1. First, I switched to “Use Facebook as Emerging Scholars Network.” If you’re the admin of a Page, you will see a similar option in the right sidebar.
   

   Page Admins can choose to use Facebook as their Page, gaining special powers in the process!

2. Next, I selected the Friends/Fans icon in the upper left corner. Click “See All.”
   

   That little silhouette is the list of your fans. Your Fans list used to be easier to find.

3. Since this was a Page, I filtered the Fans by Pages.
   

   There doesn't seem to be a Search function, unfortunately.

4. Click the X to remove them as a Fan, making sure that you check “ban permanently”as an option.
   

   "Ban permanently" is a good option to choose!

5. There is no Step 5.

That’s it! I hope you find this useful. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how to search Fans other than scrolling through the whole list of them. If you have a large number of Fans, this might be difficult. If the person has recently joined or had activity on your Page, then that will make it easier to find them. If they aren’t active and you can’t find them in your list of Fans, then perhaps you’ll be lucky and no one will notice.

Like I said, this process was far from obvious, and there might be an easier way. If you know a better or different way, please tell me in the comments. Thanks!

Note: These instructions apply only to Facebook Pages (i.e. for businesses, nonprofits, clubs, causes, etc.). If you need to block someone from your personal Facebook account, see this article from Facebook.

Mr. Jobs’s final leave of absence was announced this year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And, as it happened, Mr. Jobs died on the same day as one of Dr. King’s companions, the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, one of the last living co-founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Dr. King, too, had had a close encounter with his own mortality when he was stabbed by a mentally ill woman at a book signing in 1958. He told that story a decade later to a rally on the night of April 3, 1968, and then turned, with unsettling foresight, to the possibility of his own early death. His words, at the beginning, could easily have been a part of Steve Jobs’s commencement address: “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now.” But here Dr. King, the civic and religious leader, turned a corner that Mr. Jobs never did. “I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything, I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

How do these content-grinders make money? Largely through Google ads. It’s created a situation in which inferior search results make more money for Google. Yes, they still want to organize the world’s information, but it’s become easier to see the gray text after it: “…so we can sell ads next to it.”

Here’s the thing that occurred to me: Google doesn’t need to sell ads anymore. It simply doesn’t. It now has enough money to, well, retire.

Google currently has over $33 billion cash on hand. If they took even half of that and endowed a foundation, it would instantly be the 2nd largest foundation in the US. With a little bit of creative accounting and off-loading some assets, it could even become the largest foundation in the world. Google could then get out of the sordid advertising business and focus on organizing information and, er, not being evil. Maybe they could even get their Books project cleaned up.

Of course, there are issues with this. They would have to cut staff – though that might be a good thing, freeing up all those bright and ambitious engineers to go do their own things. It would remove the profit motive from their work, so there’s the danger of becoming complacent if they aren’t sufficiently motivated by their mission. And there’s the whole nonprofit transparency thing, though that pales in comparison to Sarbanes-Oxley.

So – will the next stage of Google’s evolution be as a nonprofit? I doubt it, but it’s a fun speculation.

There is nothing wrong with using Wikipedia to get a quick sense of a subject and to lead you to more reliable sources. Encyclopedias, survey-level textbooks, desk references, and similar resources have been used the same way for generations. If you are trying to nail down some definitive piece of information, then you should never settle for Wikipedia. As your starting point, however, I think there are few options that are much better.

For that matter, Wikipedia is an excellent resources for certain subjects, such as:

• Controversial subjects that many people, with many different perspectives, care a great deal about. Theology is a great example. If Catholics, Calvinists, Wesleyans, Orthodox, and even Swedenborgians can come up with an article on justification that they all more or less accept, I bet that’s going to be a pretty decent article.
• Obscure pop culture facts, like alternate versions of the comic book character Nightcrawler.
• People you are encountering for the first time, and need to get a quick triangulation on them, like Emanuel Swedenborg.

I use Wikipedia everyday, and there’s nothing wrong with it. If Wikipedia is your only source of information, then there’s something wrong with you, but don’t blame Wikipedia.

But what to do with these backup copies? Well, I have a Dropbox account (that’s my referral link) that I can use for safekeeping. Dropbox is a great app that lets you synch files and folders on your hard drive with an online file-sharing service, even keeping files synched across multiple computers if you want. You can share files and folders with others, so, for example, your wife and you could use it to work on your Christmas letter. Each time one of you made a change, it would be synched across all computers. It’s great for larger documents or things that are more complicated than Google Docs can handle.

So I have a place to store my WordPress backups, but I don’t really want to manually save the new backups every time they arrive. How could I make this process automatic and invisible?

After several failed attempts, here’s the process I created.

When new backups arrive, I’ve created a rule in Mail.app that shuffles them into their own folder, so that I never have to see them. That was easy, because all of the emails are from “WordPress” and include the word “Backup” in the subject.

I tried to create an Applescript to save the attachment to my Dropbox folder, but Applescript doesn’t work too well with Mail.app attachments. Instead, I created a new Application in Automator that would:

1. Find mail messages in the new “WordPress Backups” folder I created.
2. Filter those messages to deal only with any messages that arrived today.
3. Save the mail attachment to my Dropbox folder

This is important: I saved this Automator workflow as an application, so that iCal could open it. Here’s a version you can use. Just change the mail folder and the destination folder, and save it as an application.

Last step: I created a recurring event for every evening at 11pm. In iCal, you can set the alarm to open an application, so I just set it to open and run this new, hyper-specific application each day. (I also use this application-as-alarm feature to automatically open Skype or iChat if I have an online meeting scheduled with someone.)

In theory, I should never have to worry about my WordPress backups. Even if something happens to my computer, they’ll be accessible from “the cloud” via Dropbox. The backup files are very small (less than 1 MB), so Dropbox ought to be able to hold as many as I need. I let you know in a few weeks if it seems to be working correctly.

Me with a booklet I just made

I love books, and I’ve had fun making my own from time to time. If you have a duplexing printer, or if you can turn stacks of paper over, you can create quick booklets out of PDFs. Not only does it save paper, but it’s also an easy way of carrying long-ish documents with you. Throw on a cover made from a cereal box, and you’ve got a nice little book that’s much easier on the eyes than your computer monitory.

If you have a Mac, just download this free Create Booklet service. It will add a “Create Booklet” option to your print window.

For Windows, or if you prefer web-based options, use the free website BookletCreator.com. This online service provides a few more options. For example, it will let you set a maximize number of pages for your booklets, in case you are printing a very long document and need to break it up into smaller pieces.

Happy reading!

What is RSS?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It’s a way for websites to “syndicate” their content for use by other websites and software, just like a syndicated newspaper column can be published in hundreds of newspapers at the same time. At minimum, the RSS feed will contain the title of the new article and a brief summary, but many websites will make the full text, images, mp3 or PDF attachments, etc., of their articles available through RSS. For these websites, you can read their entire content without ever visiting their website. The RSS content is called the website’s RSS feed.

Why is RSS better than just visiting the website?

RSS feeds are better because of time and attention.

Time: Rather than you clicking through each of your favorite bookmarks and waiting for each page to load, your RSS reader (see below) will collect all of the latest content automatically from your favorite websites. Instead of checking a few dozen websites, you’ll only have to check one (or none at all, if you use a desktop RSS reader). Further, many popular websites change their content daily, even hourly, which means that you’ll need to check back regularly to make sure you don’t miss something. Your RSS reader, in contrast, will save all of a website’s content, so that you can read it at your leisure, on your schedule.

Attention: With all of your favorite content in one place, you can organize it based on your reading preferences, collect it into folders, skim the headlines and skip the articles you don’t care about, or even subscribe to specialty RSS feeds based on your interests. For example, love David Brooks but hate the NY Times? Subscribe to the NY Times’ feed for David Brooks’ columns, and get only the content you want to read.

How do I read a site’s RSS feed?

You need an RSS reader, sometimes called an “aggregator.” There are dozens of web-based and desktop-based readers available, usually for free. Once you add an RSS feed to your reader (this is called “subscribing”), your reader will collect the feed’s content on a regular basis and save it until you’re ready to read it.

Some of the more popular web-based readers include Google Reader, My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Netvibes. I prefer desktop software personally, and use NetNewsWire. A long list of RSS readers can be found at Wikipedia.

How can you find a website’s RSS feed?

Many web browsers make it easy to determine if a website has an RSS feed by putting a small icon in the address bar.

In Safari, the RSS icon looks like this:

In Firefox, the RSS icon looks like this:

Many websites will also provide links to their RSS feeds. For example, on my website, I have the following in my sidebar:

Depending on your RSS reader, you might be able to add the RSS feed to your subscriptions just by clicking on the RSS feed link or the RSS symbol in your browser. Or you might have to copy-and-paste the link into your RSS reader.

Are there downsides to using RSS feeds?

Yes. It’s easy to add more and more RSS feeds, until you feel even more overwhelmed than ever before. You’ll want to purge your RSS feeds periodically to eliminate any that you just aren’t reading. Some readers will track which feeds you tend to read and which you tend to skip.

It’s also easy to surround yourself with news and bloggers that simply reinforce your own perspective and biases. Maybe you see this as a benefit, not a problem, but I try to make sure that I hear view points that I disagree with, too. So I still visit general news sites like the NY Times or CNN, and even subscribe to a few RSS feeds of writers with whom I usually disagree.

Bonus Trick!

If you try all this and fall in love with RSS feeds, try creating your own custom RSS feeds with Yahoo Pipes.

The NY Times ran an article describing the game’s debt to evolutionary biology. Wright states that he was inspired by biologists like Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson for the game’s evolutionary concept. But note the description of how the game is played, from a game of Dr. Thomas Near of Yale:

The next time [after his creature died once], Dr. Near’s luck changes. He gains enough points to move to the next level of the game. His creature grows a brain. “Oh man, it’s like I graduated college,” he says. Dr. Near can now alter his creature. He stretches the body to give it a neck. He adds a pair of kangaroolike legs.

As one of the scientists interviewed in the article notes, “The mechanism is severely messed up.” In fact, it almost sounds like another theory, which, I should note, is not mentioned once in the entire article.

Keith Blount, an unapologetic English atheist, [who] created the marvelous cultural artifact call Scrivener, a program which justifies the existence of the Macintosh computer all by itself and which made completing this project an unexpected joy.

Amen, brother. Amen.