March 2012
69 posts
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Rules are no substitute for judgement →
E.B. White on Rules.
[T]hat rules are excellent organizational tools and efficient reducers of cognitive load, but they are no substitute for contextual sensitivity and personal judgement.
February 2012
64 posts
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“Everything was made. Each invention shows that the world is malleable, from the...”
– Frank Chimero
This is from his brand new website.
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Gettysburg_Cemetery_Dedication11191863.ppt
The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation is a project by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, where he imagines the Gettysburg Address’ PowerPoint slides.
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Highlight from Joseph Conrad's "Victory"
I finished reading Victory by Joseph Conrad a few weeks ago. Here’s a few passages (presented without comment or context) that jumped out at me:
Thinking is the great enemy of perfection. The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man.
I prayed like a child, of course. I believe in children...
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Better than buying links
Commercial sites should just buy the blogs that help them. There are brands selling things that bloggers love talking about and bloggers who would love to make a living without Adsense. So why don’t they just get together?
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What makes a diamond real?
This is from an old but interesting story from Wired.com about the New Diamond Age.
Put pure carbon under enough heat and pressure - say, 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit and 50,000 atmospheres - and it will crystallize into the hardest material known. Those were the conditions that first forged diamonds deep in Earth’s mantle 3.3 billion years ago. Replicating that environment in a lab...
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The smartest people are pointing us to games
Reginald Braithwaite shares my sentiment about a tragedy in technology.
What makes me sad is that the pinnacle of our computing power, the massive behavioural engine that is Google Adwords/Adsense, has decided that when someone is reading about dinosaurs, the most profitable thing to do is show them ads for games. Not books about dinosaurs, or even dinosaur games, but games.
We take a...
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“A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent...”
– Ayn Rand via Letters of Note, where you can read the full letter with this quote in context.
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There's a place to go if you're paranoid
I’m not paranoid on the web (yet), but if I were I’m happy to know there’s a place to go. DuckDuckGo, the anonymous web browser, has an illustrated guide called Google tracks you. We don’t that explains their philosophy of the web.
DuckDuckGo has also published a guide to Escape your search engine Filter Bubble! which is helpful to understanding how your search history...
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Breaking an addiction to Equasy or banning it...
Jeff Stier of Reason Magazine, in his essay Modern-Day Prohibition, shared the story of psychopharmacologist David Nutt, who didn’t think Ecstasy and LSD should be categorized among the most dangerous drugs. Instead of backing down to critics and detractors, he wrote a satirical article, analyzing another addiction.
He analyzed “an addiction called ‘Equasy’ that kills ten people a year,...
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THE COMPOSITES →
The Composites is a very strange website where Brian Joseph Davis inputs descriptions of literary characters into law enforcement composite sketch software.
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“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to...”
– Mark Twain in Following the Equator
via Brain Pickings
“The value of goals is not in the future they describe, but the change in...”
– David Allen, Productive Living
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“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go with a group.”
– - African proverb
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Pick one goal for all your priorities
Scott Adams shares the one goal he focuses on that serves the multiple priorities in his life.
The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main goal: energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities. Maximizing my personal energy means eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary...
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The Scale of the Universe 2 →
The universe is big. Scroll in to the smallest particle and out to the observable universe.
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Age-Maps
Bobby Neel Adams spliced together photos of six individuals from when they were children and adults to make these interesting Age-Maps.
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Why text?
Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, spoke to Stephen Hackett of 512pixles about why he chooses text as his medium of choice.
Text is an amazingly versatile medium. Relative to other media, text has very low production costs, both in authorship and distribution. One person can produce a great essay or even a complete book. It’s much harder to be a one-person filmmaker. And since text as a medium...
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Reality TV's many intersections
This Venn Diagram from New York Magazine shows an incredible amount of overlap in the titles and themes of various reality show.
Here’s the big version.
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Hacker News for marketers
Rand Fishkin from Moz and Dharmesh Shah from HubSpot launched a Hacker News like site for marketers, Inbound.org.
I hope the community and content quality of this site is up to the standards of it muse.
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