September 2011
2 posts
1 tag
The Truth About 'Class War' in America | Richard... →
1 tag
The End Of Growth | Anonymous | European | 05... →
April 2011
1 post
A Hard Thing is Done by Figuring Out How to Start
March 2011
3 posts
P.Z. Myers on nearly dying:
And then I felt myself going. My guts went all watery, and I felt the unpleasantness of nausea with a flabby feeling that no, I wasn’t even going to have the strength to vomit. My limbs went all rubbery and limp. I kept sweating — a cold, clammy sweat. There was a roaring whisper in my ears, and all I heard as the doctors milled about was a distant “waa...
Twelve Virtues of Rationality →
They are not new lessons. Never owe any money you can’t pay tomorrow morning. Never let the markets dictate your actions. Always be in a position to play your own game. Never take on more risks than you can handle…Good businesses, good management, plenty of liquidity, always having a loaded gun; if you play by those principles you will do fine no matter what happens. And you don’t ever know...
February 2011
1 post
A lot of life is being prepared for a lucky break.
January 2011
5 posts
Lost in Thought
Sam Harris, who has been my favorite secular thinker for a few years now, wrote an excellent response to the question, “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?”
We are Lost in Thought
If the lives of your children depended on it, you could not focus on anything — even the feeling of a knife at your throat — for more than a few seconds, before...
“Once a problem is described in sufficient detail, its solution is obvious.”
Updating and configuring Office for my work machine was an annoying experience that makes me distrustful of it. I was trying to open a docx file from an email in Outlook. It’s the first time I’ve tried to use Office since getting the machine from my employer, and it inflicted the following disjointed workflow on me:
Run the auto-updater.
Quit Outlook. What? Okay. I hope it remembers...
Dinosaurier part1 | Free Movies Videos - Watch... →
2011
1. Listen to yourself
2. Listen to others
3. Follow through
4. Ask questions
December 2010
10 posts
The Blast Shack →
The Wikileaks Cablegate scandal is the most exciting and interesting hacker scandal ever. I rather commonly write about such things, and I’m surrounded by online acquaintances who take a burning interest in every little jot and tittle of this ongoing saga. So it’s going to take me a while to explain why this highly newsworthy event fills me with such a chilly, deadening sense of Edgar Allen Poe...
“Being your fullest self is a lot of work”
The future isn’t going to feel futuristic. It’s simply going to feel weird and out-of-control-ish, the way it does now, because too many things are changing too quickly. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn’t feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.
Giving Good Design Feedback
Anyone who has had to provide feedback to a design agency they’ve hired should read this piece.
First rule of design feedback: what you’re looking at is not art. It’s not even close. It’s a business tool in the making and should be looked at objectively like any other business tool you work with. The right question is not, “Do I like it?” but “Does this meet our goals?” If it’s blue,...
All right, here, instead of using those keys, you should take this extremely convoluted and foreign-looking mobile phone, into which you have to insert all of your keys, type in a special password, and then oh, well, it works on most locks but not all of them, so you’ll only be able to replace some of your keys with it, so now you should carry this new weird mobile phone on your keyring...
On the importance of control groups
One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction.
At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full...
The Insanity Virus →
Keep Your Identity Small →
Paul Graham describes how discussions on some topics break down into useless argument when certain audiences are participating; People are unable to discuss anything objectively when their own identity is tangled up in it:
More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn’t engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion...
November 2010
6 posts
Formalize CSS →
A form normalization library that looks promising.
[ via Dave Shea ]
Young people can find information faster and sort information faster than older people. For example, young people are more likely to use the best tool at the best time: They collaborate on wiki-type tools with ease. They crowdsource. They’re aces with downloading software onto the company laptop to become more productive and efficient. Think about it: Younger people don’t utter the phrase...
October 2010
1 post
September 2010
12 posts
Las Vegas Death Ray →
Apparently there’s a building in Vegas that can singe your hair and melt plastic cups if you stand in the reflected beam of sunlight it projects. Best part, that beam reflects onto the swimming pool enclosure.
Rolling Stone on the Tea Party movement →
A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can’t imagine it.
An excellent article in Rolling Stone about the nature of the modern...
Introduction to NodeJS →
I’ve watched this a few times, already.
Divided Minds, Specious Souls →
The Smart Set: The Wise Men (and Women!) - June... →
There are, according to Hall and the researchers he meets, eight attributes of wisdom: Emotional Regulation, Knowing What’s Important, Moral Reasoning, Compassion, Humility, Altruism, Patience, and Dealing with Uncertainty.
To be wise is not to know particular facts but to know without excessive confidence or excessive cautiousness. Wisdom is thus not a belief, a value, a set of...
Moss carpet for your bathroom | Veerle's blog 3.0 →
The moisture from the shower and what drips off of you when you get out waters the plants.
BLDGBLOG: Vintage Mobile Cinema →
I love the bubble on the front of this vehicle. It’s simultaneously very futuristic and reminiscent of a crown.
August 2010
6 posts
http://samhey.com/post/993069227 →
Edmund & Tenzing →
I hope I will someday look this badass on a day-to-day basis, much less while freezing my ass off at the ceiling of the world.
Adobe on Typekit →
A reason to mess around with my Typekit account once more. The best part: I can mock something in Photoshop using Adobe fonts and push them to the web using Typekit.
Why Space Travel Will Always Suck
Cracked has an amusing breakdown of the serious engineering and human challenges with traveling long distances through space. I think the following passage makes for a good premise for a scifi film:
When something does go wrong, the reality is going to be like Apollo 13, with astronauts scrambling desperately to MacGyver up shit like air filters out of duct tape and plastic bags.
One could...
The Great Spare-Time Revolution
Someone born in 1960 has watched something like 50,000 hours of television already. Fifty thousand hours—more than five and a half solid years.
D:
Nausicaä meets cyberpunk but in a good way. This is what the Machinarium universe might look like several thousand years into its future.
July 2010
12 posts
37Signals and Pricing Models
A great blog post about why 37Signals’ advice is irrelevant and unhelpful to the majority of web application developers:
‘People are willing to pay’ say 37 signals to the cowering mass of young developers bombarded with an implicit open source manifesto written across the social web. But the success of 37 signals and their relatively high pricing model does not prove people are willing...
In Praise of Progress
The New York Times “Opinionator” section published a nice little teardown of primitivism:
But you know what? The 19th century stunk. It’s a total pain to live this way.
For about 4,000 years living standards barely budged. Then, in the 18th or 19th century they began to take off and the upward ascent has been miraculous. People at the poverty line live better, materially, than...
“When you know you’re in a real police state is when the police shoot.”
– Margaret Atwood