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They just keep tempting me. Memories. So many memories.

Steven Poole over at The New Republic: Gladwell is a brilliant salesman for a certain kind of cognitive drug. He tells his readers that everything they thought they knew about a subject is wrong, and then delivers what is presented as a counterintuitive discovery but is actually a bromide of familiar clichés. The reader is thus led on a pleasant quasi-intellectual tour, to be reassured at the end that a flavour of folksy wisdom was right all along.

LaunchCenter Pro is out with a big update. 2.0 is a nice redesign with a couple of new features. If you need exhaustive reviews to convince you, then I recommend the Geeks with Juniors post as well as the MacStories review. I think it’s a worthy app for what it does, but the lack of an iPad version with action syncing reduces the value for me. Once it fell off my home screen, I basically stopped using it.

It seems small relative to the size of Wikipedia, but it highlights the value of supporting them: By September of this year, the investigation talk page included over 900 edits from more than 50 authors. It had unearthed 323 user accounts as confirmed sockpuppets with an additional 84 suspected. The only other known sockpuppet network of this size and scope was the case of Bambifan101, a still-ongoing investigation that located 236 suspected and 249 confirmed accounts.

Some nice ideas here with a reference back to Caleb’s post about using Pandoc on iOS. I tried using CloudConvert in Editorial but ran into upload errors and the support is almost non-existent. I moved on to other projects but this one is still enticing.

I worked in oncology long enough that I’m a bit jaded to its coverage in the general media. This series from Scientific American is good. There are two conclusions about cancer I still can’t shake: Cancer mechanisms are so complex that it’s almost unbelievable that anyone develops it. Cancer mechanisms are so common that it’s almost impossible that everyone doesn’t have it. Here’s the link to the full series

From FastMail’s blog: As noted in our recently updated privacy policy, we are an Australian company subject to Australian law. We are required to disclose information about specific individual accounts to properly authorised Australian law enforcement with the appropriate supporting documentation, which means a warrant signed by an Australian judge. We do not co-operate with any kind of blanket surveillance, monitoring or “fishing expeditions”, and we do not give out user information to anyone outside Australia.

Ever wish Editorial supported tags? Wish granted. This is quite clever and superior to most application dependent tags. It means the tags are actually part of the document text and transportable anywhere. That’s my biggest problem with adopting tags, they are ephemeral and generally lost when moving a document around. This workflow assumes tags begin with a hash mark, which may not work for many (including me).

Paperback is a new web service for reading Pinboard bookmarks formatted in a readable and non-distracting view. I’ve been testing it for a couple of months and it’s very nicely done. $15 per year is a pretty good value if you use Pinboard as your reading library, as I do. Here’s the elevator pitch: Read things Archive things back into Paperback (with tags or other metadata, if you’d like) Delete things I like some of the nice touches like logging in with a Pinboard token.

On the heels of BitTorrent server-less file sync comes BitTorrent server-less chat: So over at Labs, we’re working on something that could solve for conversation security. BitTorrent Chat applies distributed technology to the idea of IM. Our goal is to ensure that your messages stay yours: private, secure, and free. Something tells me 2014 is going to see a dramatic increase in secure chat, email and file sharing services.