In the old days, before 3.0, Safari had an annoying habit. If you pressed Cmd-Q with many windows and tabs open, then Safari would quit. This could be incredibly frustrating; especially when you accidentally pressed Q instead of W.

Taboo, a questionable InputManager hack, provided a work around.

Safari 3.0 fixes it properly. Apple has included the option of prompting the user on close if multiple tabs or windows are open.

However, if Taboo is still installed, you cannot close top level windows.

Taboo lives in one of the following two directories.

~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins
/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins

Remove it, and Safari 3.0 will work as intended.

People’s first reaction to such a device (“WOW”) is amazing. It is, therefore, incredible disappointing to realize that the product is unusable.

- from elements blog, on the Prada phone (by LG).

The two smartest designers I know spawned their own consultancy for user experience on mobile devices. Thanks to blogging, you can get their insights for free!

If the tone of this book seems steeped in the culture of Darwinism and evolutionary thinking, it does not come from any remotely formal training in the natural sciences, but from the evolutionary way of thinking taught by my Monte Carlo simulators.

Nassim Taleb revised his book on the way humans deal with randomness; how we rationalize luck. It is worth a read. (Recommended by the likes of Tom Peters, and Peter Bernstein).

The part that grabbed my attention was Nassim’s use of Monte Carlo simulations, to test out scenarios. The simulator allows exploration of alternate paths, both past and future. Evolution is a search technique to find successful survival strategies for a particular scenario. In biology, we have only one scenario to investigate: ours. The Monte Carlo simulator allows testing strategies under different scenarios.

This is very similar to the work on complexity theory being done at the Santa Fe institute (as told in the Origin of Wealth). Nassim refers to their work later in the book:

The so-called complexity theorists came to the rescue. … Clearly these scientists are trying hard, and providing us with wonderful solutions in the physical sciences and better models in the social siblings (though nothing satisfactory there yet).

The key is the yet.

I’m holding out hope for complexity theory as applied to economics and finance. The classical equilibrium models don’t resonate strongly with my understanding of this world. Early research into the application of complexity theory rings very true.

Even if the numbers don’t hold out exactly, the model provided matches my understanding of people and markets much better. Nassim himself says it best:

Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than compute.

Lets hope it can deliver both.

What I’ve Learned, an article by Tony Blair, covers his time as prime minister of Britain.

From the title headings alone, you can learn something:

1. Be a player not a spectator
2. Transatlantic co-operation is still vital
3. Be very clear about global terrorism
4. We must stand up for our values
5. It’s about tomorrow’s agenda too

The article includes much more. Tony provides an insightful view on world politics today and the why behind some of his choices.

From The Origin of Wealth:

Markets win over command and control, not because of their efficiency at resource allocation in equilibrium, but because of their effectiveness at innovation in disequilibrium.

Evolution, genetic algorithms and complexity theory, as applied to economics: It is a search problem.

This book foretells the demise of economic theories based on equilibrium. To tell the story, a wide path is walked through the history of economics, advanced computer science, physics and some chaos theory. Very interesting reading, if you are interested in economics, or why economics works or doesn’t (quite) work.

For a review, see John Hagel’s article.