December 2009
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A Brief History of the Imaginary Map by Don Beck...
Nobody really knows why there is no patron saint of cartographers. Even the meanest human professions have one: criminals can turn to St. Dismas and drug addicts to St. Kolbe for comfort, but nobody offers the honest, hardworking cartographer solace against the misfortunes of an inaccurately drawn coastline or a spilled ink pot. Not so for navigators (and how far would they get without a map?) who...
Talent is overrated
fluffynotes:
When we observe someone who has truly mastered their craft, whether it’s a writer, athlete, musician, or business person, we tend to assume they achieved that level of mastery through a combination of two ways:
1. They worked really, really hard. 2. They were born with some level of natural talent.
However, in Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from...
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“Good ideas rarely come in bunches. The designer who voluntarily presents his...”
– Paul Rand | Quotes on Design
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“I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain...”
– Stephen Jay Gould (via azspot) (via nerdgasms)
The Myth of Wikipedia Democracy →
infoneernet:
Despite its reputation for openness, the online encyclopedia has long been ruled by a tight clique of aggressive editors who drive out amateurs and newcomers.
Wikipedia is renowned for its openness—a Web site so democratic that anyone can edit its pages—but despite the reputation, the site has always been mostly edited by an elite coterie of contributors. And as many of...
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November 2009
“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you...”
– Dale Carnegie (via littlemiss) (via infoneernet)
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WatchThe Google Story | Fubiz™
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Entering the Superproject Void
For the first time in memory, the nation has no outsize public works project under way. The Big Dig, with its three and a half miles of underground highways channeling traffic beneath downtown Boston, was completed in December 2007, the month the Great Recession began.
So what are we missing, exactly? Huge public works — or more precisely, their historic absence — didn’t cause therecession any...
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“My clothes say bohemian hipster girl next door but my words say obscene drunken...”
– icallbullsh**onthat
Oh like the internet has a shortage of those? :-)
(via un)
ahahaha!
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This, Jen, is the internet →
the internet according to The IT Crowd:
[Roy enters the room.]
Roy: (iritated) Hey! What is Jen doing with the Internet?
Jen: Moss said I could use it for my speech.
[Roy speaks to Moss in an edgy way.]
Roy: Are you insane? What if she drops it?
Jen: I won’t drop it, I’ll look after it.
Roy: No. No, no, no, no, Jen. [Takes the box back from Jen.] No, this needs to go straight...
“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where...”
– Steve Jobs (via sheasylvia) (via wellthatsjustgreat)
Googled - The End of the World as We Know It,' by...
Because, let me tell you, I remember the old days, the antegoogluvian era. It was O.K. — it wasn’t horrible by any means. There were cordless telephones, and people wore comfortable sweaters. There was AltaVista, and Ask Jeeves, and HotBot, and Excite, and Infoseek, and Northern Light — with its deep results and its elegant floating schooner logo — and if you wanted to drag through several oceans...
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Microsoft's top developers prefer old-school...
Highlights:
“I will fight you if you try to take away my text editor,” said Don Box, a Microsoft distinguished engineer.
“Graphical programming environments are usable when they are useless, but unusable when they would be useful,” said Jeffrey Snover, another Microsoft distinguished engineer and creator of Microsoft’s PowerShell scripting tool for Windows....
“… science would go completely mad if left to its own devices. Look at...”
– Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (via totempole) (via notational)
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“The Information Revolution is not bloodless. There’s plenty to like about...”
– Cory Doctorow (Locus, Nov 2009) via Confessions of a Science Librarian
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