Saturday Potpourri

Alas, there's no free lunch in the perfectly imperfect world. The free Tag Board service force-feeds silly popup ads to my blog. Fortunately, both Firefox and IE can silently block them. I wonder who is still paying for popup ads—so obsolete…

Is this (prank?) a bug or feature of Gmail? Still, I am very impressed that some people can exhaust 1G on emails alone (lots of attachments?) within a year. I estimate that all my emails accumulated over the last 12+ years (from all accounts with attachments intact) can comfortably fit on a CD. Until 1996, my annual email archive used to be backed up on a single floppy.

Here's my clever idea for sociologists: why not use the email storage as a sensible metric of one's sociability in the digital age? Develop some logarithmic scale (to give a scientific flavor) which takes into account various social factors (multipliers like the number of recipients to fine-tune a theoretical model). It'll be indisputably quantitative: the more email storage one consumes (excluding spams of course), the more networked s/he is—probably smarter, richer, and happier too. A plausible theory, isn't it?