December 2011
11 posts
“ghosts with power cords”
– Avery Edison
on new science and research - cyberpunkture →
This is a great article on a new directions for science research and publishing. From a guy who actually has been dealing with it for the last few years.
…pointing to the fact that we’re not taking enough advantage of technology is the success of the polymath projects in leveraging a distributed and open group of people to solve hard math problems by letting them easily collaborate on...
Manic Pixie Dream Boy?
So last night in a conversation that was sort of all over the place, I ended up explaining the concept of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl to a friend1.
Intrigued, he apparently googled it at home, and found out that it’s been subverted—or at least lampshaded—in a few movies.
Which made me wonder. Hollywood loves being “creative” by doing the obvious inversion of a...
xkcd: Dreams →
This is an old favorite, and every now again worth remembering explicitly.
The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer
number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I’m
sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live trapped in loops, reliving a few
days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out ahead of
us....
“"Need” is such a bourgeoise concept”
– A coworker of mine
A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design →
I’m a bit late on this, but Bret Victor has a fantastic screed up about the recent “Future Vision” video that made the rounds not too long ago.
I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.
Is that so bad, to dump the tactile for the visual? Try this:...
Your Code Sucks and I Hate You →
Some years ago a coworker of mine, Jonathan Lange, put out a paper on code review.
Some reviews are involuntary. These tend to happen late at night when a programmer is deciphering code in an obscure corner of the project, perhaps trying to fix a bug. These code reviews are often characterized by coarse language, angry comments and are generally unhelpful to the original author, who might not...