the Kappa Alpha Society, the Penn Band, Citizens for Global Solutions, and the World Federalist Movement.
4. A check for $1 to the University of Pennsylvania, with a cover letter thanking the administration for the concern they’ve historically shown to my academic department and the A3 staff.
5. Remainder to a foundation dedicated to the proposition that, yes, dammit, some problems do get better if you throw money at them. Charter would insist that funds be spent and the foundation disbanded no later than December 10, 2069.

Five bad habits

I smoke, I gamble, I eat poorly, I don’t mind conversational confrontation, and I’m rather too proud of all of the above.

Five things you like doing

I smoke, I gamble, I eat poorly, I don’t mind conversational confrontation, and I’m rather too proud of all of the above.

Five things you would never wear again

1. The all-white outfit that I wore when I played Teen Angel in 1984
2. A black velvet bow tie the size of my head (it was 1976)
3. The 1987 Penn Band jacket, cunningly constructed out of trash bags and laundry lint
4. A baseball cap
5. A toga and an electric blue Speedo bathing suit

Last five blogs in the chain, and feel free to send all of us a dollar (a Nigerian will send you $100 if you do):

1. Electronic Cerebrectomy
2. Byzantium’s Shores: The Occasional Meditations of an Overalls-clad Hippie
3. Simple Tricks and Nonsense
4. I Should Be Sleeping
5. The Vast Jeff Wing Conspiracy

(Dammit, Brian, have you ever tried copying source from your blog? Do you get charged extra for whitespace? Sheesh.)

Every once in a while, I get inspired to take a look at my upcoming travel schedule and think, “Man, I am such an idiot.” Yes, those degrees are Fahrenheit.

Harrah’s really doesn’t want me to stay with them on Fridays or Saturdays….

Very weird: fatal shooting by Penn police at the Club Wizzards strip club.

Debate between Brian Greenberg and me on the state of Mac OS X security.

Pennsylvania requires people who eBay stuff they don’t own to get a state auctioneer’s license, demonstrating once again that they will be dragged kicking and screaming out of the 19th century.

New media douchebags explained. Extremely funny and surprisingly safe for work, provided reading this sentence out loud is safe where you work.

Thanks to Making Light: Jon’s Singer’s turkey algorithm is, “for a turkey of greater than ten pounds, the roasting time should be equal to 1.65 times the natural log of the weight of the bird in pounds, cooked at 325 F.” I’m amused to see a natural logarithm being used for anything. I also think this is the first time I’ve used the two words I always mistype, logarithm and algorithm, together in a paragraph.

Check out the most viewed articles at Conservapedia. Man, some folks need a hobby.

Brilliant SNL spoof of iPhone ads.

Now available until November 26: the One Laptop Per Child XO. $400 for US and Canadian residents only, which buys one for you and one for someone else. And you get a year of T-Mobile hotspot service.

If you wrote a novel about Atlantic City politics, it couldn’t be as bizarre as what’s really going on.

As a communications geek, I’m amused by this piece on the disappearing phone booth. First that people’s connections to it are from the Superman movies, when the “changing in a phone booth” trope dates back to the cartoons and comics of the 1930s and 1940s. Second that there are now phone booths without phones. Third that the kid quoted at the end has apparently never had a dead battery.

Brian pointed me to the Australian Santa Clauses (Santa Clai?) who can’t say “ho ho ho” for fear of deriding nearby women as harlots.

So let me get this straight: once a year, millions of people take their offspring to see a jolly fat messiah icon whose image was invented by the Coca-Cola company, who then bribes children with presents in order to get them to sit on his lap. The children are encouraged to be extra good in order to curry favor with this man, who then will visit their homes while they’re sleeping.

And the issue is the word “ho”? Seems to me that the goyim are missing the obvious.

Today is the 25th anniversary of my bar mitzvah. I could have gotten through today quite nicely without realizing this.

Was it just me, or did anyone else burst out laughing when they heard our Commander-in-Chief say the following?

I spoke to President Musharraf right before I came over here to visit with President Sarkozy. And my message was that we believe strongly in elections, and that you ought to have elections soon, and you need to take off your uniform. You can’t be the President and the head of the military at the same time.

So here we have the man who was elected through the result of not one, but two disputed elections, giving advice on democracy to a man who took power through a military coup and is now extending his rule via martial law.

But that’s not why this was funny. This was funny because no president before Bush has been so damned clingy to his role as Commander-in-Chief, using his titular role as head of the military to construe criticism of him as criticism of “the troops”. His presidency is all obout being president and head of the military. He’s the first English-speaking politician to wear a codpiece since Blackadder. And obviously, he had all traces of irony surgically removed at birth.

Making plans for an upcoming trip to Canada, and for the first time it hit me just how strange this is: