Think Big

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

—Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1846-1912)

The case against Passion (v. Professionalism)

Good article about the romanticized view of passion vs. professionalism, and why professionalism is actually better.

I think this might be my last post about work environments for a little while.

Every manager's dream team

At GitHub we don’t have a project tracker or todo list – we just all work on whatever is most interesting to us. No standup meetings, burndown charts or points to assign. No chickens or pigs. It’s sort of the open source software style of business – everyone itches their own scratch. Inexplicably, it works really well and keeps everyone engaged, new features appearing quickly and bugs fixed rather fast. No managers, directors, PMs or departments – and it’s the most agile, focused and efficient team I’ve ever worked with. Maybe we should write a book about it.

Do whatever you want. Do it now. Don’t fuck around.

From www.thegeektalk.com

So Shut Up and Get to Work

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.
-- Samuel Johnson

Productivity Tools

List of productivity tools.

Douglas R. Hofstadter Lecture on Analogy

Douglas R. Hofstadter gave a lecture at Stanford on Feb. 6, 2006. He's a smart and thoughtful guy.

-- 2/26/2010 It makes me want to read GEB. I was about to say "GEB again," but I didn't actually read the whole thing before.

The Relativity of Wrong

"John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

-- Issac Asimov from the essay "The Relativity of Wrong"

Stolen from this article on a website called "Less Wrong," where this equally excellent quote appeared:

The Sophisticate: "The world isn't black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It's all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else."
The Zetet: "Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view..."
-- Marc Stiegler, David's Sling

Word of the Day: Snowclone

From Wikipedia:

A snowclone is a type of cliché and phrasal template originally defined as "a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants".

An example of a snowclone is "gray is the new black", a version of the template "X is the new Y". X and Y may be replaced with different words or phrases – for example, "comedy is the new rock 'n' roll". Both the generic formula and the new phrases produced from it are called "snowclones".

It emphasizes the use of a familiar (and often particular) formula and previous cultural knowledge of the reader to express information about an idea. The idea being discussed may be different in meaning from the original formula, but can be understood using the same trope as the original formulation.

Other examples:
Mother of all X
This is your brain on X
I [shape] X
The Talented Mr. X

My favorite: Have X, will travel (for me: Spacesuit), from the marathon Boys Adventure book era.

Database of Snowclones here.

Point/Counterpoint for the Decline and Fall of USA

On the one hand, Warren Buffet's partner Charles Munger argues that the US has blown it through poor management and overreach, but on the other hand, we can still innovate and create something like this chair for a trip to the beach. All hope is not lost.

The making of Old Spice's commercial: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDk9jjdiXJQ

Unexpected Pricing at Amazon.com

Click the image to see a larger version -- I used an image rather than a link, because prices change. Strange that the actual physical DVD is actually less expensive than downloading the MP3. While I could argue that people would pay for convenience, I think the pricing is just not connected one with the other, and there are some forces at work to push the physical DVD down in price to $7.99, while the .mp3 is pegged at $9.99. Maybe there is competition from other sites?

Tom Friedman (NYT) article: The Fat Lady Has Sung

I like the optimism in this article -- he's not saying that it is the end of the American Empire (necessarily), just that we are entering some lean years and need to act accordingly.

This article supports my philosophy of the cycle of lean and flush times. Lean years are healthy (when viewed properly) because they force prioritizing and pruning and focusing on what is most important. The flush years can then be times to experiment, to take long-odds bets with high potential payoffs, and to give people time to be creative and daydream. Some of those experiments then become the core, long term goals at the next lean time, and so on and so on.

Seven years of plenty followed by seven years of drought.

Godspell - On the Willows

Maybe the best song in the show

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nC7Kt1pXGTk

Chat's Logical Conclusion

While the phrase, "Taken to its logical conclusion" is something that I hear fairly frequently (at least in my own head, as I apply a Kantian foolish consistency to my actions), I do think that Chatroulette does actually qualify. You talk to a random person on a webcam. Or not. No promises. No commitment. A monad of human interaction.

I haven't really investigated it, so I'm not even sure you can ever find them again even if you wanted to . . . . It's feeling, actually, a little bit like the hiring scheme from Diamond Age, where (if I remember correctly) the drummers had to work for some ungodly number of computational cycles in order to backtrace a single transaction so that Miranda who was narrating for the little girl could find her.

That's an aside from the additional abstraction that you get from Chatroulette. Maybe it is more akin to the Single Serving Friend concept from Fight Club.

Quote of the day

The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves. -- Logan Pearsall Smith

Thanks, Mom!

Thank You, Roger Penrose.

If I needed to tile a bathroom, I would put these tiles on it. Thank you, Roger Penrose.

In the Beginning was the Command Line

So much more than a history of the Mac and PC platforms. One of the best essays I've ever read. By Neal Stephenson, who has gone on to bigger and better things, but this essay will always have a special place.

Here's an update, which is good, but a little bit more inside baseball than the original.

Glider

Great symbol on so many levels, but particularly great when linked to this article: How to become a Hacker It looks a little bit intimidating at the beginning because the revision history is at the top, but it's worth reading.

Little tree

Faculty Singers - Candlelight Service 2009

Post-it Notes that Look like Grass

They make lovely bookmarks.

Very excited to be singing this piece

In the Westminster Winter Concert on March 4, 2010, the Chorale will be singing Sure On This Shining Night by Lauridsen.

A better performance of the Lauridsen piece by the University of Utah.

The end of the American Era

Without sounding too much like the Rise and Fall of the Great Empires, this recent competition result caught my eye. In the International Collegiate Programming Contest, the first American Universities (CMU, Cornell, and MIT) were tied for 14th behind Chinese and Russian Universities.

It makes me less skeptical about claims that the US is about to fall behind China in scientific research.

A is Wise

A is reluctant to jump into the whole social media, Facebook, Twitter world. She is a very private person and worries that there is too much information available about people before they even start advertising their every move and thought.

Confirmation of this sentiment is a website called PleaseRobMe, which tracks Twitter and Foursquare posts when the person has checked in someplace other than at home. Since they're not at home, they are implicitly saying, "Hey, please come rob me."

Two comments:

1. Great idea for a website -- a clever, subversive way to highlight some weaknesses in the rhetoric about the "post privacy" society.
2. A was right to be worried about this.

Brain Teaser for the day

There's a village full of polite people that has no reflective surfaces. Every villager sees every other villager every day. Some higher power identifies that there is at least one sinner among the people. Any person who has sinned is marked by the higher power, and must leave the village. No resident will give a sinner any indication that he is marked, but all of the sinners leave on the third day. How many sinners are there?

Answer (and a good story)

Given up for Lent

Also video games. But not blogging, or Diet Coke.

Holland Hall Head of School Search Firm

Holland Hall chooses Educators' Collaborative as the search firm for the next Head of School.

First Post

First post.