Better Living Through Thinking

What the Terrorists Want

Mon, 18 Sep 2006

Bruce Schneier

<http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71642-0.html> <http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0609.html#1>

A brief excerpt from a recent Bruce Schneier essay:

I'd like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.

...

(read more...)

[ category: /links | link: Schneier,What_the_Terrorists_Want ]

The Walt Within

Fri, 21 Jul 2006

Robert X. Cringely

<http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060202.html>

A bad title to an insightful essay. Some exerpts (none of which are related to the point of the article directly):

Disney is in the film, TV, sports, publishing, and hospitality industries, but none of its major competitors -- none -- are run by ...

(read more...)

[ category: /links | link: Cringely,The_Walt_Within ]

Graham: Copy What You Like

Tue, 11 Jul 2006

Excerpt from a recent Paul Graham essay:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html>

It can be hard to separate the things you like from the things you're impressed with. One trick is to ignore presentation. Whenever I see a painting impressively hung in a museum, I ask myself: how much would I pay for this if I found it at a garage sale, dirty and frameless, and with no idea who painted it? If you walk around a ...

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[ category: /links | link: Graham,Copy_What_You_Like ]

Joel on Software: The Development Abstraction Layer

Tue, 16 May 2006

Excerpt from a recent Joel Spolsky essay:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstraction.html>

Any successful software company is going to consist of a thin layer of developers, creating software, spread across the top of a big abstract administrative organization.

The abstraction exists solely to create the illusion that the daily ...

(read more...)

[ category: /links | link: Joel,The_Development_Abstraction_Layer ]

Graham: Are Software Patents Evil?

Mon, 03 Apr 2006

Excerpt from a recent Paul Graham essay:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html>

Good hackers care a lot about matters of principle, and they are highly mobile. If a company starts misbehaving, smart people won't work there. For some reason this seems to be more true in software than other businesses. I don't think it's because hackers have intrinsically higher principles so much as that their skills are easily transferrable. Perhaps we can split the difference and say that mobility gives hackers the luxury of being principled.
[ category: /links | link: Graham,Are_Software_Patents_Evil ]

Welcome to Quantum Mechanics

Thu, 16 Mar 2006

<http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/02/28/paul-kwiat-on-quantum-computation>

<http://www.physics.uiuc.edu/People/Faculty/profiles/Kwiat/Interaction-Free-Measurements.htm>

<http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0602240107feb24,1,5661316.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true>

<http://www.physics.uiuc.edu/Research/QI/Photonics/publications.html>

[ category: /links | link: quantum_mechanics ]

Graham: How to Do What You Love

Thu, 09 Mar 2006

Excerpt from a recent Paul Graham essay:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html>

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid ...

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[ category: /links | link: Graham,How_to_Do_What_You_Love ]

Graham: Good and Bad Procrastination

Fri, 03 Feb 2006

Excerpt from a recent Paul Graham essay:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html>

The cost of an interruption is not just the time it takes, but that it breaks the time on either side in half. You probably only have to interrupt someone a couple times a day before they're unable to work on hard problems at all.

...

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[ category: /links | link: Graham,Good_and_Bad_Procrastination ]

Graham: How to Make Wealth (2)

Wed, 01 Feb 2006

Excerpt from a recent Paul Graham essay:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html>

One valuable thing you tend to get only in startups is *uninterruptability*. Different kinds of work have different time quanta. Someone proofreading a manuscript could probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes with little loss of productivity. But the time quantum for hacking is very long: it might ...

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[ category: /links | link: Graham,How_to_Make_Wealth2 ]

Graham: How to Make Wealth

Wed, 01 Feb 2006

Excerpt from a recent Paul Graham essay:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html>

Craftsmen

The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones. But with the rise of ...

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[ category: /links | link: Graham,How_to_Make_Wealth ]

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Moon Status

Phase: 2.88%
Illuminated: 0.82%
Age (days): 0.85
moon phase 0.0288119907253682 Wed Sep 8 21:42:36 MDT 2010