Why securing a user’s consistent identity helps your company — I’m from an earlier era of the internet. In the 2000s, if your desired username was anything other than one of the top few thousand dictionary words, you could acquire it on every service, every time. We got used to this, to the point that it became, at least for…

How would you design an incubator to find the best con artists? — Whether for chickens or startups, all incubators do the same thing. They provide ideal conditions to maximize the growth of whatever is desired. How would one design an incubator specifically for con artists? What would bring forth the most devious, ruthless, manipulative hucksters with the greatest skill at taking the…

The S you drew on your notebooks in school may one day save you on a deserted island. — Many people, particularly those which may be in a dangerous situation, are familiar with the Morse code for SOS. I’m not, but it’d probably be on my reading list before taking a three-hour tour. …

If an at-cost market suddenly has to label its prices, the biggest change won’t be on the consumer side. — Imagine a slightly different world with a different economic system. In this world, no shops you browse advertise their prices. You simply buy things and they deduct the item’s cost from your bank account. They charged you the actual production cost of the item, so no one was particularly appalled…

We weave a confusing yarn when we associate the personality traits of a human with a corporation — A spokesman doesn’t do what you think they do. Their real purpose is kept a secret, because if you knew it, their services wouldn’t be worth millions of dollars. They’d be nearly worthless. …

If your college physics class didn’t suck, the wrong people would pass. — History is largely memorization. The curriculum is deliberately non-thematic. One can make endless arguments as to why history texts are spectacularly bland. The most obvious being political disagreement would demand the story of existence be sterilized of all meaning. Physics is different. There is no reason it can’t be tied…

Why are soccer moms better at coming up with terrorists plots to worry about than terrorists are at implementing them? — Before the professor arrived, a Bruce Vilanch-looking classmate claimed to have devised a scheme to dismantle the credit card system without employing extraordinary Fight Club-esque means. He would not reveal it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the idea really was feasible. Just as it wouldn’t surprise me if one…

Thanks to the CAN-SPAM act, if you can read the message, the unsubscribe link probably works. — Never follow the unsubscribe links in spam. Never even download the images in spam, or spammers will find out your address is real and give it to all their friends! That’s what we’ve been taught, but spam filtering and the CAN-SPAM act have changed the game, and common knowledge no…

If atheists want to be the default, they’ll have to place themselves beneath believers rather than above them. — Atheism is an absence of certain widely held unprovable beliefs. It is not constructed by subtracting religion from a religious worldview. It is what you get when you never consider religion at all. It’s quite perplexing that the term atheism even exists. After all, a-aetherism and a-geocentrism aren’t used to…