Friday Four

1. Wired explains why three MIT grads want to send you an empty box:

"Buying online is really awesome. People have become very accustomed to one-click buying. The confidence is there, and with mobile that's only growing," Blackshaw says.

"The inverse isn't true. Selling online is really awful. It hasn't progressed to the same frictionless transaction that buying has."

Sold, as the new company is called, handles only a few small, upscale items now, but I hope they really can work with a greater variety of products down the road. I have a couple of small boxes of things I'd rather sell than simply toss into the trash. Time to deal with those things has been the big obstacle for me.

2. For the curious, and pursuant to last week's post, here's a crucial robin update:

3. I wouldn't say that Americans speak English totally differently from each other, but I enjoyed going through this set of twenty-two maps showing such things as the geographical distribution of you/you all/y'all and the words used for what the folks on the West Coast call freeways. My favorite part came in the form of the following update on a map showing how people across the country pronounce the first word in "Bowie knife":

From a Texan: "It's pronounced Boo-wie because it's named after Jim Bowie (pronounced Boo-wie), who played a major role in the Texas revolution. That explains why we're the only ones who pronounce it correctly."

He's mostly right -- except that Texans aren't the only ones: There is a pocket of people in Maryland who do the same.

4. This article on how crackers guess difficult passwords definitely falls into the "interesting" category of things, and not the "good news" I include in my Friday posts. Here's the most interesting/troubling/possibly-useful-to-know quote: "This is an answer to the batteryhorsestaple thing." [link added]

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected spelling of robin.