August 2009
30 posts
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“…the moral behind a failure-related story is usually about preventing it, or...”
– Marco Tabini, The Importance of Failure [via]
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“Speed used to convey urgency; now we somehow think it means efficiency.”
– John Freeman, Not So Fast: Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto for slow communication
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“We can no longer keep up with our own creations, and so we are constructing an...”
– Kevin Kelly, The Most Powerful Force in the World
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“From a bit to a few hundred megabytes, from a microsecond to a half an hour of...”
– E. W. Dijkstra, On the cruelty of really teaching computing science
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“If a small quantity of user effort can produce a substantial improvement in user...”
– Mencius Moldbug, in Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces (in which Palm’s Graffiti input system is held up as an example of such user effort)
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“Patients literally do not know how to be healthy, have no sense of the implicit...”
– Adam Bosworth, speech to Aspen Health Forum [via]
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Port Authority Bus Terminal as... →
“The map is color-coded, and you know which color the ticket office for the Newark Airport Shuttle should be, but there is no such ticket office on the map. You double-check, search more thoroughly. No, no, there can be no doubt: There are nine Hudson News stands, but no location in the entire Port Authority where tickets for the Newark Airport Shuttle are sold.” [via]
“It was a couple of simple questions: Have you ever made a mistake? And, if so,...”
– Charles Bosk, on “a set of interviews with young doctors who had either resigned or been fired from neurosurgery-training programs, in an effort to figure out what separated the unsuccessful surgeons from their successful counterparts,” quoted in The Physical Genius [via]
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“The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America’s flora. Only now,...”
– Rick Perlstein, In America, Crazy is a Preexisting Condition: Birthers, Health Care Hecklers and the Rise of Right-Wing Rage
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“Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its...”
– Stephen Pinker, Why is There Peace? [via]
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“…as time went by I think that knowledgeable, responsible commentators got tired...”
– Bruce Bartlett, on why the media is apt to allow discredited ideas on the air nowadays
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“At best, it would take 167 inbound lanes, or 84 copies of the Queens Midtown...”
– Michael Frumin, What’s Capacity got to do with my City? [via]
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“Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years,...”
– David Simon, quoted in Newspapers last bastion against political corruption, says creator of The Wire
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“One of the striking things about mass killings in the U.S. is how consistently...”
– Bob Herbert, Women at Risk [via]
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“Nothing scares a non-programmer more than a computer because they don’t...”
– So you’ve just been hired by an IT department…
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“…Given this accurate risk analysis, any rational employee will regularly...”
– Bruce Schneier, Risk Intuition
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Reply or Reply All? →
The Ethicist answers the question of how to respond to someone who emails an urban legend to a large number of people: reply directly or reply to all? (Scroll down on the page for the question and the answer.)
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“Each of these projects is, from today’s vantage point, clearly insane; each...”
– Dwight Garner, When David Fought Goliath in Washington Square Park, referring to Robert Moses’s proposed projects to “build a four-lane highway through the middle of Washington Square Park,” “raze[] 14 blocks in the heart of Greenwich Village,” and “plunge a...
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“At times it seems as if parents are being deliberately encouraged to fear for...”
– Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood
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“And if you make special-occasion foods cheap and easy enough to eat every day,...”
– Michael Pollan, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch
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“Health insurance is a weird industry. Healthcare itself is provided by doctors,...”
– Kevin Drum, Health Insurance Hell
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“The Food Network has helped to transform cooking from something you do into...”
– Michael Pollan, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch
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“The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three:...”
– Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, written in 1964
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“…in fact, market-driven medicine didn’t exist a generation ago,...”
– Timothy Noah, Did Warren Burger Create the Health Care Mess? The 1975 antitrust decision that gave you physician-owned hospitals.
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“With dozens of monthly newsstand pulp-fiction magazines demanding to be fed, and...”
– Charles Stross, on how television affected the short science fiction market, in the introduction to Wireless, a short story collection
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“If you’re not proud of where you work, go work somewhere else. You...”
– Seth Godin, “All I do is work here”