February 2012
2 posts
A script for Xcode to make your life suck a little... →
Patrick and I co-wrote (he wrote, and I re-wrote and documented) a nice little script for Xcode. It lets you keep API keys in a file outside of your project’s version control system (great for open source work or for multiple developers with different keys). It’s nice. I hope it makes your day a tiny bit better.
Football is destroying itself
(via Kottke) Grantland has two articles, one by Jonah Lehrer and one by Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier, about how concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) may end the sport of football in the near future.
Remember “punch-drunk” boxers? It turns out they were literally pummeling their brains into an Alzheimer’s-like state of neuron death. Chronic exposure to concussions and...
January 2012
7 posts
Why Science is Failing Us →
Science is all about telling a story that fits a set of data points. These stories cut corners and ignore small pieces that don’t fit, because the complexity of explaining every bit puts you in a bind to figure out the whole gig, down to every last detail. The problem is, sometimes those small details matter a whole lot, and it’s why medicine (and, in my opinion, economics) is having a...
Vladimir Nabokov’s Transparent Things is a lovely read. The Kindle sample caught me right at the start, and it’s delightfully short and can be read in one sitting. Despite its brevity, it’s a well-written novel with the same flowing prose and long paragraphs, both interspersed with asides and ambiguous changes in subject, that make me miss David Foster Wallace. It’s only...
The really tough problem of innovation is waste... →
via timoni:
“The way to have good ideas is to have lots of ideas.” That’s one of my favorite axioms and, in my experience, it is universally true. I have many ideas, every day, and some of them are very good. Mostly, though, they are bad.
— The Cooper Journal: Innovation is a waste disposal problem
Give Me Something To Read's 2011 Highlights
givemesomethingtoread:
Here are Give Me Something To Read’s highlights of the year. This list is comprised of my favourites and reader favourites, selected from articles posted here in 2011 (limited to those originally published in 2011). Open this post in your browser to make use of the Read Later button accompanying each link.
Read More
I’ve read over half of these, and every one was...
This Week's Reading
Jon Stewart and the dichotomy of accidentally becoming a serious news anchor while being a comedian.
There Is No Time in Waterloo: A McSweeney’s short story from their “Life in 2024” issue. Not science fiction, just “futurism-ish”. (I read this online and went to look up which issue it’s in; I recognized the cover from my own copy sitting on my nightstand.)
...
Informal Foursquare Rules
Places you shouldn’t check in:
Where you sleep. It’s no fun being mayor of your own flat: you live there. Let your friend that visits all the time earn it. (Important note: this includes the house of your significant other/fling/one night stand. It’s weird to be at a friend’s house and have their roommate’s friend-with-benefits check in (and even weirder when...
“The governor’s plan slashes $3.1 billion from an estimated $58.8 billion...”
– Ohio’s War on the Middle Class | Mother Jones
December 2011
13 posts
The Single Best Thing You Can Do for Your Health -... →
This went around Twitter a few days ago, and deserves a link. I’ll sum it up simply, though the video is short, cute, and worth watching: “Can you limit your sitting and sleeping to just 23 1/2 hours a day? 30 minutes of walking makes a huge difference in your quality of life.”
I got a Fitbit a few months ago, and simply love it. Having a step count at the end of my day...
Prometheus - Movie Trailers - iTunes →
Firefly? Is that you?
who killed videogames? (a ghost story) | insert... →
This is a four chapter short story about videogames, compulsion, and a bunch of other things. Find the time to read this, ok?
iTunes's iCloud Cache
I had a few hours to kill on the plane on Sunday, so I thought I’d take a look at how iTunes does caching for iCloud songs. This is a new caching mechanism in iTunes 10.5, and only applies to songs you start playing from iCloud in iTunes without hitting the download button. (Downloaded songs are treated like regular store purchases.)
Temporary files from iCloud are stored in...
“I like to urge designers to always ask themselves: “Does this logo look like a...”
– StumbleUpon Stumbles on Hidden Shape - Brand New
Why Spotify can never be profitable: The secret... →
As a music consumer, I love services like Spotify and Rdio: they let me listen to vast amounts of music and seemingly depthless back catalogues. But as someone who enjoys new bands, I love concerts: they seem to be one of the more reliable ways to send non-trivial sums of money to acts you like.
Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction →
You’re reading Bret Victor, right? (You should be.)
Economics focus: House of horrors, part 2 - The... →
… home prices are overvalued by about 25% or more in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, New Zealand, Britain, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. Indeed, in the first four of those countries housing looks more overvalued than it was in America at the peak of its bubble.
“It doesn’t take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the...”
– Don’t Be A Free User - Pinboard
November 2011
9 posts
The Economist v. The Budget
This week’s Economist has a four-piece discussion of the United States’ budgetary woes:
There’s a detailed piece about the Congressional supercommittee’s utter failure to effect any real reform, even with a procedural layup unlikely to be seen again for years (no amendments and no filibusters allowed, and yet, no deal emerged which took advantage of this).
There’s...
Concurrency Programming Guide: Migrating Away from... →
If you are currently using semaphores to restrict access to a shared resource, you should consider using dispatch semaphores instead. Traditional semaphores always require calling down to the kernel to test the semaphore. In contrast, dispatch semaphores test the semaphore state quickly in user space and trap into the kernel only when the test fails and the calling thread needs to be blocked....
Required Reading
There’s been a plethora of lovely articles I’ve read with Instapaper over the past few weeks. Here’s a few of my most favorite.
Gender and Society
There’s been a lot of noise lately, both in my social circle online and in my head, about gender interactions and socialization patterns in communities. I’m still mulling a lot of it over, but in the meantime, you should...
Voyager I and II →
“Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are each equipped with six sets, or pairs, of thrusters to control their movement. These include three pairs of primary thrusters and three backup, or redundant, pairs. Voyager 2 is currently using the two pairs of backup thrusters that control the pitch and yaw motion of the spacecraft. Switching to the backup thruster pair that controls roll motion will...
The Ticking Euro Bomb (Parts 1–4) – Der Spiegel... →
Der Spiegel’s four-part series on the Euro crisis is another great perspective on, and more backstory for, the impending currency meltdown in Europe.
A euro referendum: Greece’s woes - The Economist →
Let’s talk about austerity measures, bloated spending, and obstinate electorates.
… [A] country’s finances are not defined by markets alone. Rather the limits of solvency are tested by people’s willingness to accept tax rises and spending cuts. A government runs out of political capital long before it runs out of things to tax. In the end, won’t pay matters more than can’t pay.
Greece is,...
Jon Stewart and the Burden of History - Esquire →
This is a great article, and you should definitely watch his interview with Chris Wallace after reading it (it’s also linked in the piece).
“It becomes harder for our friends and ourselves to figure out what really...”
– n+1: The Accidental Bricoleurs
October 2011
4 posts
Generation X Can Get Bent
I’ve had a lot of drafts floating in my head about how badly the world is broken, and how fixing it will require my parents’ generation getting the hell out of the way. Now that a snippy little post called Generation X Doesn’t Want to Hear It is making its rounds, it’s as good a time as any to talk about the world from the next generation’s perspective. We’re not entitled...
About Steve
I’m writing about Steve Jobs’s life, but it’s really not for you, it’s for me.
Steve Jobs was an incredible person to watch move through the world, a person to be awed by, to envy, and to imitate, not because of what he did, or who he inspired, or what he created, but because of his relentless pursuit of a better self.
Many stories have been told about the young, brash, passionate co-founder...
September 2011
5 posts
12 tags
August 2011
2 posts
Why software patents are not fixable – Marco.org →
Marco presents an cogent argument for why software patents, as a type of issued patent, are in basic violation of both the U.S. Code sections surrounding patents and previous judicial rulings on the topic. (Read his post, then follow it up with a very well-written [Wikipedia] article outlining the establishment and subsequent rulings surrounding patent law.)
What’s missing from the “software...
Pen Type-A →
I ordered one of the Hi-Tec-C pens from JetPens a few days ago before deciding on this Kickstarter: it writes like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I’m irrationally excited about this. (via @jblanton)
July 2011
1 post
ginandtacos.com - NPF: The Lost Arts →
A fair critique of CG’s pervasive usage in today’s movies.
May 2011
6 posts
Nerrrrds
It’s been a week of great technical articles.
Start with a discussion of SSL handshake latency and HTTPS optimizations. Then read Ars Technica’s two articles on DOCSIS, the “unsung hero of high-speed cable internet access”: part one and part two. And finally, try Ars Technica’s technical write-up of big network-attached storage: Isilon, the petabyte storage solution.
“…I can guarantee you, without fear of contradiction, that no software engineer...”
– Jon Evans, Why The New Guy Can’t Code
1 tag
A Brief Review of Google Voice
I ported my number from AT&T to Google Voice a month and a half ago. It has its benefits and its detractions, but on the whole I’m keeping it for now and not porting back, partially because it’s Good Enough, and partially because I’m tired of dealing with billing departments and three-day SMS outages.
Having your primary number with Google Voice is great, because it means...
Let’s pretend for a moment that you’re on an airplane. That there’s a baby rattler being shaken two seats in front of you. That you’ve been sitting in this window seat for the better part of what feels like two days, but can only be five hours, because if it was any longer, you’d definitely have landed or at the very least have run out of fuel. That you’ve eaten every last edible thing within...
Marginal Costs Rise, Causing Shift in Demand →
Oh, sorry, I just ran an Ars Technica article about companies bringing high-margin and quality control-sensitive processes back to the US from China through my Economics Auto-Summarizer 3000, and the title was what it spit out.
1 tag
We go about our day-to-day, happily ignoring the cyborgs in our midst. Anyone with an IUD for birth control. Anyone with magnets in their fingertips. Anyone with glasses, and definitely anyone with glasses mounted to their nose. Anyone with pacemakers, seizure control devices, joint replacements, pins to set broken bones. We’re mostly a population of medical cyborgs.
If you’ll allow me to...
April 2011
5 posts
1 tag
Do, or Die Trying?
(I’ll be damned if I’m going to miss Publish It Tuesday two weeks in a row: I’ve already got a sack of guilt on my shoulders from last week’s intentional miss. Luckily, Andy’s piece on goals and preemption got me thinking…)
I’m terrible at personal goals. They languish in Things for months, constantly de-prioritized for more immediate, more urgent, more enjoyable projects and ideas. Worse than...