The Effective Strategy For Choosing Right Domain Names | How-To | Smashing Magazine
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/02/the-effective-strategy-for-choosing-right-domain-names/

effective-strategy-for-choosing-right-domain-names

Naming is linguistic design, and a good domain name is an important part of the overall design of a website. A name plays a prominent role when people discover, remember, think about, talk about, search for, or navigate to a website. It establishes a theme for the branding of a website before people even visit it for the first time. Coming up with a good domain name requires a combination of strategy, imagination and good linguistic design practice. You’ll find some basic pieces of advice all over the Web, and it’s worth mentioning those right away. Ideally, your domain name should be: * Short * Catchy and memorable, * Easy to pronounce, * Easy to spell, * Not too similar to competing domain names, * Not a violation of someone else’s trademark.

It isn’t surprising that the tournament directors found Eurisko’s strategies beyond the pale. It’s wrong to sink your own ships, they believed. And they were right. But let’s remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let’s remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath’s terms, Goliath wins.

"Insurgents, though, operate in real time. Lawrence hit the Turks, in that stretch in the spring of 1917, nearly every day, because he knew that the more he accelerated the pace of combat the more the war became a battle of endurance—and endurance battles favor the insurgent."

This is invaluable! (Especially helpful for things like writing Silverlight 2 code, where the documentation is largely in blog posts, and the way to make CustomControls changed significantly between Beta 2 and RTW.)

&as_qdr=y15

Display the Date a Web Page Was Published in Search Results

Advanced Functional Programming - Fall 2006

These pages are a record of the in-class discussions for the graduate class "Advanced Functional Programming" given at Harvard University in the Fall of 2006.

Good article on being hypercritical.

Knowing what's wrong is a prerequisite for fixing it. That may sound trite, but...

As far back as I can remember, I was told I would grow up to be an artist. By age six, my obsessively detailed renderings of Mechagodzilla, et al. were already drawing attention from adults. By the time I was eight years old, my parents had been persuaded by teachers and friends to enroll me in private art lessons. I recall the informal "admissions test" with my first art instructor. A scale model of a bull was placed in front of me on a table and I was asked to draw it. The plastic bull was a faithful reproduction, full of muscles and knobby joints. It was an ugly, forlorn thing, far removed from my normal subject matter. After a few minutes, the resulting drawing was roughly in proportion, the details were well represented, and the perspective was pretty close. I was in. Thus began eight years of regular art instruction. I progressed from pencils and pastels to watercolors and acrylics, and finally to oils. The content was mostly classical: lots of still lifes and landscapes. Meanw

Interesting piece, via S.teave

John Siracusa on the role criticism plays in design.

eriments in an fMRI machine. Carolyn says she will be participating in the sc

Cho chweet: "Footage of these experiments is poignant, as the kids struggle to delay gratification for just a little bit longer. Some cover their eyes with their hands or turn around so that they can’t see the tray. Others start kicking the desk, or tug on their pigtails, or stroke the marshmallow as if it were a tiny stuffed animal."

Summary of EQ, delayed gratification studies.

The secret of self-control. People who are able to delay gratification appear to be more successful in life.

The secret of self-control.

study of success and happiness or the lack of same

I was amusing myself by imagining Kirk attempting to be an authority figure and this is what happened.

Chekov rolls his eyes and then enunciates very clearly, like he’s speaking to someone a little bit slow, and sometimes he really does wonder about Sulu. “I punched a superior officer in the face!”

"If people just went around punching superior officers because they were assholes, there would be anarchy, and I’d be very bruised.” [ I would have loved it for this fragment alone, but the rest of the fic is equally good. It's gen, with some UST running around]

Kirk learns to deal with the necessities of command. This story has a great Kirk voice, and it also features my personal favorite, Chekov - and a Uhura who isn't taking any bullshit!

Kirk slouches in his chair and sighs. McCoy will give him this; the man is a champion at slouching. There’s something about the way he slouches that seems to be saying, ‘I could be sitting straight, but the universe just couldn’t handle the awesomeness of me being fully upright in this chair.’ It’s a lot to say in just the way he sits. It’s impressive.

Kirk attempts to be an authority figure and McCoy mocks.

I was amusing myself by imagining Kirk attempting to be an authority figure and this is what happened. Gen, with a brief moment of Kirk's POV on Spock/Uhura which is absolutely hilarious.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jisc.ac.uk%2Fpublications%2Fdocuments%2Fheweb2.aspx

Brilliant Statistically proven ways that work.

Devil’s advocate example works with large organizations. Leaders who consistently seek out dissenting opinions earn more respect, and generally have better agreement with people in the room than those who rule by lying the law and persecuting dissenters.

Twitter

It may seem like an impossible task to keep up with all the Twitter apps that have come to market as of late. Even though you have plenty of directories to help with the process, we noticed that it’s still difficult to ascertain which apps support multiple accounts...

Technology and exercise make an excellent pair; you can now track, plan, and graph your workouts more easily than ever. We're here to take a look at six of the most popular tools for the job. Photo by andronicusmax. Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite exercise tracking or planning tool. You responded and we rounded up the top six—six on account of a three-way tie. The following contenders represent the most popular tools among Lifehacker readers for tracking, measuring, and quantifying their exercise endeavors. When the item in question is a physical item, such as the Nike+ running system, the operating system listed corresponds to the supported operating system for the accompanying tracking software. Gyminee (Web Based, Basic Account: Free/Pro Account: $45 per year) Gyminee is web-based fitness tool with an enormous amount of features. Not only can you track your fitness goals like pounds lost, changes in resting heart rate, and all other manner of common fitness

It has been two months since we hosted a great group of academics, entrepreneurs, educators, and administrators at our Union Square Sessions Event, Hacking Education. Fred posted his initial thoughts immediately after the event and in a great example of peer production, Alex Krupp curated the Twitter stream that captured the thoughts of folks inside and outside of the event. I finally found some quality time to spend with the transcript that is now online, and thought I would try to expand on Fred's initial thoughts and develop a couple of the key themes that came out of the conversation. Before diving in, however, I'd like to make a pitch for the transcript. It is not perfect (imagine trying to record 40 high powered people all talking at once), but it is readable and full of lots of insights. I would encourage anyone who is interested in the impact of technology on education to plow through it. I have tried to pull some of the highlights here, but there is no way that even this over

There was broad consensus that the internet is enabling substantial changes in the way we learn and teach. It has always been possible to learn outside of a school setting. The ubiquitous connectivity and very low cost of content production and distribution seems to enable the unbundling of key components of education.

Summary of a meeting on how technology could "reinvent" education. Topics include open courseware, game curriculum, reducing marginal cost of education to zero if viewed as an information good, etc. Tiny gem is Danah Boyd's comments which explain why the OLPC project has run into problems overseas.

This is pretty awesome. It's a plain-English explanation of what rules should have to apply to any literary use of time travel, given what we know about space-time. "Time travel isn’t magic; it may or may not be allowed by the laws of physics — we don’t know them well enough to be sure — but we do know enough to say that if time travel were possible, certain rules would have to be obeyed." I was, of course, reading these rules and thinking of LOST, which, by my count, seems to play by all the rules expect maybe number three (but, in their defense, if you don't have some visual cue to the audience that time travel just happened, how would they ever know? I understand that it would happen in the real world, but you kind of need the flashing light as a storytelling device). Great read.

0. There are no paradoxes. 1. Traveling into the future is easy. 2. Traveling into the past is hard — but maybe not impossible. 3. Traveling through time is like traveling through space. 4. Things that travel together, age together. 5. Black holes are not time machines. 6. If something happened, it happened. 7. There is no meta-time. 8. You can’t travel back to before the time machine was built. 9. Unless you go to a parallel universe. 10. And even then, your old universe is still there.

Like Rule 0.

I love how smart everyone wants to act in the comments.

good one

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

who could wait only thirty sec

The marshmallow test -- longitudinal studies show that it may predict future success better than intelligence

The ability to delay gratification is a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q. "Intelligence is really important, but it's still not as important as self-control."

In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a “game room” at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Carolyn chose the marshmallow. Although she’s now forty-four, Carolyn still has a weakness for those air-puffed balls of corn syrup and gelatine. “I know I shouldn’t like them,” she says. “But they’re just so delicious!” A researcher then made Carolyn an offer: she could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, she could have two marshmallows when he returned. He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would forfeit the second. Then he left the room.

Don’t! The secret of self-control.

极度华丽的花纹

Floral typography is the technique that combines typography, calligraphy and lettering to create dynamic, flourishing designs. With the help of floral elements you can create

Floral typography is the technique that combines typography, calligraphy and lettering.

最近この手の華やかなのがどうも苦手だ。

Floral typography is the technique that combines typography, calligraphy and lettering to create dynamic, “flourishing” designs. With the help of floral elements you can create very tempting and vivid artworks in which the typography seems to be shaped by plants and flowers. In this way you can convey your message in a very artistic way. In fact, various floral ornaments – which are the essential component of floral typography – can make the design stand out and help the artist to create inspiring, refreshing and thought-provoking pieces of art.

Kuinka Googlen AdWords oikeasti toimii. Steven Levyn erinomainen juttu Wiredissa.

The economics behind the ads you see, and what they cost.

Article by Steven Levy (not: Steven Levitt ;-) ) on Hal Varian, Google chief economist and the application of auctions to all kinds of logistical, organisational or economic problems.

Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a "new modern-day sort of communists," a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open source zealots are more likely to be libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism.

Operating without state funding or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, this mostly free marketplace achieves social good at an efficiency that would stagger any government or traditional corporation. Sure, it undermines the business model of newspapers, but at the same time it makes an indisputable case that the sharing model is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions.

mmunal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just Wikipedia but wikin

Stop what you’re doing and make your project a github page. For the love of god, your project has no documentation. RDoc is cool, READMEs are decent, but descriptive websites with examples? Oh, they RULE.

Github blog engine for OpenSource documentation

I cannot convey to you the size of my man-crush on Reg Braithwaite.

"Let's recap. When we explain something in our heads, our explanations have three properties that matter to whether we are optimistic or not: Whether we explain things in a personal or impersonal way, whether we explain things in a specific or general way, and whether we explain things in a permanent or temporary way. / [...] / Optimists explain good things as being personal, general, and permanent, and explain away bad things as being impersonal, specific, and temporary. And if you point out the contradiction in their explanations, they see no contradiction. To them, the bad stuff really isn't about them, it's just that one thing that one time."

Added from delicious

“Here lies Europe, overwhelmed by Muslim immigrants and emptied of native-born Europeans.” That is the obituary some pundits have been writing in recent years. But neither the immigrants nor the Europeans are playing their assigned roles.

Apparently Europe is no longer going to be drowned in a sea of Muslim babies. Because I know you were all so worried.

"At the turn of this century, the conventional wisdom among demographers was that the population of Europe was in precipitous decline, the Islamic world was in the grip of a population explosion, and Africa’s population faced devastation by HIV/AIDS. Only a handful of scholars questioned the idea that the Chinese would outnumber all other groups for decades or even centuries to come. In fact, however, the latest UN projections suggest that China’s population, now 1.3 billion, will increase slowly through 2030 but may then be reduced to half that number by the end of the ­century." Fascinating article on demography, including the prediction that in 2050, Africa will have a majority of the world's Christians, in addition to being the demographic center of Islam.

e locks and hotel room safes: These days, Tobias is attacking the lock famous for protecting places li

Get Wired's take on technology business news and the Silicon Valley scene including IT, media, mobility, broadband, video, design, security, software, networking and internet startups on Wired.com

Thinking like a criminal is Tobias' idea of fun. It makes him laugh. It has also made him money and earned him a reputation as something of the Rain Man of lock-breaking. Even if you've never heard of Tobias, you may know his work: He's the guy who figured out how to steal your bike, unlock your front door, crack your gun lock, blow up your airplane, and hijack your mail. Marc Weber Tobias has a name for the headache he inflicts on his targets: the Marc Weber Tobias problem.

"Marc Weber Tobias can pick, crack, or bump any lock. Now he wants to teach the world how to break into military facilities and corporate headquarters."

An article about someone with a gift for picking locks.

Tobias is laughing. And laughing. The effect is disconcerting. It's a bwa-ha-ha kind of evil mastermind laugh—appropriate if you've just sacked Constantinople, checkmated Deep Blue, or handed Superman a Dixie cup of kryptonite Kool-Aid, but downright scary in a midtown Manhattan restaurant during the early-bird special. Our fellow diners begin to stare. Tobias doesn't notice and wouldn't care anyway. He's as rumpled and wild as a nerdy grizzly bear. His place mat is covered in diagrams and sketched floor plans and scribbled arrows. His laugh fits him like a

While researching investment strategies for my retirement savings, I’ve been reading a lot of books. There are hundreds of authors offering thousands of tips for turning a small pile of gold into a big pile of gold. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell whose advice to heed. To be honest, I find the simplest investment strategies most appealing. I just finished reading Paul Farrell’s The Lazy Person’s Guide to Investing, for example, and I found myself drawn to the “lazy portfolios” he describes. Lazy portfolios are collections of index funds. Because these portfolios are balanced — they contain stocks and bonds — they mitigate risk while providing excellent returns. Best of all, they take very little time to maintain. Reminder: An index fund is a low-cost mutual fund designed to mimic the movement of a specific market index. A Vanguard 500 index fund (like VFINX), for example, tracks the performance of the S&P 500. The chief virtue of index funds is that, over the long-term, they deliver

summer reading challenge--Infinite jest

Google Tech Talk April 24, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Joel Spolsky Until recently, searching for help on highly technical programming problems has been a mess. A lot of what the search engines found was old discussions in forums, where you have a lot of wrong answers and out-of-date answers that you have to sift through yourself. You also found a lot of answers at sites that were hidden behind a pay wall, which uncloaked themselves for Google and then demanded membership fees to see the answers. StackOverflow.com is a programmer's Q&A site that launched last September to address these problems. It incorporates more modern ideas about community such as voting and public editing, and even a few ideas from game design, to create a much more successful way to get help with programming problems. In a few short months, it has grown to 14 million page views a month and reaches 3 million unique programmers every month.

Healthy Food Combinations

Everyone knows that road to flat, tight abs is paved with crunches. Lots and lots and lots of excruciating crunches. Or is it? As it turns out, the exercises synonymous with strong, attractive abs may not be the best way to train your core—and may be

Interesting, I wonder when the article telling us how bad pushups are for you will come out. What about breathing? Anyone else feel this way?

"it won’t matter how muscular your torso is if your body fat is too high. The best way to build strong, visible abs isn’t through repeated sit-ups, but by engaging in circuit training that has you working your entire core while you’re burning calories – and to keep yourself disciplined during meals." YES INDEED (but you should definitely do crunches every day :) )

Lungo elenco di programmi utili per GNU/Linux

รวมซอฟท์แวร์ linux

A thorough list of highly recommended, must-have programs, free tools and utilities for Linux desktops, across a wide range of categories

By Lera Boroditsky

ong time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered

Interesting recent work on Linguistic relativity / Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis related ideas in cognitive linguistics

Success and Motivation

"Should Print Out and Bound"

"Git submodules are implemented using two moving parts: the .gitmodules file and a special kind of tree object. These together triangulate a specific revision of a specific repository which is checked out into a specific location in your project."

Fraser Speirs explains the difference between good old svn:externals and git submodules.

Excellent looking list of books to read

Stumbling on Happiness

Etoys is an educational tool for teaching children powerful ideas in compelling ways. Etoys is a media-rich authoring environment and visual programming system.

"This is a collection of e-mails I have sent to people who post classified ads. My goal is to mess with them, confuse them, and/or piss them off. These are the ones that succeeded"

Funny emails

Reglas para mejorar la programación en c

Article sobre beneficis dels estudis clàssics :)

Resulta que Tim O'rEilly estudió Clásicas.

"I've been deeply influenced by Aristotle's idea that virtue is a habit, something you practice and get better at, rather than something that comes naturally. "The control of the appetites by right reason," is how he defined it. My brother James once brilliantly reframed this as "Virtue is knowing what you really want," and then building the intellectual and moral muscle to go after it."

Scientology leader David Miscavige is the focus of this special report from the St. Petersburg Times. Former executives of the Church of Scientology, including two of the former top lieutenants to Miscavige, have come forward to describe a culture of intimidation and violence under David Miscavige. These former Scientology leaders served for years with Miscavige.

Facebook's long game. Written by former FB insider

Big O notation is used in Computer Science to describe the performance or complexity of an algorithm. Big O specifically describes the worst-case scenario, and can be used to describe the execution time required or the space used (e.g. in memory or on disk) by an algorithm.

An ex-pat Canadian debunks myths about the Canadian health care system.

, c

"Myth: Canada's health care system is a cumbersome bureaucracy. The U.S. has the most bureaucratic health care system in the world. More than 31 percent of every dollar spent on health care in the U.S. goes to paperwork, overhead, CEO salaries, profits, etc. The provincial single-payer system in Canada operates with just a 1 percent overhead. Think about it. It is not necessary to spend a huge amount of money to decide who gets care and who doesn't when everybody is covered."

Before Wall-E, there was this penetrating parable of the grim future of technology and life on an Earth without animals (and the basis for Blade Runner).

books, reading

We know it's insane. We know people will ask why on earth we think that an 1875 British satirical novel is the book you need to read right now—or, for that matter, why it even made the cut. The fact is, no one needs another best-of list telling you how great The Great Gatsby is. What we do need, in a world with precious little time to read (and think), is to know which books—new or old, fiction or nonfiction—open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways. Which is why we'd like you to sit down with Anthony Trollope, and these 49 other remarkably trenchant voices.

Top 200 Blogs

Blog list for developers

In the meantime... please enjoy the 4th edition of the Top 200 Blogs for Developers.

not so sure

Besides the fact that this comes from the NY Post, this article raises some legitimate causes for concern about our education system. Jack also provides some solutions worth thinking about and discussing...

Suppose all goes well. He'll be sitting in front of a teacher a good 18 months after first deciding to learn. What folly. The answer is to relieve schools of the job of validating knowledge and return them to a role of spreading it. Colleges should no more vouch for their own academic competence than butchers should decide for themselves whether their meat is USDA prime. As I write this, Google is putting every book ever written online. Apple is offering video college lectures for free download through its iTunes software. Skype allows free videoconferencing anywhere in the world. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and many other schools have made course materials available for free on their Web sites. Tutors cost as little as $15 an hour. Today's student who decides to learn at 1 a.m. should be doing it by 1:30. A process that makes him wait 18 months is not an education system. It's a barrier to education.

"A student who secures a degree is increasingly unlikely to make up its cost, despite higher pay, and the employer who requires a degree puts faith in a system whose standards are slipping. Too many professors who are bound to degree teaching can't truly profess; they don't proclaim loudly the things they know but instead whisper them to a chosen few, whom they must then accommodate with inflated grades. Worst of all, bright citizens spend their lives not knowing the things they ought to know, because they've been granted liberal-arts degrees for something far short of a liberal-arts education."

Each month, our editor Michael Swaine brings you a free magazine packed full of interesting articles, features, and departments. Download it in PDF, mobi (good for the Kindle), and epub (great for Stanza on the iPhone).

Pragmatic programmers...is there any other kind? Oh, yeah, I guess it is 'old school'.

hahah dude thats why kevin rose designed something and tim goes on tv for fun

Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose Discuss Their Top 5 Must-Read Books

Vanity Fair

An in-depth (and, may I say, quite scary) portrait of Sarah Palin

Article on Sarah Palin that is ridiculous

We know it's insane. We know people will ask why on earth we think that an 1875 British satirical novel is the book you need to read right now—or, for that matter, why it even made the cut. The fact is, no one needs another best-of list telling you how great The Great Gatsby is. What we do need, in a world with precious little time to read (and think), is to know which books—new or old, fiction or nonfiction—open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways. Which is why we'd like you to sit down with Anthony Trollope, and these 49 other remarkably trenchant voices.

rphism across strings/text/buffers/collections/arrays along with extremely verbose syntax for working with any kind of data structure

via @indrayam FF post

Scala as the long term replacement for java/javac?

A nice article that discuses food regarding exercise

l

TO READ

amazing story

Almost a year after A.I.G.’s collapse, despite a tidal wave of outrage, there still has been no clear explanation of what toppled the insurance giant. The author decides to ask the people involved—the silent, shell-shocked traders of the A.I.G. Financial Products unit—and finds that the story may have a villain, whose reign of terror over 400 employees brought the company, the U.S. economy, and the global financial system to their knees.

The author decides to ask the people involved—the silent, shell-shocked traders of the A.I.G. Financial Products unit—and finds that the story may have a villain, whose reign of terror over 400 employees brought the company, the U.S. economy, and the global financial system to their knees.

God is Imaginary

The Unlimited Freelancer

If you’re a freelance designer, you know how important your portfolio site is to your business. Therefore, we decided to commission Elliot Jay Stocks, a well-known web designer, to film two 30-minute screen-casts on “How to Design a Portfolio Site.” In part one Elliot gets you started by covering these points: The Three Key Concepts that make a portfolio site; Nine amazing portfolio sites to learn from; How to build great case studies to reinforce your expertise; The Ultimate Portfolio Checklist; How to add visual flair in Photoshop during the design phase; How to use Narrative Theory to strengthen your portfolio. In Part II, he’ll be jumping into some HTML and CSS to show you how to build your portfolio, and integrate it into a content management system.

"If you’re a freelance designer, you know how important your portfolio site is to your business. Therefore, we decided to commission Elliot Jay Stocks, a well-known web designer, to film two 30-minute screen-casts on “How to Design a Portfolio Site.”"

use for learning management

jQuery makes writing a good JavaScript-based Web application easy and straightforward, but there are a few extra steps required to turn your good Web application into a great Web app. This article details some of the steps to give your Web application the final layer of polish.

hen we want to use regular multiplication, but can’t, we bring out the big guns and integrate. Area is just a visualization technique, don’t get too caught up in it. Now go learn calculus!”

A free online novel by Catherynne M. Valente, powered by donations.

Every Monday a new chapter is uploaded so the adventure can continue.

catherynne valente

@Pogue twitter staff believes twitter best used for casual conversations, not serious archiving etc. :) http://bit.ly/3bXAXn [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/2094867969]

Twitter team members don't follow very many other people, they aren't following many of the top developers in their own community, and they don't even Tweet very much.

def eat[T <: {def eat(): Unit}](a: T) // whatever

David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" -- "The Mezzanine" by Nicholson Baker

Interesting article with a fresh look towards user expirience on the desktop

the auditory illusions are interesting!

New Scientist's guide to the simple techniques that will uncover the inner workings of your grey matter

Books in the canon that this guy reckons, shouldn't be...

A humorous take on books to skip

At lunch last weekend I overheard someone at another table say that when she wanted a greater caffeine buzz, she chose a different roast. I can't remember whether she chose darker or lighter roast for the greater buzz, but it doesn't matter; both answers were wrong. The effect of coffee roasting on caffeine content is so negligible as to be immeasurable except under tightly controlled laboratory conditions.

interesting, useful tips on presenting

Sharing: Who says technical presentations can&#39;t be engaging?: People often ask if technical or scien.. http://tinyurl.com/my7trw [from http://twitter.com/mfubib/statuses/2450508055]

People often ask if technical or science-related presentations can be as compelling as presentations covering other less technical topics.

"Failure to spend the [presentation] time wisely and well, failure to educate, entertain, elucidate, enlighten, and most important of all, failure to maintain attention and interest should be punishable by stoning. There is no excuse for tedium."

"So instead of being arrogant, take every opportunity you get to learn new things. Whether it is from an experienced entrepreneur who has been around the block, or a 16-year-old kid, everyone can teach you something. You just have to learn what to take away from a conversation because there are going to be some things that are going to benefit you and others that won’t."

what's not to like about a piece of advice that says you don't have to be perfect to succeed?

Interesting presentation on setting company culture...

Internal Netflix document detailing culture and practice that is *very* different to almost everyone else. Some amazing and inspiring stuff. I hope they walk the talk.

Excellent Excellent Article.

ein without his pipe, George Burns without his cigar or Jackson Pollock without a cig

If you are a new or intermediate Linux user, you are probably still looking for some app replacements. Here are 24 of the best Linux apps.

** Posted using Viigo: Mobile RSS, Sports, Current Events and more **

These apps are high-quality, versatile, professional, reliable, and often available in many different packages (deb, rpm, etc). If you're new to the Linux game, or simply want a list of programs that have been re-verified as excellent by many hundreds of users, this article is for you. To download and install the apps, just go to your built-in package manager.

Not often, but it happens. Sometimes I get so intimidated by work that I end up procrastinating online. I started my workday at 6 a.m. last Monday hoping to get the week off to a good start, but I found myself reading a Wikipedia entry on the many versions of “Blade Runner” three hours later.

Man, I need to follow this plan

WWD rolls out a five-point plan, one they claim is needed to eliminate the gap between what you think are your biggest time wasters from your actual time wasters. The distinction is an important one because, without accurate data, any other efforts to cut down on your web wandering will probably be unsuccessful. The plan starts with a simple pen-and-paper audit to identify where your attention goes (aside from, you know, this site). They also suggest setting up visible reminders, like a sticky note with an arrow that points to the screen and the words, "Is this really what you want to be doing right now?" Once you've got the first step down, the full five-point plan helps you figure out why you engage in such behavior and offers ways to kick the compulsive surfing habit.

I was reading an article on "Lambda the Ultimate" about Bruce Mills's book "A Theoretical Introduction to Programming," and in particular about the difference between "menu-lookup" writing of glue code, and "real programming", which the author defines as "to increase the computational capacity, to begin with a set of operations, and develop them into new operations that were not obviously implicit in the original set."

A really nice and introspective peek into Kragen's development as a programmer. Lots of nice insights.

The Big Question: Are You Better Than Yesterday?

For fitness, improving your career and other big, difficult goals, think not about getting closer each day to the goal, think about doing better in your efforts toward that goal than yesterday: "was today better than yesterday?"

The secret is to focus on making whatever it is you’re trying to improve and make better today than it was yesterday.

Cover the basics of speed reading fast!

This post is a condensed overview of principles I taught to undergraduates at Princeton University in 1998 at a seminar called the “PX Project”. The below was written several years ago, so it’s worded like Ivy-Leaguer pompous-ass prose, but the results are substantial. In fact, while on an airplane in China two weeks ago, I helped Glenn McElhose increase his reading speed 34% in less than 5 minutes. I have never seen the method fail. Here’s how it works…

Google File System

ACM Queue, August 7, 2009

googlevoice

Kathy forwarded it to me.

Innovative use of numbers, voice and data

Great slide show on drinking and economics.

This is short, funny and nice story about taxes and tax cuts. We are sure you'll find it interesting and would appreciate your vote for the presentation. FYI.... THIS PRESENTATION WAS CONCEIVED, DESIGNED AND DEVELOPED IN ABOUT 27 HOURS. That story of how we managed it is coming up shortly as a separate presentation

are two reasons for thi

On a case study, and investigators discussings the difficulties

How modern information gathering technology complicates the lives of those who want to start a new life.

The urge to disappear, to shed one’s identity and reemerge in another, surely must be as old as human society. It’s a fantasy that can flicker tantalizingly on the horizon at moments of crisis or grow into a persistent daydream that accompanies life’s daily burdens. A fight with your spouse leaves you momentarily despondent, perhaps, or a longtime relationship feels dead on its feet. Your mortgage payment becomes suddenly unmanageable, or a pile of debts gradually rises above your head. Maybe you simply awaken one day unable to shake your disappointment over a choice you could have made or a better life you might have had. And then the thought occurs to you: What if I could drop everything, abandon my life’s baggage, and start over as someone else?

a plan to escape

For Matthew Alan Sheppard, all of the anxiety, deception, and delusion converged in one moment on a crisp winter weekend in February 2008.

Bowloftoast sez, "This is a short animation that takes the viewer through a progressive description of all (and all possible) dimensions, up to and including the 10th. It is an elegant introduction to the fundamentals of string theory and a mind-blowing toe-dip into the pool of the metaphysical."

Great Errol Morris series about lies and lying http://bit.ly/CgUcb [from http://twitter.com/pkedrosky/statuses/3208516239]

Errol Morris interviews Ricky Jay.

We don’t have Craigslist around here, and looking at it makes me wonder that it works at all. But sometimes the sheer density of information can make the battle worth it. As does a lack of marketing blindness: How many times did marketing or ‚developing a business‘ actually improve products or the companies making them? From the POV of the user/customer, that is.

I Thought this was a very interesting read - the tragedy of craigslist

The Internet's great promise is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful.

The axioms of this worldview are easy to state. "People are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day," Newmark says. If most people are good and their needs are simple, all you have to do to serve them well is build a minimal infrastructure allowing them to get together and work things out for themselves. Any additional features are almost certainly superfluous and could even be damaging.

Craig Newmark says that craigslist works because people are good, and he has stuck to this point of view without wavering. Whether you accept it as true will depend on your standard of goodness.

despite the initial focus on the irrelevant topic of CL's design, and the typical wired.com annoying writing, the article becomes quite good later: "These are technically sophisticated people who take pride in their work, and when we knock them down they don't just decide to go find something else to do. You could say we are breeding the perfect spammer."

"Craig Newmark seems to have discovered a new way to run a business. He suspects that it may be the right way to run the world."

Great article on the problems with Craigslist as well as a good profile on the founder

The Internet's great promise is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful. So how come when you arrive at the most popular dating site in the US you find a stream of anonymous come-ons intermixed with insults, ads for prostitutes, naked pictures, and obvious scams?

Newmark's claim of almost total disinterest in wealth dovetails with the way craigslist does business. Besides offering nearly all of its features for free, it scorns advertising, refuses investment, ignores design, and does not innovate. Ordinarily, a company that showed such complete disdain for the normal rules of business would be vulnerable to competition, but craigslist has no serious rivals. The glory of the site is its size and its price. But seen from another angle, craigslist is one of the strangest monopolies in history, where customers are locked in by fees set at zero and where the ambiance of neglect is not a way to extract more profit but the expression of a worldview.

"If most people are good and their needs are simple, all you have to do to serve them well is build a minimal infrastructure allowing them to get together and work things out for themselves. Any additional features are almost certainly superfluous and could even be damaging." "During the company's first years, Newmark approved nearly every message on the list, and in the decade since he has spent much of his time eliminating offensive ones. Even by the most conservative accounting, he has passed judgment on tens of thousands of classified ads. Very few people could do this and thrive." "These all signal Newmark and Buckmaster's wariness about what humans, including themselves, might do if given the chance. There may be a peace sign on every page, but the implicit political philosophy of craigslist has a deeply conservative, even a tragic cast. Every day the choristers of the social web chirp their advice about openness and trust; craigslist follows none of it"

this is the anti-business

Via http://tomewing.tumblr.com

Software Transactional Memory

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1454466

An extremely in-depth review of what's new in SL.

writing blogs

40 Freelance Writing Blogs

Pre-alpha book release

# Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source by Richard Monson-Haefel # Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say by Kevlin Henney

Quants come in three basic varieties. 1. Structurers: people who price complex financial instruments. 2. Risk managers people who manage portfolio risk 3. Quant traders people who use statistics to make money by buying and selling most quants are structurers. Of course, there is often bleed over between these varieties -but it’s a useful taxonomy for looking for work. I’ve done a little of all three at this point (very little, honestly), and have always liked quant trading problems more than the other two varieties. It’s the most ambitious, and the most likely to net you a career outside of a large organization (go me: Army of one!). It’s also the most mysterious, since successful quant traders don’t like to talk about what they do. Structurers and risk managers have to talk about what they do, almost by definition. Quant traders gain little from talking about their special sauce.

***** very good and deep articles on finance topics by "Locklin on science"

vocab of "job specs" in trading

tips for frugal living... cooking

Good reminder of why it's important to keep your Wordpress blog updated and patched

RT @wordpress: How to Keep WordPress Secure: http://bit.ly/12zHUd [from http://twitter.com/Jennerosity/statuses/3785091291]

There is another serious WordPress hack making the rounds. If you run WordPress, make sure you upgrade ASAP

A great, lengthy piece on cool things to read online to learn more about the world

One would be hard-pressed to disapprove of autodidacticism. Consider a list of notable alumni from the academy of the self-taught: René Descartes, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, William Blake.

Submitted by korfuri

This is the beginning of Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good! Reading this tutorial should be one of your first steps in learning Erlang.

Follow the links and be prepared to have your mind moderately blown.

Gladwell articles

Lehrer is interested in the historic dichotomy between "emotional" decision-making and "rational" decision-making and what modern neuroscience can tell us about these two modes of thinking. One surprising and compelling conclusion is that people who experience damage to the parts of their brain responsible for emotional reactions are unable to decide, because their rational mind dithers endlessly over the possible rational reasons for each course of action. The Platonic ideal of a rational being making decisions without recourse to the wordless gut-instinct is revealed as a helpless schmuck who can't answer questions as basic as "White or brown toast?"

People everywhere are mindlessly over-sharing on the world's largest social network, without a second thought as to who's reading their posts or what effect it could have on them further down the road.

5 Easy Steps to Stay Safe (and Private!) on Facebook

When the President of the United States warns schoolchildren to watch what they say and do on Facebook, you know that we've got a problem...and it's not one ...

hen the President of the United States warns schoolchildren to watch what they say and do on Facebook, you know that we've got a problem...and it's not one limited to the U.S.'s borders, either. People everywhere are mindlessly over-sharing on the world's largest social network, without a second thought as to who's reading their posts or what effect it could have on them further down the road. For example, did you know that 30% of today's employers are using Facebook to vet potential employees prior to hiring? In today's tough economy, the question of whether to post those embarrassing party pics could now cost you a paycheck in addition to a reputation. (Keep that in mind when tagging your friends' photos, too, won't you?) But what can be done? It's not like you can just quit Facebook, right? No - and you don't have to either. You just need to take a few precautions.

ng to enter here is "Only Friends." Anythin

"If you follow this article, you should end up with a language that can define functions, call functions, define variables, assign data to variables and perform basic math operations. It will support two basic types, doubles and integers. Some of the functionality is unimplemented, so you can have the satisfaction of actually implementing some of this stuff yourself and get the hang of writing a compiler with a little help."

Tutorial for writing your own compiler

Music for relax or better productivity.

Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.

Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful things so that people can do stuff. He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40. And he will wield them elegantly even as your go-cart is careening down the hill at a mile a minute.

PickTheBrain

Resources to help make you somewhat smarter. This should be interesting...

BRAIN ... HowTo be BETTER

out being sustained by people who cared about experimentation and exploration. Sometimes these people were relatives, but sometimes they were neighbors, teachers or other influential adults. A number of the innovative entrepreneurs also went to Montessori schools, where they learned to follow their curiosity. To paraphrase the famous Apple ad campaign, innovators not only learned early on to think different, they act different (and even talk different).

How Do Innovators Think? 5:21 PM Monday September 28, 2009 by Bronwyn Fryer Tags:Creativity, Innovation, Leadership What makes visionary entrepreneurs such as Apple's Steve Jobs, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Ebay's Pierre Omidyar and Meg Whitman, and P&G's A.G. Lafley tick? In a question-and-answer session with HBR contributing editor Bronwyn Fryer, Professors Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of Insead explain how the "Innovators' DNA" works.This post is part of HarvardBusiness.org's Creativity at Work special package. Fryer: You conducted a six-year study surveying 3,000 creative executives and conducting an additional 500 individual interviews. During this study you found five "discovery skills" that distinguish them. What are these skills? Dyer: The first skill is what we call "associating." It's a cognitive skill that allows creative people to make connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas. The second skill is questioning - an abilit

e ab

Artikel über einen Botnet Master, Der via MSN von einem Cisco Experten Interviewt wurde. Bsonders interessant sind die Motive, warum Er keinen "normalen" Job annimmt.

GR: Infiltrating a Botnet - Cisco Systems http://bit.ly/1jHXy6 [from http://twitter.com/robinhowlett/statuses/3516971966]

Technical, but interesting read.

»But what’s almost certain is that economists will have to learn to live with messiness.«

It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession.

By Paul Krugman

An AWESOME reference on bandwidth for engineers.

This is a unique YDN blog post.

scalablity

Viszonylag hosszú, de remek videó sok-sok GTD tippel.

"The talk on Time management, however, is a more pragmatic talk and talks about techniques to manage time better. Again, the underlying principle in Randy’s talk is to maximize life and fun. "

The Web is constantly turning out new and extraordinary services many of us are unfamiliar with. During TED University at this spring's TED2007 in Monterey, Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH, offered an ultra-fast-moving ride through sites in many different areas, from art, design and illustration, to daily news, blogs and curiosity. Now, by popular demand, here's his list of 100 websites you should know and use.

research.philips.com

I have come to the conclusion, over the last three years, that working hard is overrated. This is an idea I have been kicking around for a while, but it was thrown into sharp relief by a blog post entitled The Only Alternative Is To Work Harder, by a gentleman named Paras Chapra over at Wingify. Paras and I have corresponded over email a few times, so I say as one analytics junkie to another: the notion that working longer hours is correlated to better business results is a pernicious social pathology.

crazy books to read or not

"couchdb ruby"

Logging to couch

Susan Blackmore: Consciousness Paul Broks: What should I do? David Buss: Overcoming irrationality Robert Cialdini: Over-commitment Marilyn Davidson: Lost opportunities Elizabeth Loftus: Nightmares Paul Ekman: Death and forgiveness Sue Gardner: Dark places Alison Gopnik: Parenthood Jerome Kagan: Methodological flaws Stephen Kosslyn: Satiators and addicts Ellen Langer: Optimism David Lavallee: Sporting rituals Chris McManus: Beauty Robert Plomin: Nature, nurture Mike Posner: Learning difficulties Stephen Reicher: Who am I? Steven Rose: The explanatory gap Paul Rozin: Time management Norbert Schwarz: Incidental feelings Martin Seligman: Self-control Robert Sternberg: Career masochism Richard Wiseman: Wit

The email edition of the British Psychological Society's Research Digest has reached the milestone of its 150th issue. That's over 900 quality, peer-reviewed psychology journal articles digested since 2003. To mark the occasion, the Digest editor has invited some of the world's leading psychologists to look inwards and share, in 150 words, one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves. Their responses are by turns candid, witty and thought-provoking. Here's what they had to say:

Psychologist writes about what they don't understand about themself

Artikel med länksamling där ett antal personer på 150 ord ska beskriva "one nagging thing" de inte förstår med sig själva.

"The email edition of the British Psychological Society's Research Digest has reached the milestone of its 150th issue. That's over 900 quality, peer-reviewed psychology journal articles digested since 2003. To mark the occasion, the Digest editor has invited some of the world's leading psychologists to look inwards and share, in 150 words, one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves." Via Mind Hacks.

the Digest editor has invited some of the world's leading psychologists to look inwards and share, in 150 words, one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves. Their responses are by turns candid, witty and thought-provoking. Here's what they had to say:

모든 기업가들이 꼭 읽어야 하는 열가지 책

Experience Themes How a storytelling method can help unify teams and create better products by Cindy Chastain on 2009/10/06

Como usar historias para elegir el tema general de un sitio y mantenerlo enfocado.

The more beautifully you shape your work around one clear idea, the more meanings audiences will discover in your film as they take your idea and follow its implication into every aspect of their lives.

There’s an old adage among screenwriters that when a writer can sum up a story in a sentence or less, he has discovered what’s important about the story. He’ll know what the story is about and therefore have a strong sense of theme. And in knowing the theme, he’ll have a compass to use in the process of “designing” the damn thing (i.e. what to keep, what to lose, what actually happens at the end). The story will be all the better for it because it all hangs together with a central idea that will give it greater impact and meaning.

al introduction to lambda calculus

Offensive Play How different are dogfighting and football? by Malcolm Gladwell

The effect of football on the human brain is stomach-turning.

“I remember, every season, multiple occasions where I’d hit someone so hard that my eyes went cross-eyed, and they wouldn’t come uncrossed for a full series of plays. You are just out there, trying to hit the guy in the middle, because there are three of them. You don’t remember much. There are the cases where you hit a guy and you’d get into a collision where everything goes off. You’re dazed. And there are the others where you are involved in a big, long drive. You start on your own five-yard line, and drive all the way down the field—fifteen, eighteen plays in a row sometimes. Every play: collision, collision, collision. By the time you get to the other end of the field, you’re seeing spots. You feel like you are going to black out. Literally, these white explosions—boom, boom, boom—lights getting dimmer and brighter, dimmer and brighter.

technical debt

Analysis of when and why having bad / no tech design does / doesn't pay. Basically it's a metaphor for thinking about how and why we make tech design decisions.

Inventor of

"use the back of the 3x5 card as your Anti-Todo List. "

productivity tools: Let's start with a bang: don't keep a schedule.- "By not keeping a schedule, I mean: refuse to commit to meetings, appointments, or activities at any set time in any future day. As a result, you can always work on whatever is most important or most interesting, at any time." Each night before you go to bed, prepare a 3x5 index card with a short list of 3 to 5 things that you will do the next day. And then, the next day, do those things. ...Then, throughout the rest of the day, use the back of the 3x5 card as your Anti-Todo List. This isn't a real list. And the name is tongue firmly in cheek. What you do is this: every time you do something -- anything -- useful during the day, write it down in your Anti-Todo List on the card." This is obviously suited to the practices of the advanced learner.

The techniques that follow work together as an integrated set for me, but they probably won't for you. Maybe you'll get one or two ideas -- probably out of the ideas I stole from other people. If so, I have succeeded.

I have made a breakdown of the main arguments taught in high school and university which are utilized in computer science. I divided this list in a basic section and specific applications one.

linear

I grew up like Athena—covered with playing cards instead of armor—and, at the age of seven, materialized on a TV show, doing magic.

Ricky Jay profile in the New Yorker recommended by Whet Moser

Terrific profile of magician and historian Ricky Jay, and "the virtues of skeleton men, fasting impostors, and cannonball catchers".

A 1993 profile on sleight-of-hand artist and erudite Ricky Jay.

A profile of Ricky Jay from the New Yorker. April 1993.

"Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class".

The SEC's halfhearted oversight didn't go unnoticed by the market. Six months after Bear was eaten by predators, virtually the same scenario repeated itself in the case of Lehman Brothers — another top-five investment bank that in September 2008 was vaporized in an obvious case of market manipulation. From there, the financial crisis was on, and the global economy went into full-blown crater mode.

ant. Under what became known as the "options market maker exception," the SEC permitted a market maker to sell shares whether or not he had them or could find them right away. In theory, this made sense, since delaying the market maker from selling to offset a big buy order could dry up liquidity and slow down trading. But it also created a loophole for naked short-sellers to kill stocks easily — and legally. Take Bear Stearns, for example. Say the stock is trading at $62, as it was on March 11th, and someone buys put options from the market maker to sell $1.7 million in Bear stock nine days later at $30. To offset that big trade, the market maker might try to keep his own portfolio balanced by selling off shares in the company, whether or not he can locate them. But here's the catch: The market maker often sells those phantom shares to the same person who bought the put options. That buyer, after all, would love to snap up a bunch of counterfeit Bear stock, since he can driv

Naked short-selling, and how it brought down Bear Stearns (well, that and their ludicrous debt-to-asset ratio).

.

Interesting set of links and posts describing the technologies Google builds its software on, and how they work together.

The Google Technology Stack … or as I would put it: An Introduction to MapReduce, Data Mining and PageRank

A great in-depth treament of the engine that powers Google

Part of what makes Google such an amazing engine of innovation is their internal technology stack: a set of powerful proprietary technologies that makes it easy for Google developers to generate and process enormous quantities of data. According to a senior Microsoft developer who moved to Google, Googlers work and think at a higher level of abstraction than do developers at many other companies, including Microsoft: “Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement” (Credit: Joel Spolsky). This series of posts describes some of the technologies that make this high level of abstraction possible.

Jason Fried hates lame meetings, tech companies that don't generate revenue, and companies that treat their employees like children. A peek inside his typical workday

37 Signals CEO/President writes about how he works

you end up dying with your customer base, because the software is too complicated for a newcomer. We keep our products simple. I'd rather have people grow out of our products, as long as more people are growing into them. We also get thousands of suggestions. The default answer is always no. We rarely have meetings. I hate them. They're a huge waste of time, and they're costly. Creative people need unstructured time to get in the zone. You can't do that in 20 minutes. Very rarely is a question important enough to stop people from doing what they're doing. Everything can wait a couple of hours, unless it is a true emergency. We want to get rid of interruption as much as we possibly can, because that's the real enemy of productivity. Everyone should read stuff on the Web that's goofy or discover something new. I

Here's a list of 140 Google interview questions.

Here's a list of 140 Google interview questions. Many of our clients have interviewed and received Google job offers. Contact us for a free 15 minute interview analysis before your Google interview.

It is amazing how easy it is to sail through a Computer Science degree from a top university without ever learning the basic tools of software developers, without ever working on a team, and without ever taking a course for which you don’t get an automatic F for collaborating. Many CS departments are trapped in the 1980s, teaching the same old curriculum that has by now become completely divorced from the reality of modern software development.

To learn to program effectively you need to work collaboratively on projects with other people.

(he's) writing a series of tutorials on x86 assembly for C programmers who are already familiar with many of the basics of programming and computing.

Im writing a series of tutorials on x86 assembly for C programmers who are already familiar with many of the basics of programming and computing. The assembly tutorials available online just arent doing it for me, and I need something organized the way I think, on the topics Im interested in, presented in a way which make comprehensive understanding easy. Ill do the work, go find the answers, and then drop everything here for you to enjoy.

Interesting to see the problems that are present at Google regarding staying in sync with the latest kernel code.

Life at Twitter

But behind the calm, every-office exterior, lies the astonishing truth: the staff here are holding up the systems behind the world's hottest internet startup. They are responsible for a sprawling website on which 35 million people from all over the world fire out vast numbers of messages every second. This isn't just any normal office. This is Twitter.

Useful tips about keeping your skills up in software development to stay employed .. and employable

s you uniqu

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.edge.org%2F3rd_culture%2Fschirrmacher09%2Fschirrmacher09_index.html

He is interested in George Dyson's comment "What if the price of machines that think is people who don't?" He is looking at how the modification of our cognitive structures is a process that eventually blends machines and humans in a deeper way, more than any human-computer interface could possibly achieve. He's also fascinated in an idea presented a decade ago by Danny Hillis: "In the long run, the Internet will arrive at a much richer infrastructure, in which ideas can potentially evolve outside of human minds."

So... At the end of the day, what do I think? I like Go, but I don't love it. If it had generics, it would definitely be my favorite of the C/C /C#/Java family. It's got a very elegant simplicity to it which I really like. The interface type system is wonderful. The overall structure of programs and modules is excellent. But it's got some ugliness. Some of the ugliness is fixable, and some of it isn't. On balance, I think it's a really good language, but it could have been a lot better. It's not going to wipe C off the face of the earth. But I think it will establish itself as a solid alternative. And hopefully, over time, they'll fix some of the worst parts of the ugliness, without sacrificing the beauty or simplicity of the language. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fscienceblogs.com%2Fgoodmath%2F2009%2F11%2Fgoogles_new_language_go.php

"The most innovative thing about it is its type system. There are two kinds of types in Go: concrete types, and interface types. Concrete types are exactly what you're used to from most programming languages. Interface types are similar to interface types in languages like Java, with one huge exception: you don't need to declare what interface types you implement! An interface is a specification of what methods a type must provide to be used in some context. Anything which implements those methods implements the interface. Even if the interface was defined later than a type, in a different module, compiled separately, if the object implements the methods named in the interface, then it implements the interface." -- This is nice and all, but I (still) don't understand why this isn't just "abstract data types implemented in a language people might use." Didn't Barbara Liskov *just* win a Turing Award for this? Isn't this idea 30+ years old? (Yes, it is.)

Good Go, Bad Go.

As Larry Page astutely observes: "There is a pattern in companies, even in technological companies, that the people who do the work -- the engineers, the programmers, the foot soldiers if you will -- typically get rolled over by the management ... you end up kind of demoralized. You want to have a culture where the people who are doing the work, the scientists and the engineers, are empowered. And that they are managed by people who deeply understand what they are doing."

"Don't settle"

Google 10個の教訓

Article which seems nice. I should read.

No direct references are allowed to anything if they can be avoided. Every data structure is designed for expansion and self-identifying as to version. Every code segment is made self-identifying by the compiler or other construction procedure. Code and data are changeable on a per-command/process/system basis, and as few as possible copies of anything are kept, so single copies could be dynamically updated as necessary.

"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz is in "The 100 Best Books of the Decade - @TheTimes http://j.mp/3ZYLo9

100 The Position by Meg Wolitzer (2005) An hilarious, serious novel about sex and love and family.

If you’re used to the C family of languages, or the closely related family of “scripting languages,” Haskell’s syntax (mainly) is a bit baffling at first. For some people, it can even seem like it’s sneaking out from under you every time you think you understand it. This is sort of a FAQ for people who are new to Haskell, or scared away by its syntax.

Aside from his Nine Stories, JD Salinger published twenty-two stories in various magazines which remain uncollected. Several attempts have been made to compile these stories together but have met stiff resistance by the author. Spanning his literary career between the years 1940-1965, these stories display changes in both the author's style and message. While some are plainly of commercial quality, most are serious works containing an expansive gift of enlightenment and self-examination: that very-satisfying "Salinger moment".

JD Salinger Uncollected Stories

do you get the application up and running on your development environment. If you’re lucky, there’ll be some up-to-date instructions for getting it to kind of start up. Then you’ll get one of the other developers to show you how to run a few

http://www.developers.org.ua/archives/vseloved/2009/07/03/weekly-linkdump-182/

Weird. This was my advice to undergrads, although not in science...

Approach to getting broad understanding of topics you don't understand that well

Blog post/article on how to set your self up to be able to improve your learning ability.

yeah, amen in so many ways. It's harder and takes longer (the biggest problem), but immersion (in combination with good memory) is by far the only way to learn things. It's how I learnt to spell (and that's now slipping: the other aphorism is "use it or lose it")

Note that the title above isn’t “how to learn everything”, but “how to learn about everything”. The distinction I have in mind is between knowing the inside of a topic in deep detail — many facts and problem-solving skills — and knowing the structure and context of a topic: essential facts, what problems can be solved by the skilled, and how the topic fits with others. This knowledge isn’t superficial in a survey-course sense: It is about both deep structure and practical applications. Knowing about, in this sense, is crucial to understanding a new problem and what must be learned in more depth in order to solve it. The cross-disciplinary reach of nanotechnology almost demands this as a condition of competence.

50 most interesting wikipedia articles

Lista de libros sobre programación que merece la pena tener

Unit-testaus javascriptissä yms.

jquery conf

i've never heard of most of these. but the ones i have heard of i thoroughly enjoyed, and i think the writer describes their valuable qualities well makes me want to explore the rest of the list

Starting from Dynamo, ending with (roughly) follow @nosqlupdate on Twitter.

Materials that you need to read in order to get started with NoSQL

List of resources to read to get up-to-speed on the NoSQL movement.

I've tried to span as many subjects as possible to have a little something for everyone while limiting myself to foundational papers that have had a lasting impact on the field and are also highly readable. Some of the people (Chomsky, Shannon, Metropolis, Ulam) represented here might not consider themselves computer scientists but the papers I've included have been so important that they cannot be left out. I admit a few papers may seem like idiosyncratic picks due to my particular interest in certain areas like computer graphics and computational dynamics. There are several important papers I couldn't include due to an absence of freely available copies, e.g. Rissanen's Generalized Kraft Inequality and Arithmetic Coding.

I am looking for something clever or thought provoking that doesn't depend on too much background knowledge, and is easy to read without too much formalism/maths.

Recommender a compsci paper for me to read this weekend

Good explanation of how CouchDB indexes.

how couchdb b-trees work internally

최근 10년간 SF소설 시장에서 눈부신 활약을 보였던 20권의 책 선정(해리포터 시리즈, 시간여행자의 아내 등등). 2009년 12월 11일자 <자료제공:io9>

Vipassana Fellowship's online Meditation Course provides a supported introduction to Buddhist Meditation as found in the Theravada tradition. Resources and support for meditators and authoritative texts from the earliest Buddhist sources.

glide

We've often been asked what makes Google Chrome so fast -- from its snappy start-up time and fast page-loading, to the ability to run complex web applications quickly. To walk through some of the thought processes and technical decisions involved in making Google Chrome a fast browser, we've put together three technical interviews on DNS pre-resolution, the V8 JavaScript engine, and DOM bindings. In a future post, we'll also cover other important areas like WebKit and UI responsiveness.

Spoiler alert: DNS pre-resolution, the V8 JavaScript engine, and DOM bindings

Chrome does indeed has a fast.

Until recently, I hadn’t traveled much. I grew up in and and around Portland, and that’s where I tended to spend my vacations. But after my wife’s parents took us on a few trips (to Alaska, to San Francisco, to London, Dublin, and New York), the travel bug bit me. I’d like to see more of the world, and I’d like to do it without spending a lot of cash. Travel full-time for less than $14,000 per year

Article about advantages of scripting languages over system programming languages

Scripting: Higher Level Programming

Scripting languages such as Perl and Tcl represent a very different style of programming than system programming languages such as C or JavaTM. Scripting languages are designed for "gluing" applications; they use typeless approaches to achieve a higher level of programming and more rapid application development than system programming languages. Increases in computer speed and changes in the application mix are making scripting languages more and more important for applications of the future.

At 4:15 AM on a recent Tuesday, on a quiet, darkened street in Windsor, Ontario, a man was wrapping up another long day tormenting and terrorizing strangers on the telephone. Working from a sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment in a ramshackle building a block from the Detroit River, the man, nicknamed "Dex", heads a network of so-called pranksters who have spent more than a year engaged in an orgy of criminal activity--vandalism, threats, harassment, impersonation, hacking, and other assorted felonies and misdemeanors--targeting U.S. businesses and residents.

The Smoking Gun: Telephone Terrorist

A TSG investigation unmasks the leader of Pranknet and the miscreants behind a year-long wave of phone call criminality

Outing An Online Outlaw A TSG investigation unmasks the leader of Pranknet and the miscreants behind a year-long wave of phone call criminality

Official page on 2.6 on python.org. Lots of Python 3 compatibility features/

2.5->2.6.2

t

How to Get a Professional Look With Color

As Google product managers, you are building something that will outlast all of us, and none of us can imagine all the ways Google will grow and touch people's lives. In that way, we are like our colleague Vint Cerf, who didn't know exactly how many networks would want to be part of this "Internet" so he set the default to open. Vint certainly got it right. I believe we will too.

Google Manifesto

mfortable speaking wi

Ted didn't know--or care--what anyone outside the investment team did. The senior managers were the people to impress, and his fellow analysts were the people to keep ahead of. He sometimes had a hard time getting the administrative team's help in closing trades, but he didn't let that stop him. In fact, he'd often mention his disappointment with administrative staffers at his interruptions--er, meetings--with senior managers.

The wise moves that outpaced a wily and ambitious colleague.

This is a true tale about two acquaintances of mine. One knew instinctively exactly how to get ahead in the workplace. The other thought he knew--and was dead wrong. Alot of us would probably act pretty much the way the latter did. I believe their experiences hold lessons for all of us.

** Posted using Viigo: Mobile RSS, Sports, Current Events and more ** The wise moves that outpaced a wily and ambitious colleague.

My 2nd Notebook is NEXT ACTIONS. As I process my INBOX I will tag the notes with the appropriate @CONTEXT. Currently I have settled on the following tags:

from the Official Google Blog – a history lesson for us all

inspiration

Today, almost a third of all Google searches in Japan are coming from mobile devices — a leading indicator of where the rest of the world will soon be.

Compare "State of Google" addresses since 2004.

5/07/2009 12:11:00 PM Posted by Sergey Brin, Co-founder

this

Kunagi tulevikus on seda kirja ilmselt päris huvitav lugeda :)

e tells us some things to expect in the next. Computers will be 100 times faster still and storage will be 100 times cheaper. Many of the problems that we call artificial intelligence today will become accepted as standard computational capabilities, including image processing, spe

Robert Harris', Twenty Pieces of Music That Changed the World

One of the most popular features on The Sunday Edition this past year and a half has been, 20 Pieces of Music that Changed the World. The Sunday Edition's very own musical guru, Robert Harris took us on a cultural journey -- discussing the importance of music from Beethoven to Disco, and from Depression-era classics to rap. The entire series is soon to be released as a boxed set of CDs. In the meantime, click here and have and listen!

provides

Seneca, a Spanish-born philosopher of Rome who lived in the first century A.D., was one of the prominent sages of the Stoic school. He's chiefly remembered today for his Moral Essays, a collection of twelve articles on various ethical themes. "On The Shortness Of Life" is an essay addressed to a friend, and it is excerpted and condensed here from Moses Hadas' fine work, The Stoic Philosophy Of Seneca.

True.

The Truth Behind Real CSI Evidence - Popular Mechanics

As DNA testing has made it possible to re-examine biological evidence from past trials, more than 200 people have had their convictions overturned. In approximately 50 percent of those cases, bad forensic analysis contributed to their imprisonment.

Forensic science was not developed by scientists. It was mostly created by cops, who were guided by little more than common sense. And as hundreds of criminal cases begin to unravel, many established forensic practices are coming under fire. PM takes an in-depth look at the shaky science that has put innocent people behind bars.

Outside of building companies, reading has been one of my daily passions since I was a young child. Each year, I attempt to read more books than the previous year. This year I read 146. The following books were the five that made the most impact and immediate improvement on my performance as an entrepreneur.

. Mission and Vision statements are an integral key of the Middle Way Method and you will find yourself reviewing and updating your

David Dobbs tells us about a new theory in genetics called the orchid hypothesis that suggests that the genes that underlie some of the most troubling human behaviors -- violence, depression, anxiety -- can, in combination with the right environment, also be responsible for our best behaviors. Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind's phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail -- but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society's most cr

People that are genetically prone to being at risk in poor environments are also more successful in good environments

found via kottke.org

"the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success"

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.

a bad environment and poor parenting vs the right environment and good parenting

“stress diathesis” or “genetic vulnerability” model Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people. The Atlantic Online | December 2009 |

Franc

A Photo Student › Photo Writings - essays by Benjamin, Barthes, Sontag, Foucault, etc.

The Adventures of James Pomerantz in Photo MFA Land

Gravity keeps our feet on the ground and our planet circling the sun, but we know remarkably little about it. New Scientist investigates the force's greatest mysteries.

If you allow applications to save your passwords, anyone with physical access to your PC can decode them unless you're properly encrypting them—and chances are pretty good you're not. Let's walk through the right and wrong ways to store your passwords.

If you allow applications to save your passwords, anyone with physical access to your PC can decode them unless you&#039;re properly encrypting them&mdash;and chances are pretty good you&#039;re not. Let&#039;s walk through the right and wrong ways to store your passwords.

Really great analysis.

America has been strong because, despite its flawed system, people built toward the future in the 1840s, and the 1930s, and the 1950s. During just the time when Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park, when Theodore Roosevelt set aside land for the National Parks, when Dwight Eisenhower created the Pentagon research agency that ultimately gave rise to the Internet, the American system seemed broken too. They worked within its flaws and limits, which made all the difference. That is the bravest and best choice for us now.

Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great: our university system, our receptiveness to immigration, our culture of innovation. In most significant ways, the U.S. remains the envy of the world. But here’s the alarming problem: our governing system is old and broken and dysfunctional. Fixing it—without resorting to a constitutional convention or a coup—is the key to securing the nation’s future.

Very good but doesn't *really* propose that strong of sol'ns. I think we need to try to infuse competition into the government. I also think that we need to cut military spending, my god how did he not mention this!

thoughtful - build on this to make the argument that our best way to change the system is by changing the people within it. If people in government were operating more altruistically, it wouldn't matter what system they operated within, good things would happen.

modulos de drupal

40+ Essential Drupal Modules

In any given era, those who minister to the mentally ill — doctors or shamans or priests — inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. Because the troubled mind has been influenced by healers of diverse religious and scientific persuasions, the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another.

from a book on the same topic, describes how the "symptom repertoire" of mental illness is becoming standardized around the world, which is quite different from times past. "we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness."

very good site

50 Free Sources for Business Plans, Templates and Models

Best practices for using blocks in Ruby.

How to print to a file in a block of code; more novel ways to implement < and << (redirect)

Moving non time critical emails to Google Wave resulted in a smoother line of communication and the ability to return to conversations.

Some interesting nuggets in here.

On how Google Wave surprisingly changed my life http://bit.ly/4ux6kq

Film, Television, Books, Music, Art, Poetry, Celebrity, Sex, Science, Fashion

It's a particularly insidious problem for fast-growing start-ups. When you're really small and you're just starting out, you don't have that many people, so keeping everyone in the loop on everything doesn't really take that much time. But as you get bigger, the number of people who might potentially get involved in any particular discussion increases, and the amount of stuff you're doing as a company increases, and the amount of time you can waste overcommunicating becomes a serious problem.

"Have you ever invited employees to a meeting just so they wouldn't feel left out? If so, you may be an overcommunicator."

David Heineimeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and partner at 37signals in Chicago, says that planning is guessing, and for a start-up, the focus must be on today and not on tomorrow. He argues that constraints--fiscal, temporal, or otherwise--drive innovation and effective problem-solving. The most important thing, Hansson believes, is to make a dent in the universe with your company.

awesome article!

This tale of two boys, and of the millions of kids just like them, embodies the most stunning finding to come out of education research in the past decade: more than any other variable in education—more than schools or curriculum—teachers matter.

After his two years were up, Farr went to law school, as planned.,

Worth having every staff read and debate this article.

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I still run into people lambasting git for the concept of the index from time to time. It seems strange and superfluous to users of other VCSs – like a speed bump that serves no purpose. Why not just commit the changes in the working copy? This perception is understandable; when I first heard of git, back as a Subversion user, I was one of these people. How times and minds change. Today, I use it and rely on it so much that I can’t imagine moving to any other VCS that doesn’t have this concept. (And none of the contemporary contenders do.) Because of this, I keep responding to such criticism, repeating myself. I figured I should put my explanation down somewhere where I can point people to.

so this is one of my FAVORITE BOOKS OF ALL TIME!! and now lots of the stories are up right here :D :D :D

From "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", the kind of advice that saves you a lifetime of figuring it out by yourself

hey're not going to give you a goddamn thing; I'm not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.

Good summary of pros and cons of vimscript vs ruby/python/whatever.

Some things to consider when writing a plugin for vim. Comments describe how to implement some OOP in vimscript. whodathunkit?

Listas sobre GTD

Short stories by J. D. Salinger published in The New Yorker

Salinger in the New Yorker.

links to all Salinger stories published in The New Yorker

lessig lays out various problems and plans w/ copyrighting culture, in GREAT detail. i wonder if his ideas would work...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1091094

a hilarious collection of attention-grabbing essay titles

teaching for creativity

The field of web design is constantly changing and growing. Getting in a rut is often the result of not staying up to date with the latest trends and technologies in the industry. Even if we do stay up to date, many of us at one time or another feel anxious about whether we’re advancing. If you’re at a firm, you may be working towards a raise or promotion, or perhaps you’re thinking of jumping ship to a bigger and better company. For the freelancers out there, we of course determine our own destiny; but far too often our careers feel stagnant, too. This article goes over some ways to reignite your growth as a web designer.

How to Grow as a Web Designer | Webdesigner Depot - http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/02/how-to-grow-as-a-web-designer/

รักษาโลก โลกสีเขียว

A paginated display is one of the top optimization scenarios we see in the real world. Search results pages, leaderboards, and most-popular lists are good examples. You know the design pattern: display 20 results in some most-relevant order. Show a "next" and "previous" link. And usually, show how many items are in the whole list and how many pages of results there are. Rendering such a display can consume more resources than the entire rest of the site! As an example, I'm looking at slow log analysis results (with our microslow patches, set to log all queries) for one client; the slow log contains 6300 seconds' worth of queries, and the two main queries for the paginated display consumed 2850 and 380 seconds, respectively.

Rendering such a display can consume more resources than the entire rest of the site!

A paginated display is one of the top optimization scenarios we see in the real world. Search results pages, leaderboards, and most-popular lists are good examples.

RT @estherschindler: I wrote: "Old-school programming techniques you probably don't miss" http://bit.ly/5BoWr - I disagree with some of it. [from http://twitter.com/nealrichter/statuses/1652091891]

Interesting JavaScript quiz based around closures and orders of evaluation. Some of the questions are quite mindbending.

Great quiz and comments.

These big picture changes have concentrated on a few key areas: * Decoupling Rails components from one another as much as possible, making things more modular and a la carte. * Pulling in improvements from Merb and rewrite/refactor much of the internals to improve performance. * Exposing explicit, documented API’s for common tasks and integration of wider ecosystem components from testing, ORM, etc.

Hi, I'm Jeremy McAnally. I work at Intridea and tweet at @jm and get my open source on at http://github.com/jm and write run-on sentences.

After scouring book reviews and Wikipedia, a list of the Top Ten Best Apocalyptic Novels was born. The books on this list take you down the darkest paths in uncivilized worlds, from cannibalistic gangs to vampire infected corpses. If this list doesn't get you thinking on the quickest way stock your basement full of water, canned goods and rifles, I don't know what will! Enjoy!

The Pirate Bay we know and love, though still harboring torrents for now, is going away. But that doesn't mean BitTorrent is dead. Far from it. Here are five places to get your torrent on after it closes for good

The Pirate Bay we know and love, though still harboring torrents for now, is going away. But that doesn't mean BitTorrent is dead. Far from it. Here are five places to get your torrent on after it closes for good.

Sharing model data via ActiveResource -- good stuff.

Measurement of quantum phenomena could be affected by fractal nature of the object being measured.

w the answer to that question now, and I'm still basi

Types and Programming Languages,

other essential aspect was the range o

Some details about the mechanics of Five Whys

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fstartuplessonslearned.blogspot.com%2F2009%2F07%2Fhow-to-conduct-five-whys-root-cause.html

Smashing Magazine

Throughout 2009, I kept a running list of the best journalism I encountered. Although I endeavored to remain as impartial as possible, note that I've been an employee of The Atlantic, that I'd eagerly write for numerous publications that received awards, that I have too many friends/acquaintances/professional contacts in journalism [...]

Throughout 2009, I kept a running list of the best journalism I encountered. Although I endeavored to remain as impartial as possible, note that I’ve been an employee of The Atlantic, that I’d eagerly write for numerous publications that received awards, that I have too many friends/acquaintances/professional contacts in journalism to disclose them all, and that the number of pieces I miss every year far exceeds the number I’m able to read.

A step by step example of creating a jQuery plugin and close examination of jQuery UI interaction plugins.

How to create a jQuery plugin

This is awzzzzom

Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students.

There are more than three million teachers in the United States, and Doug Lemov is trying to prove that he can teach them to be better.

Very cool IDE concept!!

Just because you've got a relatively inexpensive point-and-shoot camera and not a $1500+ DSLR rig doesn't mean you can't take awesome photos. Here's a look at how you can elevate your regular old point-and-shoot shots to greatness.

git staging and branching

Git is a fast, flexible but challenging distributed version control system. Before jumping in: Understand regular version control Understand

"This site presents strategies and resources for faculty members and graduate assistants who are teaching Introduction to Philosophy courses; it also includes material of interest to college faculty generally. The mission of TΦ101 is to provide free, user-friendly resources to the academic community."

My Website

アマノユウ｢どこかのタイミングで見ておこうとメモメモ。｣

Fascinating!

A quarter century ago, Windows wasn't everywhere. In fact, some were doubtful it would ever ship at all. And Tandy Trower was there.

quotes Mike Taylor: "I want to make things, not just glue things together." http://bit.ly/9Yxm1V

In a recent interview, Don Knuth wrote: 'The way a lot of programming goes today isn't any fun because it's just plugging in magic incantations — combine somebody else's software and start it up.' The Reinvigorated Programmer laments how much of our 'programming' time is spent pasting not-quite-compatible libraries together and patching around the edges.

Good story on how much science is messed up by misuse of statistics

Tom Siegfried, Mar 27, 2010 "uring the past century, though, a mutant form of math has deflected science’s heart from the modes of calculation that had long served so faithfully. Science was seduced by statistics, the math rooted in the same principles that guarantee profits for Las Vegas casinos. Supposedly, the proper use of statistics makes relying on scientific results a safe bet. But in practice, widespread misuse of statistical methods makes science more like a crapshoot." "Statistical tests are supposed to guide scientists in judging whether an experimental result reflects some real effect or is merely a random fluke, but the standard methods mix mutually inconsistent philosophies and offer no meaningful basis for making such decisions. Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous, and tests of medical dangers or treatments are often contra"

On the abuse and misuse of statistics by science

Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics

A useful article outlining the shortcomings of statistics when it comes to ascertaining scientific fact. Half of all medical data could be wrong. "For better or for worse, science has long been married to mathematics. Generally it has been for the better. Especially since the days of Galileo and Newton, math has nurtured science. Rigorous mathematical methods have secured science’s fidelity to fact and conferred a timeless reliability to its findings."

Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics

Keep this as a reference to common couch FUD :)

I believe there is plenty more that can be discovered about pacing in games -- certainly some more scientific studies of heart rate, etc whilst playing games might unearth some real revelations about what makes the pace in games so emotionally involving and also what simply does not work.

game design possibilities: speed, tempo, threat, carrot/stick, chase

Interesting look at level pacing

Suggested by arun

[Found via Coast to Coast Bio] Tim Bray outlines a new CS curriculum that re-focuses on the web as a platform (rather than an individual computer). Under this training, CS students would graduate prepared for the modern challenges of working with big data.

The World Wide Web as a framework for structuring much of the academic Computer Science curriculum.

Viewing the World Wide Web as a framework for structuring part of the academic Computer Science (and Computer Engineering, perhaps) curriculum. Includes a link to "The first few milliseconds of a HTTPS connection" which should be as fascinating as a read.

even take driving tests, apply for passports, or enroll in college classes under one of his many aliases: J

a real-life master criminal

Coding technique without error

guide to 25 of the most dangerous programming mistakes - a must read!

outsider

PageRank is a standard and much discussed topic in SEO and while it is relevant, the methods and techniques discussed are often not. There is a lot of

SEO optimization articles

The web designers' guide to cloud hosting All you need to know about developing and hosting in the cloud

Cloud computing is quietly taking over the world and changing the way we use our computers forever. Whether you're storing your photo collection on Flickr or logging on to Gmail, everyone's now using the cloud, even if they don't realise it. But how does it work and how can we as web designers and developers make it work for us?

Cloud computing is quietly taking over the world and changing the way we use our computers forever. Whether you're storing your photo collection on Flickr or logging on to Gmail, everyone's now using the cloud, even if they don't realise it. But how does it work and how can we as web designers and developers make it work for us? Cloud computing runs on virtual servers. Rather than being a single physical box, a virtual server runs as part of a physical box. This type of virtualisation is nothing new and has long been a cost-effective entry-level solution. Virtual machines on the cloud run on clusters of servers. Again, this is nothing new: most medium-to-large server set-ups involve clustering.

Amid the many uncertainties loosed by the al-Qaida attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, one forecast seemed beyond doubt: Islamist terrorists would strike the United States again—and soon.

Clear overview of the prevailing theories about why no major attacks have occurred since 9/11/01.

This is the second post in an article series about MIT's lecture course Introduction to Algorithms. I changed my mind ...

The google ninjas mentioned at ala2009

Gmail is far and away the best online email management system out there right now. But a lot of people still use it like a regular email service, never touching some of its power-features that can really help with email overload. So Google launched a new Tips area of the site today to serve as a reference point for how to become what it calls a “Gmail Ninja.

reading Google Wants You To Become A Gmail Ninja. Or Look Like A Huge Nerd Trying. http://ow.ly/15FXM5 [from http://twitter.com/ploked/statuses/2299959418]

Good article about the power of Google in research.

The future of the Web is everywhere. The future of the Web is not at your desk. It’s not necessarily in your pocket, either. It’s everywhere. With each new technological innovation, we continue to become more and more immersed in the Web, connecting the ever-growing layer of information in the virtual world to the real one around us. But rather than get starry-eyed with utopian wonder about this bright future ahead, we should soberly anticipate the massive amount of planning and design work it will require of designers, developers and others.

Looking for an antidote to Star Trek's utopian but overbearing Federation? Like your science fiction with a bigger emphasis on personal liberties? Then check out our list of the greatest libertarian science fiction...

Incl. list of bookmarks to "Best of Naggum" usenet articles

Some essays, flames and other stuff by Erik Naggum

acquire

In Seed Magazine, Jonathan Gottschall, a leading Literary Darwinist, reviews Geoffrey Miller's latest book, Spent, which argues that most of what we do, especially what we buy, is a kind of marketing designed to signal our power and secure our (genetic) place in the social hierarchy. That's all well and good, but it seems awful reductive.

In Spent, University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller contends that marketing—the jet fuel of unrestrained consumerism—“is the most dominant force in human culture,” and thus the most powerful shaper of life on Earth. Using vivid, evocative language, Miller suggests that consumerism is the sea of modern life and we are the plankton—helplessly tumbled and swirled by forces we can feel but not understand. Miller aims to penetrate to the evolutionary wellsprings of consumerist mania, and to show how it is possible to live lives that are more sustainable, more sane, and more satisfying.

Resources

This article explores some of the Linux architectures that support real-time characteristics and discusses what it really means to be a real-time architecture. Several solutions endow Linux with real-time capabilities, and in this article I examine the thin-kernel (or micro-kernel) approach, the nano-kernel approach, and the resource-kernel approach. Finally, I describe the real-time capabilities in the standard 2.6 kernel and show you how to enable and use them.

very good summary about linux and rt

Great way to lose an hour - a must-read dialog between sports columnist Bill Simmons and author Malcolm Gladwell. http://bit.ly/3w857i [from http://twitter.com/JMaultasch/statuses/1796294654]

This will suck about 30 minutes from your life. As Truman Capote once said about Jack Kerouac, "That's not writing, it's typing."

Simmons Meets Gladwell Part II

Malcolm Gladwell talking about Nick Faldo. "Faldo in his prime was terrifying. He was surly and tough and charismatic and emotionally and psychologically bulletproof, and I feel like he'd do a better job of getting under Tiger's skin than anyone out there right now. What's the defining fact about Faldo? His ex-girlfriend once destroyed his Porsche with a 9-iron. The corresponding fact for Woods is that his favorite band is Hootie and the Blowfish. Hootie and the Blowfish? What's Faldo's favorite band? Joy Division? Or some kind of obscure Welsh thrash band too hard core for American radio?"

Gaming with the Wii and the games for it.

supertitious, crowd, asking for help, familiarity breeds contempt, Mondays, pets, right ear

Many fascinating insights into the human mind are hidden in the most routine activities.

Aggregation of pop-psychology articles

Good insightful articles on practical psychology

psychology blog article

:D

bandom recs list

List your five-to-ten favourite bandom fics, and the reasons they are your favourites.

people listing 5-10 of their faves

BY POPULAR BANDOM LOVE-IN DEMAND: List your five-to-ten favourite bandom fics, and the reasons they are your favourites. Please provide links, you never know what people will not have read! As a bonus, if you're a writer, list your favourite bandom fic that you've written, and why. We never get an excuse to rec ourselves, so go for it! REC AWAY! \o/

People list their 5 - 10 fav bandom fics.

So many beautiful fics, everyone's favorites by trustworthy names

RECS!! List your five-to-ten favourite bandom fics, and the reasons they are your favourites. Please provide links, you never know what people will not have read!

"RAID" is now used as an umbrella term for computer data storage schemes that can divide and replicate data among multiple hard disk drives. The different schemes/architectures are named by the word RAID followed by a number, as in RAID 0, RAID 1, etc. RAID's various designs all involve two key design goals: increased data reliability or increased input/output performance. When multiple physical disks are set up to use RAID technology, they are said to be in a RAID array. This array distributes data across multiple disks, but the array is seen by the computer user and operating system as one single disk.

Sorry to tease, but Solang is not packaged for Ubuntu anywhere yet! Will update when available. In the meantime, try gThumb and Shotwell.

muy bien explicado

Mega matéria na Wired

Awesome article in Wired "As Lost Ends, Creators Explain How They Did It, What’s Going On" http://bit.ly/doLFq0 via @dougmeacham

An interesting article highlighting the need to spark student interest in maths through the use of magic numbers, links to music and the creative arts and through an emphasis that, “A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas,” (cited du Sautoy, 2009). The article is a brilliant read for math teachers in the diverse classroom who need to understand that for some students, “the subject comes alive when they learn how mathematics is not an isolated subject, but runs seductively below the surface of many other subjects in the curriculum,” (du Sautoy, 2009). The article may be beneficial for those teachers aiming to engage the disengaged and may provide teachers with ideas for extension activities for gifted and talented students. Well worth a read for any teacher wanting to spice up their mathematics curriculum.

Guardian article written by Marcus du Sautoy 23/06/09 on livening up the maths curriculum with big, creative mathematical adventures. Links to gallery of useful archietectural photos. Recommended by CH. Links to other useful Guardian articles on maths by same author.

"I've never understood why education is so compartmentalised" - "... the maths we were doing in the classroom wasn't really what maths was about. It was something much more exciting, creative, imaginative. Those books provided me with a key to the secret garden of mathematics" - "In that garden I discovered that mathematics also has great stories. Unsolved mysteries like the enigma of prime numbers. Magical mathematical machines that could help you see in four dimensions. Mathematicians who had journeyed to infinity and beyond..." - lighting the fire, relating to the abstract

How do you spark off an interest in maths when the curriculum seems dreary? It's all about mystery, big stories and journeys to infinity and beyond, says Marcus du Sautoy

I've never understood why education is so compartmentalised. My son looks at his timetable: maths first lesson, history second lesson, music before lunch. The curriculum gives no hint at how integrated all these subjects are. To look at the historical evolution of mathematical ideas provides an invaluable perspective on why the mathematics was created in the first place.

great essay on encouraging a passion for math

While reading through lots of code can give you an appreciation of what well-written code looks and feels like, the ability to create it is a skill that is developed from experience and frustration. Luckily, there are a number of excellent articles and books out there to help the aspiring code perfectionist. The following resources are ones that have helped me personally strive to write code worth looking at

This book is one of the fundamental database theory books available today. A list of the papers featured in the book, as well as various lecture notes, are listed. Need to track down some of these papers.

ust as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenseless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software." The negative characteristics of cloud computing that Stallman id

"The negative characteristics of cloud computing that Stallman identifies are very real, but the solution that he prescribes seems grossly myopic and counterintuitive. ... Stallman correctly recognizes those problems, but his belief that the problems are intractable is simply wrong. The open source software movement has found productive ways to address the same kind of problems on the desktop, and I'm confident that reasonable solutions can be found to bring the same level of freedom to the cloud. The challenges posed by new computing paradigms will require the open source software community to evolve and adapt, not collectively stick its head in the sand. "

Great article on the benefits and drawbacks of cloud computing.

We tend to apply ergonomics as it relates to our waking activities. But utilizing the right sleep posture is just as important as having the right PC posture, especially if you want to enjoy a pain-free morning and day.

Check out the types of tweets that can come from following these twitters

Now on to a brief summary of some tenants that I've learned and live by.

Blog article on the lessons of someone having programmed for the last thirty years.

"What are some really useful but esoteric language features in Perl that you've actually been able to employ to do useful work?" The community responds. Great stuff here.

What are some really useful but esoteric language features in Perl that you've actually been able to employ to do useful work? Guidelines: Try to limit answers the Perl core and not CPAN Please give an example and a short description

via kottke.com, dozens of links about the late writer, david foster wallace

A collection of links to resources related to, anecdotes about, and eulogies of the deceased author. NB: he loved The Wire!

Jason Kottke assembled a set of links commemorating DFW.

kottke's list of remembrances, because I, too, need to close some of these tabs

Kottke rounds up quite a few links about David Foster Wallace, the acclaimed writer that died recently. I've never read anything by Wallace, but all the outpouring of sorrow makes me wonder if I should have been.

Looks like a useful reading list for interaction design.

Required reading list for MFA interaction-design program @ School of Visual Arts, in New York

Thu Feb 12, 2009 at 9:13 AM | Fast Company |BY Cliff Kuang

Good list... need to read a few on here

iancr's confessional on diet, exercise and self-discipline

Great tips on staying fit and eating healthy. Also a great recommendation for the book "The End of Overeating" by David Kessler which shows why so many Americans are getting fat and what to do about it.

“…LOOK AT ME I’M SKINNY…” DIET, EXERCISE, NATURE, AND NURTURE

interesting article about ian rogers' relationship with food and exercise and being a 'skinny guy'.

So, as an aide to programmers looking to improve their ability to produce and critique aesthetic arguments, I've put together a short reading list of items I find both accessible and helpful. These texts vary from actual art criticism to art history and theory. They also vary in vintage — from the very recent to more than 100 years old — and in format — from serious book-length essays to short art criticism and reportage.

"What's "striking and paradoxical" about this research, he says, is that it shows that reaching materialistic and image-related milestones actually contributes to ill-being; despite their accomplishments, individuals experience more negative emotions like shame and anger and more physical symptoms of anxiety such as headaches, stomachaches, and loss of energy. By contrast, individuals who value personal growth, close relationships, community involvement, and physical health are more satisfied as they meet success in those areas."

We sat down with Microsoft to hear the company’s side of the Vista story.  What lessons have been learned following the worstWindows launch in the company’s history? Is Microsoft doing enough to regain PC users’ faith?Way back in January 2007, after years of hype and anticipation, Microsoft unveiled Windows Vista to a decidedly lukewarm reception by the PC community, IT pros, and tech journalists alike. Instead of a revolutionary next-generation OS that was chock-full of new features, the Windows community got an underwhelming rehash with very little going for it. Oh, and Vista was plagued with performance and incompatibility problems to boot.

I think this article sums up how i felt abt vista too..

"...a bunch of good writing on weblogs, creative work, and online media."

"Merlin Mann has been on a tear lately. He's been rethinking what he wants to do with 43 Folders -- a site he started four years ago to think in public about Getting Things Done (and other stuff) -- which rethinking has resulted in a bunch of good writing on weblogs, creative work, and online media. Some links and excerpts follow."

In his celebrated 1837 Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard, titled "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted that a day would come when America would end what he called "our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands." His prediction came true in the twentieth century, and in no area of learning more so than in science. This surely would have pleased Emerson. When he listed his heroes he would generally include Copernicus and Galileo and Newton along with Socrates and Jesus and Swedenborg. But I think that Emerson would have had mixed feelings about one consequence of the advance of science here and abroad—that it has led to a widespread weakening of religious belief.[1]

Without God By Steven Weinberg Charles DarwinCharles Darwin by David Levine In his celebrated 1837 Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard, titled "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted that a day would come when America would end what he called "our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands." His prediction came true in the twentieth century, and in no area of learning more so than in science. This surely would have pleased Emerson. When he listed his heroes he would generally include Copernicus and Galileo and Newton along with Socrates and Jesus and Swedenborg. But I think that Emerson would have had mixed feelings about one consequence of the advance of science here and abroad—that it has led to a widespread weakening of religious belief.[1]

He warned me that we must worship God, because otherwise we would start worshiping each other. He was right about the danger, but I would suggest a different cure: we should get out of the habit of worshiping anything.

The future belongs to the companies who figure out how to collect and use data successfully. In this in-depth piece, O'Reilly editor Mike Loukides examines the unique skills and opportunities that flow from data science.

aspects Business Intelligence, Text Mining, and other statistical analysis

Ty lidi nikdy neslyseli treba o LEMovi?

An american venture capitalist's blog with information on technology business start ups

Need to read these again once a week.

Sie com artigos sobre empreendedorismo

Varios Artículos con conceptos interesantes sobre empresa

via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1426799 + http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cejxa/scala_for_hackers/

Foursquare

If jQuery is just the "magic black-box" to you, have a watch of this brilliant screen cast -> http://bit.ly/dxS69t – Oliver Gosling (goslingoweb) http://twitter.com/goslingoweb/statuses/16457270950

HTML 5 Lessons.

Interesting book on programming / development.

RT @draenews: Del The State of HTML5 Apps: http://bit.ly/95vE7h

Intérêt du HTML 5 pour les Webapps.

The state of #HTML5 apps http://dld.bz/hEAe

If you like ...

First comment is the best.

Upgrading a Rails 2 App to Rails 3

In this article, we’ll go through the main areas of Rails 3 that have seen major improvements. We’ll see how the evolution of Rails into its current mature form makes it easy to accomplish usual tasks, while also packing up new features any serious developer would appreciate.

Upgrade a Rails 2 App to Rails 3

9 Essential Books For Bloggers and Freedom

About how Dunnung-Kroeger began as a theory

All Joy and No Fun | Why parents hate parenting (parents are more depressed than nonparents no matter what their... http://ff.im/-nq6wU

read this when I have time...

particularly those of us who find moment-to-moment happiness a bit elusive to begin with.

Via Ben. Fascinating analysis of parenting, expectations, happiness, the history of parenting, etc.

"From the perspective of the species, it’s perfectly unmysterious why people have children. From the perspective of the individual, however, it’s more of a mystery than one might think. Most people assume that having children will make them happier. Yet a wide variety of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so. This finding is surprisingly consistent, showing up across a range of disciplines."

Why parents hate parenting.

oh dear,

All Joy and No Fun

Assorted Clojure Resources from Hacker News

The Spill, The Scandal and the President

The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world's most dangerous oil company get away with murder

Rolling Stone is on fire these days—The Spill, The Scandal and the President http://bit.ly/9X3rnW & The Runaway General http://bit.ly/97zeAS

@djspiewak wrote a very detailed intro to operational transformation. Very useful for building, say, a collab editor

Almost exactly a year ago, Google made one of the most remarkable press releases in the Web 2.0 era. Of course, by “press release”, I actually mean keynote at their own conference, and by “remarkable” I mean potentially-transformative and groundbreaking. I am referring of course to the announcement of Google Wave, a real-time collaboration tool which has been in open beta for the last several months.

Good article explaining how the Operational Transform from Google Wave can be implemented, and the various cases that have to be handled when server and client both have edits pending.

The algorithm behind "Wave"

Setting your mind on a goal may be counterproductive. Instead think of the future as an open question.

Willingness is a core concept of addiction recovery programs—and a paradoxical one. Twelve-step programs emphasize that addicts cannot will themselves into healthy sobriety—indeed, that ego and self-reliance are often a root cause of their problem. Yet recovering addicts must be willing. That is, they must be open to the possibility that the group and its principles are powerful enough to trump a compulsive disease.

I'm not totally sure that I understand the conclusions the the scientist came to about goal setting, but I'm interested in figuring out what it means and how to apply it to more effective goal setting...

"Setting your mind on a goal may be counterproductive. Instead think of the future as an open question."

Setting your mind on a goal may be counterproductive. Instead think of the future as an open question

People with wondering minds completed significantly more anagrams than did those with willful minds. In other words, the people who kept their minds open were more goal-directed and more motivated than those who declared their objective to themselves.

will i

Jared Padalecki is a Dreamer—a person who can insert himself into other people's dreams and manipulate them. While asleep, he can watch other people's fantasies, steal their secrets, and change their minds... all without their knowledge. For eleven years, he's been owned by Lumoinnovations, a powerful corporation that will stop at nothing to increase their influence and market share. Jared is their secret weapon, kept sound asleep and forced to Dream with people tricked into sleeping nearby while his handlers watch. When his latest assignment goes terribly wrong, resulting in the death of the subject, Jared is discarded as useless, left for dead in an alley. He is found by Jensen Ackles, a man who is struggling to get over a failed relationship and who has almost given up hope of forging a true Bond with anyone. He has known Dreamers in the past, but none like Jared, who begins to heal under Jensen's care.

Jared Padalecki is a Dreamer—a person who can insert himself into other people's dreams and manipulate them. While asleep, he can watch other people's fantasies, steal their secrets, and change their minds... all without their knowledge. For eleven years, he's been owned by Lumoinnovations, a powerful corporation that will stop at nothing to increase their influence and market share. Jared is their secret weapon, kept sound asleep and forced to Dream with people tricked into sleeping nearby while his handlers watch. When his latest assignment goes terribly wrong, resulting in the death of the subject, Jared is discarded as useless, left for dead in an alley.

Summary: Jared Padalecki is a Dreamer—a person who can insert himself into other people's dreams and manipulate them. While asleep, he can watch other people's fantasies, steal their secrets, and change their minds... all without their knowledge. For eleven years, he's been owned by Lumoinnovations, a powerful corporation that will stop at nothing to increase their influence and market share. Jared is their secret weapon, kept sound asleep and forced to Dream with people tricked into sleeping nearby while his handlers watch. When his latest assignment goes terribly wrong, resulting in the death of the subject, Jared is discarded as useless, left for dead in an alley. He is found by Jensen Ackles, a man who is struggling to get over a failed relationship and who has almost given up hope of forging a true Bond with anyone. He has known Dreamers in the past, but none like Jared, who begins to heal under Jensen's care.

Jared Padalecki is a Dreamer—a person who can insert himself into other people's dreams and manipulate them. For 11 years, he's been owned by Lumoinnovations, a powerful corporation that will stop at nothing to increase their influence and market share. Jared is their secret weapon, kept sound asleep and forced to Dream with people tricked into sleeping nearby while his handlers watch. When his latest assignment goes terribly wrong, resulting in the death of the subject, Jared is discarded as useless, left for dead in an alley. He is found by Jensen Ackles, a man who is struggling to get over a failed relationship and who has almost given up hope of forging a true Bond with anyone. When Jared truly wakes up for the first time since he was a child, it is Jensen who helps him find his way. They grow close as Jared gains confidence, and life is good... until Lumoinnovations discovers Jared is still alive and decides they want him back.

Jared Padalecki is a Dreamer, can insert himself into other people's dreams and manipulate them. For eleven years, he's been owned by Lumoinnovations, a powerful corporation that will stop at nothing to increase their influence and market share. Jared is kept sound asleep and forced to Dream with people tricked into sleeping nearby while his handlers watch. When his latest assignment goes terribly wrong, resulting in the death of the subject, Jared is discarded as useless, left for dead in an alley. He is found by Jensen Ackles, a man who is struggling to get over a failed relationship and who has almost given up hope of forging a true Bond with anyone. When Jared truly wakes up for the first time since he was a child, it is Jensen who helps him find his way. They grow close as Jared gains confidence, and life is good... until Lumoinnovations discovers Jared is still alive and decides they want him back.

Jared Padalecki is a Dreamer—a person who can insert himself into other people's dreams and manipulate them. For eleven years, he's been owned by Lumoinnovations. Jared is their secret weapon, kept sound asleep and forced to Dream with people tricked into sleeping nearby while his handlers watch. When his latest assignment goes terribly wrong, resulting in the death of the subject, Jared is discarded as useless, left for dead in an alley. He is found by Jensen Ackles, a man who is struggling to get over a failed relationship and who has almost given up hope of forging a true Bond with anyone. He has known Dreamers in the past, but none like Jared, who begins to heal under Jensen's care. They grow close as Jared gains confidence, and life is good... until Lumoinnovations discovers Jared is still alive and decides they want him back.

TO READ: Jared Padalecki is a Dreamer—a person who can insert himself into other people's dreams and manipulate them. While asleep, he can watch other people's fantasies, steal their secrets, and change their minds... all without their knowledge. For eleven years, he's been owned by Lumoinnovations, a powerful corporation that will stop at nothing to increase their influence and market share. Jared is their secret weapon, kept sound asleep and forced to Dream with people tricked into sleeping nearby while his handlers watch. When his latest assignment goes terribly wrong, resulting in the death of the subject, Jared is discarded as useless, left for dead in an alley.

ared Padalecki is a Dreamer—a person who can insert himself into other people's dreams and manipulate them. While asleep, he can watch other people's fantasies, steal their secrets, and change their minds... all without their knowledge. For eleven years, he's been owned by Lumoinnovations, a powerful corporation that will stop at nothing to increase their influence and market share. Jared is their secret weapon, kept sound asleep and forced to Dream with people tricked into sleeping nearby while his handlers watch. When his latest assignment goes terribly wrong, resulting in the death of the subject, Jared is discarded as useless, left for dead in an alley.

Summary: Jared Padalecki is a Dreamer—a person who can insert himself into other people's dreams and manipulate them. While asleep, he can watch other people's fantasies, steal their secrets, and change their minds... all without their knowledge. For eleven years, he's been owned by Lumoinnovations, a powerful corporation that will stop at nothing to increase their influence and market share. Jared is their secret weapon, kept sound asleep and forced to Dream with people tricked into sleeping nearby while his handlers watch. When his latest assignment goes terribly wrong, resulting in the death of the subject, Jared is discarded as useless, left for dead in an alley. He is found by Jensen Ackles, a man who is struggling to get over a failed relationship and who has almost given up hope of forging a true Bond with anyone.

Dreamer Jared

Jared Padalecki is a Dreamer—a person who can insert himself into other people's dreams and manipulate them... all without their knowledge. For eleven years, he's been owned by Lumoinnovations, a powerful corporation that will stop at nothing to increase their influence and market share. Jared is their secret weapon, kept sound asleep and forced to Dream with people tricked into sleeping nearby while his handlers watch. When his latest assignment goes terribly wrong, resulting in the death of the subject, Jared is left for dead in an alley. He is found by Jensen Ackles, a man who has almost given up hope of forging a true Bond with anyone. He has known Dreamers in the past, but none like Jared, who begins to heal under Jensen's care. When Jared wakes up for the first time since he was a child, it is Jensen who helps him find his way. They grow close as Jared gains confidence, and life is good... until Lumoinnovations discovers Jared is still alive and decides they want him back.

"Jared Padalecki is a Dreamer—a person who can insert himself into other people's dreams and manipulate them. While asleep, he can watch other people's fantasies, steal their secrets, and change their minds... all without their knowledge. For eleven years, he's been owned by Lumoinnovations, a powerful corporation that will stop at nothing to increase their influence and market share."..."When his latest assignment goes terribly wrong, resulting in the death of the subject, Jared is discarded as useless, left for dead in an alley. He is found by Jensen Ackles, a man"..."who has almost given up hope of forging a true Bond with anyone. He has known Dreamers in the past, but none like Jared, who begins to heal under Jensen's care. When Jared truly wakes up for the first time since he was a child, it is Jensen who helps him find his way. They grow close as Jared gains confidence, and life is good... until Lumoinnovations discovers Jared is still alive and decides they want him back."

10 things learned from eating on only $1 a day. http://bit.ly/bwrOKr – Aza Raskin (azaaza) http://twitter.com/azaaza/statuses/16879036268

Parisians call it a gruyère. For hundreds of years, the catacombs under the city have been a conduit, sanctuary, and birthplace for its secrets. The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables’ Jean Valjean both haunted these tunnels, striking students descended in 1968, as did patriots during the Second World War. The Nazis visited too, building a bunker in the maze below the 6th arrondissement. Honeycombed across 1,900 acres of the city, the vast majority of the tunnels are not strictly speaking “catacombs.” They house no bones. Limestone (and, to the north of the city, gypsum) quarries, these are the mines that built Paris. The oldest date back two thousand years to Roman settlers, but most were excavated in the construction boom of the late Middle Ages. Riddling the Left Bank, these tunnels were at first beyond the city’s southern limits. But as Paris’s population grew, so did the city—and soon whole neighbourhoods were built on this infirm ground.

this is really, really cool. On August 23, 2004, they discovered a cinema sixty feet beneath Paris.

RT @ebertchicago: The Lizard, the Catacombs, and the Clock: The Secret City Beneath Paris. http://bit.ly/93gYTB

crazy french secret society does cool things in the catacombs, doesn't want publicity, fame, attention

Nick Yee, (year?)

Almost 3 decades ago, in 1978, Elaine Hatfield wrote a seminal book on the topic of love - teasing apart passionate and companionate love. She defined passionate love as "a state of intense longing for union with another" and companionate love as "the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply entwined". Around the same time, Dorothy Tennov was trying to answer the same question in her book "Love and Limerence" and, similar to Hatfield, quickly differentiated between the “love” that is sincere concern and caring as opposed to the “love” that is fiery, euphoric and ephemeral. ... Tennov coined the term “limerence” for the latter so as to be able to discuss it as a concept separate from “love”. She noted that “love” is an emotion that is acted on, while “limerence” is more of a transformed state that people go into (the difference in the proverbial “I love you, but I’m not in love with you”).

Love in Four Acts: What is Romantic Love? - http://j.mp/98a0ua

Reflections on MongoDB -- http://bit.ly/aHCUC9

Kevin Kelly is asking people to recommend the best magazine articles ever written. Too much good stuff to read. Excellent.

* Susan Orlean, "Orchid Fever" in The New Yorker, January 23, 1995