June 2011
1 post
3 tags
March 2011
1 post
February 2011
2 posts
“The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.”
– Unknown
January 2011
2 posts
December 2010
3 posts
“You are the centre of your little world, and I am of mine.”
– Ivor Cutler
“Podrán cortar todas las flores
pero no detendrán la primavera”
– Pablo Neruda
November 2010
1 post
Black Sheep →
The song is called Black Sheep. The scene is from Scott Pilgrim vs the World.
I saw the movie and I really liked it. 0:00-1:21 is from the movie, the rest is made up. And from 0:15 to 0:40, the timing is just awesome.
October 2010
3 posts
“Don’t you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch...”
– Jean-Paul Sartre
“Don’t undress my love —you might find a mannequin.
Don’t...”
– Charles Bukowski - Trapped
September 2010
3 posts
The Feynman Algorithm
The Feynman Algorithm:
Write down the problem.
Think real hard.
Write down the solution.
[…]
Well, the algorithm is only guaranteed to work when performed by Prof. Feynman. Hence the name.
Non-Feynman Algorithm:
Write down the problem.
Ask Feynman.
Copy down his solution.
Unfortunately, no longer executable :-(
no hay nada en mí sino una larga herida, una oquedad que ya nadie recorre, presente sin ventanas, pensamiento que vuelve, se repite, se refleja y se pierde en su misma transparencia, conciencia traspasada por un ojo que se mira mirarse hasta anegarse de claridad:
Piedra de Sol (Fragmento) de Octavio Paz
August 2010
3 posts
Big Numbers →
Who can name a bigger number? Whoever has a deeper paradigm.
Fascinating!
What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social... →
The paradox of the welfare state, and indeed of all the social democratic (and Christian Democratic) states of Europe, was quite simply that their success would over time undermine their appeal. The generation that remembered the 1930s was understandably the most committed to preserving institutions and systems of taxation, social service, and public provision that they saw as bulwarks...
July 2010
2 posts
“In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back...”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance. 1841. via (via viafrank)
“Perfect doesn’t scale”
– Seth Godin
June 2010
2 posts
“Be like a duck. Remain calm on the surface and paddle like hell underneath.”
– Michael Caine (via rulesformyunbornson)
“Try not. Do… or do not. There is no try.”
– Jedy Master Yoda Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
May 2010
5 posts
“Language has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of...”
– Paul Tillich.
Specialization is for insects
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for...
“Delight the eye without distracting the mind”
– From Google User Experience Principles
“If you’re someone who only reads the editorial page of The New York Times, try...”
– President Obama (via southpol)
April 2010
8 posts
The Superstar Effect →
While challenging competitions are supposed to bring out our best, these studies demonstrate that when people are forced to compete against a peer who seems far superior, they often don’t rise to the challenge. Instead, they give up.
“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving...”
– Godwin’s law
Paul Buchheit: If your product is Great, it... →
What’s the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else.
…
By focusing on only a few core features in the first version, you are forced to find the true essence and value of the product.
Just don’t take literally “forget anything else” partplease. Otherwise, the...
“Because if smart women who know how smart they are intimidate men (and they do),...”
– Tiger Beatdown: 13 Ways of Looking at Liz Lemon (via syntheticpubes)
“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
– Hanlon’s razor - aka Heinlein’s razor
Programmer
A woman asks her husband, a programmer, to go shopping
Woman: Dear, please, go to the nearby grocery store to buy some bread. Also, if they have eggs, buy 6.
Man: O.K.
Twenty minutes later the husband comes back bringing 6 loaves of bread.
His wife is flabbergasted
Woman: Dear, why on earth did you buy 6 loaves of bread?
Man: They had eggs
March 2010
6 posts
“When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes...”
– Leonardo Da Vinci. Seen at Mark Shuttleworth’s blog
The referendum →
We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.
One of the hardest things to look at in this life is the lives we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look back — Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Eurydice — are lost. Looking to the side...
“Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn...”
– George Bernard Shaw
Inside Alan Greenspan's nightmare →
As Greenspan details in his book, the reason for his nightmare is that the world was depleting its stock of hundreds of millions of unemployed people, including those of the former Soviet Union and also in rural China. In other words, “too many” of them had become employed, and this was allowing for wages of factory workers in China to rise.
…
Is there something wrong with this...
2 tags
Letter - Free Speech for Whom? - NYTimes.com →
Despite the biased formulation, the argument is interesting
If The Times supports the right of American citizens organized as a corporation to exercise their First Amendment rights on behalf of terrorist organizations, why doesn’t it support the right of citizens organized as business corporations, advocacy groups and unions to support or oppose candidates?
February 2010
4 posts
Did Garry Kasparov Stumble Into a New Business... →
It was my luck (perhaps my bad luck) to be the world chess champion during the critical years in which computers challenged, then surpassed, human chess players. Before 1994 and after 2004 these duels held little interest.
Chess, Computers, Business process design… interesting mix for a reading.
2 tags
“STRANGER! if you, passing, meet me, and desire to speak to me, why should you...”
– Walt Whitman
January 2010
10 posts
The Three-Minute Rule →
You can learn a great deal about customers by studying the broader context in which they use your product or service. To do this, ask what your customer is doing three minutes immediately before and three minutes after he uses your product or service.
A Saturday Post: The Internet Devalues Everything... →
Yes, Internet technologies do enable the creation of new markets and services that didn’t exist before. Take virtual worlds as an example. But by and large, if something can be digitized, its business model is very vulnerable to being devalued by IDBTs.
Interesting reading… both post and comments.
1 tag
...then I’ll know who my real friends are
philosophistry:
One night in the mid-1990s when I was working as a journalist in Beijing, I went out to dinner with some Chinese friends. I had just finished reading a book called “The File” by the British historian Timothy Garton Ash. It’s about what happened in East Berlin after the Berlin Wall came down and everybody could see the files the Stasi had been keeping all those years. People...
Dunning–Kruger effect - Wikipedia, the free... →
The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority.