Sorry for any annoying RSS reposts/disruptions you may have experienced - I committed the cardinal sin of deploying a feature that was only half-finished.
Sorry for any annoying RSS reposts/disruptions you may have experienced - I committed the cardinal sin of deploying a feature that was only half-finished.
My fears of impending IE6 responsibilities have lessoned ever so slightly. However, this does little to alleviate the two main holdouts for IE6:
Much like legalizing gay marriage, the best weapon in this fight remains time itself.
Seth Godin posts:
The people who make desktop software are making themselves obsolete. When you start developing on the web, your default is to be smart, to interact and to be open (with other software and with your users). Desktop software (like Word) is insanely unaware of what I do, why I do it and who I do it with. Right now, the desktop folks have the momentum of the incumbent. Not for long. Time to hurry.
I was going to write something with more vitriol, but now I feel that this quote is mostly sufficient. I will say that I'm tired of "technology" press treating Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the mainstream web as the only software worth developing.
(In fairness, pop-tech media occasionally covers wizzy multitouch demos and OS X minor version releases.)
In the age of rapid cycles and connected data, how long are we going to have to settle for dumb software?
In the age of technology blowhards and armchair developers, how long are we going to have to settle for this kind of empty reasoning?
I had assumed that modern, comfortable living meant that human beings were done with substantial evolution. Turns out, I might have been wrong:
Until recently, anthropologists believed that evolutionary pressure on humans eased after the transition to a more stable agrarian lifestyle. But in the last few years, they realized the opposite was true -- diseases swept through societies in which large groups lived in close quarters for a long time. Altogether, the recent genetic changes account for 7% of the human genome, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Here's hoping it holds for modern societies as well.
Ted Dziuba on trolling and politics:
But I can tell you that from the inside, generating butthurt is big business. Every time I've knocked an article out of the park for The Register, there's been a decent troll element to it. Not all trolls succeed, but the ones that hit a nerve really bring in the page views and comments. That's just the IT world. If I could get a job trolling politics, I'd be damn sure to demand a page view bonus. I can't knock the hustle.
Last Sunday's Washington Post ran an editorial debunking foreign health care myths (more or less accurately). Near the tail is this gem:
In many ways, foreign health-care models are not really "foreign" to America, because our crazy-quilt health- care system uses elements of all of them. For Native Americans or veterans, we're Britain: The government provides health care, funding it through general taxes, and patients get no bills. For people who get insurance through their jobs, we're Germany: Premiums are split between workers and employers, and private insurance plans pay private doctors and hospitals. For people over 65, we're Canada: Everyone pays premiums for an insurance plan run by the government, and the public plan pays private doctors and hospitals according to a set fee schedule. And for the tens of millions without insurance coverage, we're Burundi or Burma: In the world's poor nations, sick people pay out of pocket for medical care; those who can't pay stay sick or die.
In this week's New Yorker, David Denby sums up the film well:
Very little in "Basterds" is meant to be taken straight, but the movie isn't quite farce, either. It's lodged in an uneasy nowheresville between counterfactual pop wish fulfillment and trashy exploitation, between exuberant nonsense and cinema scholasticism.
and
But, in "Basterds," Tarantino is mucking about with a tragic moment of history. Chaplin and Lubitsch played with the Nazis, too, but they worked as farceurs, using comedy to warn of catastrophe; they didn't carve up Nazis using horror-film flourishes. Tarantino's hyper-violent narrative reveals merely that he still daydreams like a teen-ager.
Jack Shedd built software to train his mind to subconsciously count cards, as to build a "trained intuition":
I built a quick simulator in Cocoa that dealt cards from a shuffled six-deck shoe. As each card was flipped over, slowly at first, the background of the application flashed either red, for -1, or green for +1. At random intervals, the application would stop and ask me whether I should bet low or high. If I was wrong, it flashed and beeped like a expensive car in a hail storm. If I was right, it kept going. Over time it randomized its speed, so I’d never fall into an easy rhythm.
He was inspired by How We Decide, a fantastic book... that I need to finish up. Interestingly, a good portion of the book shows precisely why we are ill-equipped to gamble at games like Blackjack. I'd wager (har har) that Jack's method will take a bit more than a handful of trials to overcome these competing instincts.