Categories
Technology

We Require More Minerals

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, […]

Categories
books Software Technology

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 […]

Categories
Technology

The Simplified World of The Thing Explainer

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 […]

Categories
Science Technology

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 […]

Categories
Technology

Breadth after Depth: Don’t Set Yourself Up to Fail in Software Projects

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 […]

Categories
Technology

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

Categories
Technology

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.

Categories
Technology

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 […]

Categories
Technology

Tips for Interviewing and Telling Good Stories

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 […]

Categories
Software tangle Technology

Evernote’s Strengths and its Fatal Flaw

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 […]