September 28, 2012
Dave Winer’s blog is full of insights, and definitely a feed you should have in your reader. Marco Arment even proposed a new theorem: “On a long enough timescale, Dave Winer is usually proven right”.
I just love this, about respect:
I respect people who ship software that’s open to competition, and then write specs to show people how to compete with them.
It’s just like the web. People come back to places that send them away.
September 20, 2012
Wow!
“Click and Drag” by Randall Munroe 2012, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License
(To see all of it, you have to click. Then drag.)
(And remember number one.)
July 11, 2012
“Billions spent on this. Billions spent on that. It’s all relative, right?”
“The Billion Dollar-o-Gram, 2009 figures” by David McCandless 2009, used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial License
Years after everyone else, I recently discovered these wonderful visualizations by David McCandless:
This image arose out of frustration with media reporting of billion dollar amounts. That is, that they’re meaningless without context. But they’re continually reported as self-evident facts. 500 billion for this war. 50 billion for this pipeline. Literally mind-boggling amounts of money.
He has many more (including a Billion Euro-o-Gram with more recent numbers) on his page, Information is Beautiful.
July 9, 2012
It seems to be very tricky to keep people from using their pets name as their password, so perhaps a possible alternative solution is to encourage choosing strong pseudo-random names for pets?
Ideally, children should consider changing the name of their pet every 12 weeks.
Seriously though, I recently switched to using LastPass for all my passwords, and I wholeheartedly recommend you do the same! It’s great.
(Lifehacker has a good introduction to LastPass)
June 28, 2012
I discovered the FlowingData blog quite recently, exploring how we can visualize and understand data about ourselves. I’m hooked! And it even has a beginner’s guide to get you started.
Some samples of what I’ve found through it, so far: the great visualization of the evolution of movie poster colors, an interesting way to measure the ink usage of different typefaces, and I’ve finally learned what 3-D pie charts are good for.
June 21, 2012
How Apple Store Seduces You With the Tilt of Its Laptops →
The level of the attention to detail in the Apple Store is just amazing:
“You might think that Apple positions all its notebook computers for aesthetic reasons. That’s partly true. The tables are uncluttered and the products are clean. But the main reason notebook computers screens are slightly angled is to encourage customers to adjust the screen to their ideal viewing angle—in other words, to touch the computer!
[...]
You see, the Apple Store was never created on the premise that people want to buy stuff. Instead Apple discovered that by creating an ownership experience, customers would be more loyal to the brand.”
But when thinking about it, I also realized that I don’t really know very much about retail store design, so even though I’m convinced this is genius I’m note sure I can judge to what extent. Many things seem magic when you don’t quite understand them.
Still deeply impressive though, and an interesting (series of) article(s).
June 15, 2012
Vintage 1980s Ericsson Commercial – YouTube →
Our telecommunications technology turns your phone into a computer terminal.
Just lovely!
And best of all, I get to do a full disclosure (just like real bloggers!): I work for Ericsson.
June 4, 2012
Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP is a blog by by Dick Lipton and Ken Regan, and it is an absolute gold mine for anyone interested in the theory of computing and complexity.
In case you’re not following it already, I’d recommend you start with “Stating P=NP Without Turing Machines”, if only for the story about the student who “solved an open problem that he thought was just a hard homework problem”.
Some posts are fairly technical (and require quite a bit of math), while others are somewhat less so, and every once in a while they even cover subjects like the math of poker. Whenever someone claims a proof about P=NP, this is the place to go for insights!
June 4, 2012
I will try running a theme of posts about blogs I think you might like, and with a signal-to-noise ratio high enough that you could add them to your RSS reader. You will find them all with the blogs tag.
April 22, 2012
This idea is very interesting, and Dave Weiner expresses it well:
If I need an API to access my data it’s not good. If I hold my data in my own space, where I can do with it as I please, and at the same time it can be part of the structures Google builds, whether it is a search engine or a discussion board, then it works. Then we can try out a million ideas, and they can build off each others’ momentum, and they all have a chance to be the next collaborative phenomenon.