I had a dream that I was a deity, wandering the world. I was waiting.. for that one moment, to declare the beginning of the end of the world.. and I found it, that one spark of anger, the last act of humanity. I withdrew to a cabin from the city, remarking on my path there to passers-by that it had begun, before space rippled around me. I stayed for awhile, waiting for the effects to build, from the tiniest scales of the bacteria to the human level. And I rested a little longer than I should've, but got back to the city eventually. Buildings were falling, the ground was opening, and people were in fistfights left and right. Armageddon. I lifted my pocketwatch in the midst of the chaos, swinging it back and forth, not glancing much at the stopped hands, the end of time. And then.. some bus tires squeaked. Immaculately clean busses .. with strange devices on top, had pulled into the city.. people stepped out, and I immediately felt.. 'they're not my people'.. these people were not of those I had watched, felt, known every breath... They started to wade into the crowd, pulling people onto the bus.. and then a bus, full of people.. my people.. disappeared. I felt their departure like a physical blow to the head.. they had somehow left the universe, and I couldn't hear them anymore. I stepped up to one of the lines of attendants near the mouth of one of the busses, lifted one of them up, and threw him several feet across the chaotic, messy intersection. I twisted another in half. I stepped up to one of the muscled security types, and having been in my current form for hundreds of years, and ordinarily not using my deific powers much, I felt a bit strange doing it, but I lifted him, and threw him a long enough ways off that I didn't see him land. These were my people, this was my universe, and noone was going to take them away, or change the end I had planned for the story.

It was a strange dream. Oh, yeah, here's an article on how improvements in battery technology for portable devices is important. While the summarized concept is good, the article is horrible. I've occasionally read things by the author before (Michael S Malone), and they were all similarly bad. His style is pitifly bad ; he's drawn like a moth to catchy and stupid misunderstanding of the things he's talking about. In short, he's a typical tech/biz journalist -- clueless and catchy. In this case, his dumb idea is based on Moore's Law, an observation that CPU speed tends to double every 18 months or so (the 18 has been fudged a bit over the years..), and suggesting that we need a 'second moore's law' for 'overall net efficiency' of a system. The surface idiocy is that Moore's Law is an observation, not a manifesto. It's stretching things too far and just sounds dumb to bridge that. Secondly, it's lame wannabeism to want to tag it on as Moore's second law. Mr Malone, tag your own shameful name onto it, make it Malone's law, and then when we're laughing at it, we'll at least be laughing at the right person. The deep idiocy is that the 18 month figure is industry specific, and was tweaked several times to tune it to the state of progress. Hoping it to match 'overall net efficiency' is silly.. and while we're at it, what exactly is 'overall net efficiency'? Is it measurable? It would've been easy for Malone to use a measurable quantity to metre progress, but instead he had to go make up a vague term. To top off his article, he makes vague calls for improvement across the industry in a number of unrelated areas. "As Moore's words suggest, inefficiency is a system problem that can be solved only with system-wide solutions".. Oy, it's rare you come up with so much stupidity in a single sentence. Moore's words suggest nothing of the sort -- he was talking about a different domain, and wasn't even suggesting anything analogous for this domain. Inefficiency is not a problem that can be solved with system-wide solutions. It's EXACTLY the opposite! Fixing systemwide inefficiency is done by looking at the fine details, finding inefficient parts, and fixing or replacing them. Malone needs to be visited by someone with a cluestick. Better batteries would be nice, yes. Journalists who arn't stupid would also be nice.

A friend pointed me at this. It reminds me of a recent onion article about the same person withdrawing to their island of doom to hold a tournament.