Things I Like
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Originality is partly a matter of having your own influences: read evolutionary biology textbooks or the Old Testament, find your metaphors where no one’s looking, don’t belong. Or belong to the other world that is not quite this one, the world from which you send back your messages. Imagine Herman Melville in workshop in 1849 being told by all his peers that he needed to cut all those informative digressions and really his big whale book was kind of dull and why did it take him so long to get to the point. And actually it was a quiet failure at the time. So was pretty much everything Thoreau published, and Emily Dickinson published only a handful of poems in her lifetime but wrote thousands.
I had a hard time with the quote for this one, I loved most of the tips. And I think they can be said for anything you want to be good at. Right now art is becoming a passion again and I love writing, and I'll get better at both if I do them a lot.
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During their investigation, Kidd and Piantadosi realized something important that strengthened their theory. It turns out that another variable has an even higher correlation with intelligence than brain size—time to maturity, or weaning time. In other words, the time it takes to shepherd newborns through absolute helplessness to a point of relative self-sufficiency predicts primate intelligence more strongly than the best measure that has previously been proposed, namely, head circumference. Orangutans have smarter babies than baboons and they wean them longer. Baboon babies, in turn, are weaned longer, and are smarter, than lemur babies.
I found this fascinating. Science and the way the world works are mind blowing.
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My students investigate the questions raised in this essay during the seminars I give on writing and researching robotics and technology. As my students’ fingers move unconsciously across desktops, miming the texting or typing they desperately want to be doing, we talk about how technology has consumed us. The students write papers on internet addiction, the consequences of smartphone use, the internet of things, the dark side of Fitbits. And yet they actively demonstrate everything we discuss. One of my students acknowledged that she can’t avoid surfing the web if she uses her laptop in class, yet she doesn’t opt for paper and pencil.
This essay was interesting to me. I didn't love everything about it, but the glimpses I get into life with devices as a young person intrigue me. As I age I'm more and more grateful to be away from devices. I spend long hours reading and thinking. I now draw with pen and paper more than on my iPad, and I journal with pen and paper as well. My todo lists have even gone low tech as of late. There is something comforting about it all to me. But I still love the internet and my iPad to be able to read things like this article. Balance, as usual, is the key but it can be very hard.
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No, the web is not print. However it shouldn’t be defined by being not print. Nor should we allow assumptions about what is and isn’t possible stop us experimenting. Unless we find the edges, unless we ask why we can’t do things, unless we come up with ways to try and make it work, the native tools won’t get better.
I've really enjoyed Rachel's work on CSS Grid and I agree with her that we aren't doing enough to push the boundaries on the web. The edges of the web are different and maybe we've become too complacent with that we're doing that's easy.
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Ownership is tricky and I don’t know quite what makes it work, but I suspect it’s the most important thing; when people own something they give it all they’ve got. When they don’t, they behave unpredictably (i.e. shit on it).
This is a really great list, super great and recommend reading it all. If you make for the web you'll find some things to think about, remember, and nod your head to.
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Vox Product has been doing incredible work on accessibility and baking it into their teams practices. And now they've shared a presentation they've created to help the rest of their team and company understand how important it is. Thank you for sharing Vox and well done!
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On a more philosophical level, this journey has served to remind me again of how terribly delicate is the fabric of civilization, of the vigilance required to protect it and of the slow and painstaking work of mending it once it has been torn. This is hardly an original thought; it is a lesson we were supposed to have learned after Nazi Germany, after Bosnia and Rwanda. Perhaps it is a lesson we need to constantly relearn.
This is an incredibly well done piece. It was the entire NY Times Magazine a few weeks ago and I just finished reading it over the weekend. At the same time we've been watching a documentary about World War I and it's incredible how the echoes of that war have reached into the years since. More so than World War II, World War I changed us and it ushered in an era of change in the world, change we are still dealing with, including in the lands highlighted in this piece. My take away from both this piece and the series on World War I is that democracy is hard, really hard, because it means compromising and respect for the other. And, related to that, the West has traipsed all over the world and decided we know how to do things best and, as history shows repeatedly, we've only made things worse. I will think about the people in this piece for years to come, especially when I see news about this part of the world.
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These 30-hour employees will be salaried and receive the same benefits as traditional 40-hour workers, but they will receive only 75 percent of the pay full-time workers earn. Currently, the company employs part-time workers that share the same benefits as full-time workers. However, the pilot program would differ in that an entire team, including managers, would work reduced hours.
Oh, how I want this to succeed. I've written about this in the past, but I believe that part time is something that could work in our industry, especially now that we work remotely on teams and in different time zones. If you are overlapping less, why can't you also get work done in less time? I've said this before, I would love to work a 30 hour, 4 day a week job. I believe I can produce great code, writing, and ideas in that time, and I think I can benefit a company. Too bad most companies can't take the risk to do this. I can't wait to see what happens at Amazon.
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Building these factories doesn’t require any new technology. In fact, the effort would be much the same as the one that Solomon oversaw at Intel’s semiconductor factory in New Mexico: Pick a site with good roads and a good technical school nearby to supply the workforce; find trained local contractors who can deal with everything from rebar to HVAC; get the local permits; order long-lead-time items like I-beam steel; level the ground and excavate; lay foundations and floors; build walls, columns, and a roof; “facilitate each of the stations for factory machine tooling with plumbing, piping, and electrical wiring”; and train a workforce of 1,500. To match the flow of panels needed to meet the Stanford targets, in the most intense years of construction we need to erect 30 of these solar panel factories a year, plus another 15 for making wind turbines. “It’s at the upper end of what I could possibly imagine,” Solomon says.
This may not be the best metaphor, but for humans who want to think of themselves as ruling over nature and not part of nature, it is a metaphor that could work. And to be quite honest, all I want right now is some action that would spur some action, because without the action soon, we are all fucked. (As you can tell, I'm fairly pessimistic about us doing anything in time to stop catastrophe).
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Practicing waiting is a lifelong practice since, as it turns out, impatience has a particular gravitational pull. But after all that waiting, finding or opening or having that once-future thing feels very much present.
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These are amazing, really, click the link, go look at it.
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And technology can feel miraculous. The application of knowledge and available materials to create new tools allows us to continually rework the world for our needs. We find gaps in our abilities and we make things that fill those gaps. We then look for more gaps. More opportunities. More frustrations. We keep building. We circle back and find that our previous gap-filling technologies had significant consequences and so we find better ways to fill the gaps. In theory we improve our lives.
This is really great and Winston has done great work on accessibility at Vox. And it's a pleasure to read more about what Winston has thought about in regards to it. We all could need affordances at some point in our lives, and it's very easy to forget that.
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This is a really great comic and it speaks to me a lot where I am right now in life. I'm spending August working on a few different things related to my health and feeling better and one of them is drinking. So I've cut way back on how much I consume. I also am on the hunt for interesting drink recipes, because if I'm going to drink a lot less, I want it to be delicious and deliberate. So when out with friends, if I order a drink, I sip it and take time with it. But I find that I prefer to have my limited amount at home, enjoying it with G, and time on the porch (in winter that'll be in front of the fire).
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The more salient point is that they are also forcing their neighbors to make that choice by turning the neighborhood into a commodity as well. The host has forced their neighbors — who see strangers coming and going constantly — to become just a little bit less engaged and connected to their home. It’s not just that they aren’t benefiting financially, it’s that they are incurring the majority of the social costs and losing what they thought their home was when they moved in. Maybe the Airbnb renter is okay with being in a cheaper “hotel,” but their neighbors didn’t sign a lease to live in any kind of hotel.
I'm not a fan of AirBnB and I think this article points out really well how the use of an apartment for full time rental disrupts and changes a neighborhood. There is a lot of things that come along with this and many times it is the neighbors who pay a hidden price while just trying to live their lives in the place they've chosen to do so.
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The distinction’s relevance persists today. Large areas of “real America” are almost entirely white. In Appalachia, that homogeneity, along with the region’s populist tradition, helps explain why white voters there took so much longer to flip from Democrat to Republican than in the Deep South. This does not mean that racism is absent in these areas—far from it. But it suggests that the racism is fueled as much by suspicion of the “other” as it is by firsthand experience of blacks and competition with them—and that political sentiment on issues such as welfare and crime isn’t as racially motivated as many liberal analysts assume. A focus on the South also eclipses places where low-income whites consist mainly of descendants of later European immigrants. (Think of the South Boston Irish, or Baltimore’s Polish American dockworkers depicted in the second season of The Wire.)
This election year in the US has brought out a lot of anger of certain folks who are feeling left behind. And the angry working class white voter is talked about more than almost any other. This piece is really fantastic, drawing on two different books written about the subject of poor whites, but from very different perspectives. I learned a lot and it made me want to read more on the subject.