The universe may or may not end at some point. If it doesn’t end, then what’s the point of life since any lifetime is finite and hence negligible? If it does end, then even more so, what’s the point of progress and advancement? What’s the performance objective of life, if there is implicitly one?

Could it be that the objective is to maximize the perturbation to the universe, through some combination of genetics and memetics, in case it doesn’t end? More offsprings, more perturbation through biology; make more “difference” to the world, more perturbation through culture? That would be one secular response in favor of the here-and-now, compared to the alternative, somewhat ascetic objective of seeking inner satisfaction.

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The great feature of an analog microwave oven controller is that setting a time is highly efficient and the effort taken to set the time (at worst) scales linearly with the heating need, which seems like a correct scaling. It has additional features such as easy adding and subtracting of time while in progress.

A digital microwave oven controller, by any measure, is an inferior product. The reasons it might be preferred are (1) to reduce component count and save cost for the manufacturer, (2) to appease consumers with an impression of a product in the “advanced” style, neither of which are excellent reasons.

This is a mistake, and the inefficiency introduced via the digital controller is only ameliorated somewhat by some oddities of the device (enter 99 and the microwave runs for 99 seconds, enter x:99 and the microwave runs for 60x+99 seconds, etc.). So between 60 and 99 seconds, you manage to save a keystroke but no more. (Ok, also between 10 min. and 10 min. 29 seconds.)

This reminds me why I dislike digital book readers, too. They suffer from the analogous problem versus paper books with regard to page turning.

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