It’s a little morbid, but whenever I die, I think it’d be pretty cool to go out with a reef ball, a mold where they combine your cremated ashes with a bit of replacement coral reef. There’s not much of a point to adding a person’s remains to it, but it’s a good way to get your family to sponsor coral reef redevelopment. The service also saves a bit of money in the process, at least compared to a burial.

Another alternative is a sky burial (really gross, graphic pictures; prepare yourself), but that’s probably a little too gross to ask of people. To put it bluntly, they feed a dissected corpse to the birds. This isn’t appalling to do in Buddhist Tibet — Buddhists believe your body is merely a vessel for your spirit, so when you die, it becomes a useless, insignificant object. It’s an agreeable position, but still a dirty way of doing things. ∞ via reddit

The awesome iPhone 3G has been officially announced, but many questions have been left unanswered.

• The price: we know it’s supposed to be cheap, but is this $199 8GB base price part of a contract? If the actual price without a contract is higher, can we re-start our contracts to get this deal?

  Answer: Nailed it. Previous iPhone customers can upgrade and renew their contract to secure the new $199 price level. ∞

• What do we do with our old iPhones? If we don’t want them, are they bricks? Will they resell? Is there a trade-in program so we can recover some of the costs and maybe even recycle the materials?
• What about Flash support? It’s getting pretty ridiculous that we can’t access such a large part of the web. I understand this is largely the fault of the web developers, but there’s no reason that we still lack Flash support.
• Did they nail copy and paste this time?
• Does it support video? Can we teleconference?
• When can we demo it in stores? What were those packages that were to be opened tomorrow? I called both AT&T and Apple stores, but retail employees haven’t heard anything yet.
• How will 3G hold up with the upcoming surge of users?
• Is the battery replaceable?
• What happens to the iPod Touch? Will they discontinue it?
• Is there support for wallpapers? Can applications at least change that?
• Is the processor any faster?
• Is there some way (first- or third-party) to do MMS?
• This is still an amazing piece of technology. How the hell did they do that? Is everybody going to have one of these now?

In philosophy, you learn that a lot of your basic assumptions about reality are depressingly incompatible or inherently meaningless. One of the clichés on which I rest many of my most meaningful decisions has been to live without regrets. Don’t do anything you’ll regret, and don’t avoid trying something you’ll regret having missed.

Well, Time is running an article, Can You Predict Happiness? (998 words), which basically overturns that. The idea may seem simple — people are far too distractable and moment-centered to predict how much they’ll enjoy something — but it has really fundamental consequences. I read this article a week ago, and yet I still keep thinking about it. Once you make a decision, even one you find important, and go with it, “the unchosen alternatives evaporate.” The good news about that is, when making a decision seems like a toss-up, you can be happy with either choice. That bad news is, if you take it to the extreme, it’ll render all of your decisions meaningless and arbitrary. You would have been fine going with that other career, that other spouse, that other life.

You know, maybe Hillary wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Update: John tipped me off to the fact that the experiment’s designer, Dan Gilbert, has done a talk on this very subject for TED. In twenty-one minutes, he clarifies it much better than either myself or the Times article does. ∞