Come along with me on a small thought experiment:

Imagine for a minute, you’ve been given a task by the United Nations Commission on Computers & Stuff.

• Your job is to optimize all of the un-optimized digital images in the world (to take less storage space).
• Your mandate dictates that you can only do lossless optimization. For context: there are tools that reorganize the contents of image files such that they take take up less storage space, but no data or image quality is lost. This is in contrast to compressing an image more, where you discard data and lose image quality.
• In my thought experiment, you somehow have the funding, computing power, and the access to all computer systems in the world.

My question is this: Is it better (from a climate standpoint) to:

1. Spend the energy once to save all of the storage space in the longer term, or;
2. Don’t spend the energy to optimize, and keep spending the energy required for the un-optimized storage?

Obviously the real answer is It Depends on factors like: how much optimization is possible on most images, how long (and on what type of storage) are most images stored. Let’s not ruin a fun (?) thought experiment with nuance, though.

What say you? Does it cost more to squish a big image, or keep it around un-squished?

Any time I’ve rented a car in my life there’s been a question I didn’t know how to answer: Do you need insurance?

I’ve had a vague notion that my credit card may provide insurance for cars I rent, or maybe my own personal car insurance may cover cars I rent. I didn’t really know though.

Sometimes I waived the rental company insurance, sometimes I paid for it.

With an upcoming rental with the Turo car rental app (think Airbnb for cars but hopefully without fuelling a housing crisis), I was asked again if I needed my own insurance, or if I should pay for Turo’s insurance.

I finally decided to figure out the real answer: do I already have insurance on cars that aren’t my own? I called The Personal Insurance Company, who insures our beloved minivan, and got a real answer.

After some confusion about coverage for when I’m driving a rental car, and coverage to pay for a rental car when my own car is damaged, I got my answer: No, I don’t have coverage for cars I rent.

How much would it cost to get insurance for cars I’m renting? They called it “endorsement PE-SEF 27” and it is $8. A year. Done.

It took me decades, but I can finally waive rental car insurance with confidence.

I like to think I’m pretty smart, until I try to read a novel featuring two characters whose names start with the same letter.

As part of their story about the downfall of Twitter, The Verge has compiled an archive of Great Tweets. I might just be tired, but I’ve been laughing for 15 minutes at these.

Not on the list, but a couple of favourites of mine:

“There’s still so much we don’t know about HTML. Even now, scientists are discovering new tags almost every day”

@Orteil42

“Stepping down from my job to devote myself full time to reading the emails from my kids schools”

Joseph Birbiglia @joebirbigs (deleted)

I asked my coworkers today: We have terms for the children of your siblings, or the children of your children. What do you call the children of your work -friends?

I was satisfied with one colleague’s suggestion of “Coworker once removed.”

Then, many hours later, it dawned on me: Businiece (or the slightly less perfect, Businephew).

All in a day’s work.