November 2009
30 posts
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“If your business is focused on making life more difficult for a competitor,...”
– Mike Masnick, Dear Rupert: You Don’t Succeed By Making Life More Difficult For Users
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“Subversion is the cheapest path to victory. So cheap, in fact, as compared with...”
– Edward Luttwak, Take me back to Constantinople: How Byzantium, not Rome, can help preserve Pax Americana [via Idea of the Day]
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“Fear is not a motivating factor. You might be able to get a little bit more out...”
– Mindy Grossman, CEO of HSN [via NYTCo Communicatons]
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“an expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very...”
– Niels Bohr, quoted by John Dickerson
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Has Bell Invented a "Telegraph Killer"? →
Hudson Hongo: “Leaked reports from Morse reveal plans to suspend a line between New York and London using kites by January, a scheme insiders predict to be a terrific success.” [via Kottke]
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“Scientists and engineers ought to stand side by side with athletes and...”
– President Obama, announcing “that the White House would begin holding an annual science fair starting next year” in A Push for Science and Technology Learning
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“Individuals threatened by terrorism become less trusting of others, even their...”
– Jennifer Merolla and Elizabeth Zechmeister, Reconsidering Public Reactions to Terrorism [via Bruce Schneier]
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“We prefer the vivid anecdote to the dry and statistically useful fact, which in...”
– Seth Godin, The amateur scientist (that’s us)
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“He is grotesquely overweight. He is childless. He lives in the chilly and...”
– “Malcolm Gladwell” on Christmas, as told to Craig Brown [via Khoi Vinh]
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“What are you guys doing over there in Rochester? Get your heads out of your...”
– John Stewart, on my hometown (segment starts at 10:41, quote at 13:25)
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“…if the data format has an ® by its name, it probably isn’t great for...”
– Clay Johnson, Adobe is Bad for Open Government [via ★]
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“Over-engineering is poison. It’s not like doing extra work for extra...”
– Paul Graham, What Startups Are Really Like
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“critics rarely create”
– Seth Godin, Trolls
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“A lot of reptiles and primates died making bad decisions so that we could end up...”
– Merlin Mann, For Immediate Relief: Speaking Like a Human
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FAQ: How long can I expect my recorded CDs/DVDs to... →
National Archives: “CD/DVD experiential life expectancy is 2 to 5 years even though published life expectancies are often cited as 10 years, 25 years, or longer.” [via Amy Langfield]
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“People who are separate are easier to control.”
– A native of Bulgaria talking about sprawl and car-centrism in the US, quoted by Richard Birch in A void paved over with concrete [via Streetsblog]
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“…any time you’re asking the user to make a choice they don’t care...”
– Jeff Atwood, Teaching Users to Read [via Clay Shirky]
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“…No decision is a decision as well, the decision not to decide. Not deciding is...”
– Seth Godin, Make a decision. While I agree with the first sentence, I disagree with the last. I disagree because I have seen the ill-effects of too many arbitrary and capricious decisions to believe that just making a decision, any decision, is always a good idea.
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“Doing something ‘simple’ at first glance does not mean you...”
– Founder of a startup company, quoted by Paul Graham in What Startups Are Really Like
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“if you want to know which areas of big companies are being ignore[d], watch for...”
– Andy Baio [via ★]
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“TV only got colour forty odd years ago, but somehow we’re expected to...”
– Tom Coates, Is the pace of change really such a shock? [via Clay Shirky]
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“We can only do a few hours of high-grade, conscious thinking in a day — we...”
– Martin Langfield in his review of David Rock’s Your Brain at Work [via Amy Langfield]
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“…the freest communications medium the world has ever known has raised...”
– Jacob Weisberg, on the effect of the Internet on freedom in The End of Prohibition: Why gay marriage, getting high, and going to Cuba will soon be legal
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Frantic energy vs calm energy →
Buster Benson: “Calm energy is difficult to find because it’s not a matter of pulling a single lever, like the coffee lever or the deadline lever, or the beat the competitors lever. Calm energy requires that a whole system be in good working order: health, clarity of mind, good intention, ability to enjoy good things when they come along, etc.”
I had not thought about it in these...
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United Airlines Exploring Viability Of Stacking... →
The Onion: “According to a press release, the company estimates that the new policy of simply arranging them in a towering mound will allow it to sell approximately 20 times more tickets per flight. In addition, executives claimed they would be able to eliminate the unnecessary cost of in-flight magazines, chairs, seat belts, blankets, bathrooms, headphones, and oxygen masks.”
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“Human beings need to understand one another in terms of primordial intimacies...”
– Nick Kallen, The Meaning of Information Technology [via Buzz Andersen]
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“Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being...”
– Amy Wallace, An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All