Benlog

For some reason, I’m fascinated by a story I’ve been following for a few months: bananas as we know them may disappear in 10 years: Two fungal diseases, Panama disease and black Sigatoka, are cutting a swath through banana plantations, just as blight once devastated potato crops. But unlike the potato, and other crops where [...]

You can’t design a voting system in the few months that precede an election. That’s why the year in between elections should be the most productive in designing new voting technology: no one from the press is paying attention, no one is rushing to merely patch their existing system, and opportunity abounds! And so, if [...]

Even if you take political preference aside for a second, and ignore the craziness of George Bush’s speech last night, if you just take it at face value, something is really really wrong. The President admitted that he made mistakes, that there’s tons of violence, that we’re not “winning.” Then he said that winning the [...]

Thad Hall wonders if Poll Workers could be scheduled like Walmart employees. Thad’s ideas are generally fantastic, and I find his out-of-the-box yet highly-informed viewpoint to be refreshing in this field. In this case, though, I don’t think this suggestion would work. It’s all about training and complexity. Consider what a well-oiled machine Walmart is, [...]

As far as technology goes, 2007 will be about web security. With everyone storing more and more personal data on various web sites, and with the continuing innovation of mash-ups, it’s inevitable. And it won’t be the web security issues of the last few years, either, it will all be about how to do private-data [...]