World Airmail Links

…And then you’ve got a meeting at another building; it’s a half a mile away. And you could take the shuttle over but you decide “I’m going to walk” because the health insurance plan that you’re on gives you bonus points if you walk more than a mile each day. We can sense that easily through your digital shoes. And if you get your heart rate up above a certain amount then you get more bonus points from your health insurance company.

— Jesse Schell, from a series of examples of what the future might hold for games designed on top of real life (making me think Foursquare is just the beginning) in  “Design Outside the Box,” a talk at DICE 2010 [via Milosz]

Movie-goers are pickier about the believability of movies than pundits are about the believability of politicians’ claims.

— Doug J, Post-realism [via Duncan Black]

There is always going to be a lowest common denominator platform. That used to be Windows. Now it’s the web.

— John Gruber, Yet More on the Unfolding Future-of-Flash-and-the-Web Saga

It takes a while to really understand any abstraction in our modern society: how currency works, why we try to separate church and state, how a bicameral legislature acts on the will of the people, how interest compounds.

…[U]nlike laymen, programmers are regularly challenged with new ways of abstracting information (be it entire programming paradigms, new frameworks, or just a new way of factoring their own code) and eventually become adept at this meta-skill.

But regular people don’t have to learn new abstractions on a day-to-day basis. Anything presented to them in a new symbolic or abstracted way is bound to cause confusion for a long time. Especially second or third order abstractions.

— Dan Grover, Toward a Grand Unified Theory of n00bs

For the most part, our big news orgs simply don’t explain things. In all candor, they rarely seem to know what sorts of claims are being made in the wider discourse.

— Bob Somerby, Why is it easy to beat our side? Wisely, Dionne asked [via Kevin Drum]

When asked about Obama’s plan (without being given any details about what the legislation includes), 49 percent opposed it and 40 percent were in favor. But after hearing key features of the legislation described, 48 percent supported the plan and 43 percent remained opposed.

— Sarah Kliff,  Newsweek Poll: Mixed Signals on Health Care [via Political Wire]

A single rogue trader can bring down a bank…. But a single rogue bank can bring down the world’s financial system.

— Simon Johnson, Goldman Goes Rogue — Special European Audit To Follow [via Duncan Black]

Politicians want to pass the ball forward, and if a banker can show them a way to pass a problem to the future, they will fall for it.

— Gikas A. Hardouvelis, economist and former official in the Greek government, quoted in Wall St. Helped to Mask Debt Fueling Europe’s Crisis