I Am Pedantic.

• 2010-07-28

  

  Carpet Flowers

• 2010-06-05

  

  Hypothesized energy composition of the universe

• 2010-05-14

  Arrington on Product Vision and Digg

  Mike Arrington wrote a long piece on Digg’s stagnated product and how lack of product vision is to blame.

  I’m skeptical of the implicit equating of vision with success, though. You can have a world-transforming vision and pursue that relentlessly despite your detractors, but that doesn’t imply success. I also don’t think there are very many visions that are, by themselves, sufficient for success.

  The point that I think should have been made (or maybe it was and I missed it) is this: Truly transformative products and services require a strong vision. That vision is a necessary but not sufficient component of success. Success will only be achieved through execution, iteration and learning, all of which reinforce, change and grow the vision. It’s a process.

  Digg’s stagnation is not only due to lack of vision, and Facebook’s success is not only a result of it. As always, complex things are not simple.

• 2010-05-09

  Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. …in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything—from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

  — Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

• 2010-04-08

  The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn’t the way it ever is. People should see that it’s never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It’s never been anything else, ever, but you can’t get that across in an essay.

  — Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

• 2010-03-22

  

  Fiscal Chart of The United States, 1791-1870

• 2010-03-06

  

  “Purchasing Power in the United States of Gold and Selected Currencies”

  Note the log scale.

• 2010-02-13

  Rubymine is Slow

  So the Java guys over at JetBrains wrote a “Ruby on Rails IDE” called Rubymine. It promises to increase your productivity, catch your errors and make you breakfast. But note what is not mentioned: speed.

  Not once on the Rubymine page is anything mentioned about “speed”, “fast”, “quick”, “rapid”, etc. Why?

  Because Rubymine is slow. Really slow.

  Obviously we all have different values, and my bias in this case should be obvious: I need speed. I absolutely refuse to use a text/programming editor that is not absolutely blazingly fast. All of the traditional big hitters fulfill this requirement: Vim, Emacs, TextMate, BBEdit, UltraEdit, etc. They’re all very fast when it comes to editing code.

  Using Rubymine, on the other hand, is like being shot in the ass with a tranquilizer dart. Everything is lethargic and heavy. I allow that some people are OK working while drunk, exhausted or tranquilized, but I’m not one of them. I will continue to write great code at lightning-quick pace with TextMate and any number of hand-crafted scripts that give me the productivity I crave.

• 2010-02-12

  Just so we’re clear, minors who send explicit photos of themselves to other minors get hit with child porn charges. Cops who send explicit photos of themselves to minors get probation.

  — Radley Balko on a frustrating story.

• 2010-02-11

  OS X 10.6: Disable Spotlight and remove Spotlight icon from menubar

  Yay, I always hated the Spotlight icon in the menubar. So useless.