I expected to read this as another '$1 a year salary' story, wherein the CEO was still _actually_ rich, but only brought in a meager 'salary', owing the rest to dividends.

What I got instead was a story about what seems to be a brilliant boss. He lowered his own salary along with everybody else's. He's accessible. He actually rides his planes and lets people know he's the CEO of the airline.

In short, he is accessible to both his customers and employees. In the startup world this probably isn't that uncommon -- when you have a staff of four or twenty, accessibility is easy to get. Wikipedia lists Japan Air as having over 30,000 employees.

This is impressive to me, however, it's worth pointing out that despite this practicality and accessibility, the article linked was written in 2009, and Japan Air filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year.

Fascinating article, with just one quip I'd have:

Plutonium-238, the material in nuclear batteries is very different from Plutonium-239, a material for nuclear weapons. There is great stigma against Plutonium, but mainly because of Pu-239. If you remember some of the news around the launch of the Cassini probe, there was opposition because of the Pu-238 pellet powering the RTG.

Compared to Pu-239, Pu-238 is non-fissile and also produces a lot of heat (which is the point, really). Pu-238 poses almost no proliferation risk. Even the radioactivity is in the form of alpha radiation, which needs very little shielding (hardly even penetrating the skin). The only problem with Pu-238 right now is that it's very expensive to produce and also very scarce. If Pu-238 were abundant, it could find many applications and pose very little security risk; building a dirty bomb out of it won't really work (as a matter a fact, neither making one out of Pu-239).

In general, our civilization has an irrational fear of nuclear energy. Even more egregious since there is a variant of nuclear technology that's almost completely proliferation-free, namely the thorium cycle.

It seems like every "I didn't use Photoshop" article is always showing off a site that... looks like the designer didn't use Photoshop.

As a designer who's in Photoshop all day long, knowing when a layout necessitates using Photoshop or not is second-nature to me now. I'll just stop using it and hop over to my text editor and start writing HTML & CSS. And for sufficiently sparse layouts, I'll just not use Photoshop at all. I assumed everyone knew and did this, but perhaps I was mistaken.