Lately I’ve been somewhat obsessed by Starcraft. It’s a computer game that’s comparable to chess, except played at insane speeds and with a greater range of strategies available. I’m not much of a gamer, but this game has my attention. Speed of play is measured by Actions Per Minute (APM). One player controls an economy, […]
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The Slow Death of Digital Books
In 2007 Amazon released the Kindle. It was never a beautiful device, but it solved a problem with reading on screens–the discomfort that some people feel after looking at a lit screen for a long time. Still, it is a very flawed device. Browsing a Kindle book is tedious. Page refreshes are jerky, and just […]
The hottest Christmas book around our house this year has been The Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe. It explains complicated stuff using only the thousand most common words in the English language. A helicopter becomes a “Sky Boat with Turning Wings” and a dishwasher is a “Box that Cleans Food Holders.” This has had the […]
String Wars
String Theory is a 30 year old theory that, if proven, would provide a unified way of explaining the four fundamental forces of nature. It combines the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism with the very elusive force of gravity. String theory has problems though.After 30 years an unproven theory would usually be counted […]
It is very easy for software product owners to be lured into the trap of designing software to solve a broad problem for many people right from the start. This is a mistake. Most ideas start to scratch an itch or build something that is unique to a particular company or group. Then as you […]
Myth and Matter
I’ve started a newsletter! Join me, a natural, habitual collector of information on a random journey through languages, spoken and coded, literature, culture, science, learning and many other topics. This is a casual, infrequent email conversation that will point you off in fun & interesting directions. Enter your email address
rien ne tient en place
rien ne tient en place. A few of my favorite things: literature, French, JavaScript and Ruby beautifully joined together in this essay about language and meaning.
Conscious Consumption
A couple weeks ago I posted about “Radical Creation”–stopping reading, watching TV, listening to podcasts etc. to re-focus on creating content and move away from constant consumption. It was a successful experiment. I came away from it refreshed and with a more conscious approach to media. I’m no longer cold-turkey, and have moved back toward […]
Telling stories is hard. Getting people to tell them can be hard too, but once you do, there is nothing as captivating. Recently Tim Ferriss interviewed Alex Blumberg of Gimlet Media on how to tell and elicit engaging stories. The interview is specifically geared toward giving advice to podcasters on how to get people to tell […]
I use Evernote heavily. It is an innovative product with a great design aesthetic from a company that seems to have a very good business model. All this has rightly earned Evernote an avid user base and a growing ecosystem. The problem with Evernote though, is that it was made for storing a specific type […]