I am very saddened by the size of the margins set as default by Word. This leading word processing application contributed to an enormous waste of paper by setting the margins to be in my opinion unusually large. To Microsoft’s credit, Word 2007 has a “narrow margins” setting but it’s not the default one. Why not?

Those standing in the defense of wide margins say that documents with wide margins are the standard, and perhaps that they are easier to read. I don’t buy it — this seems like a kind of old-fashioned tradition that nobody is willing to challenge. Let’s change the standard, get used to more text on a page: use narrow margins and save some trees!

I’ve complained about printers and the way they are used. I’d like to add another thing that frustrates me a lot: printing in color. Everyone seems to want to print in color, as if their work would improve in quality significantly when printed in color (in fact, I did see a tagline for one color printer to be “Printing in color makes your work look better”). Most documents I see printed in color contain less than 0.1% color text or graphics and, while today’s printers minimize the amount of wasted ink, it still seems incredibly wasteful.

Printing equipment overall seems to be a particularly shameful part of our electronic era — printers have for the longest time been hard to configure, find drivers for. They are archaically large, haven’t progressed much in the past decade and by virtue of their purpose (converting digital documents into paper) stand in the way of innovation.

I’m particularly frustrated, however, not by printers themselves (which I’m inclined to treat as necessary evil), but by the way people use them. Printing today should be rare, limited to instances when you don’t have access to an electronic form of the document (and such instances such be more and more rare — most people take their laptops with them when they travel so “printing documents for the road” is no longer a valid excuse). Printing should also be double-sided — we could be halving the rate at which trees are cut down if only we set that to be our default mode of printing.

I don’t know exactly what it is called but I see it all the time. Here’s an example from an email I received from a can rental company:

As a valued customer, we would appreciate your taking a moment to complete this brief Customer Satisfaction Survey regarding your recent rental at METRO CENTER.

(Emphasis added by me). The subject in one clause is customer, while the subject in another is we. This is in my view incorrect because in all strictness, since the subordinate clause is a fragment, I would expect it to match the subject of the main clause. The rental people are not a valued customer — I am.

What’s the grammatically correct form of the sentence above? How about this:

Since you are a valued customer, we would appreciate your taking a moment to complete this brief Customer Satisfaction Survey regarding your recent rental at METRO CENTER.

International cell phone roaming seems like this thing that is a relic of the corporations-can-totally-exploit-you-and-get-away-with-it past. Just like checking accounts with zero interest rates.

Frankly, I don’t know how companies implement international roaming but it seems inconceivable that it’s hard now in the digital era. Years ago in the age of monopolistic communications companies arguing about the interfaces between them, trying to come up with some way to provide adapters to their analog systems, with no better choice to call someone abroad, roaming was justifiably expensive, but now? Information is transferred digitally, easy to transform, there is an abundance of other options. So why is roaming so expensive? Have people fallen in a strange mode of accepting this as the way things are out of inertia?

Analogies are very powerful because they are a device that enables the listener to connect to the thought process of the speaker efficiently (all you need is an apt analogy and the entire context is transferred implicitly). In a way, since an analogy carried with it the shared (cultural, literary, etc.) context, you can convey a lot of information with a short phrase.

However, in my view, analogies are dangerous. Rarely do people use them correctly. And, when used incorrectly, analogies set people down the path of mismatched context. And because that context is implicit, there’s nobody to question it or call it out so it’s likely that the speaker and the listeners get very out of sync.

From information theory point of view, there is no such thing as a free lunch. You can take advantage of the massive information compression that an analogy provides, but this compression is valid in a small set of circumstances — in a vast majority of slightly different circumstances you convey misinformation. So be careful!

I tried one a week ago. I’m adding two more reasons (don’t know why they didn’t make the original list, they are so obvious!)

• The chicken is not even that tasty, usually made with low-quality meat
• Above all, this is a particularly unhealthy food

There, I’m done. For now