I picked up a phrase some time ago that I think applies: “The next big thing is always beneath contempt.” Implication being that it is, of course, until it isn’t. Until it’s too big to ignore. This has happened over and over again in our society. In the middle ages, people assumed that no serious discussion could happen in anything but Latin — the so-called “vulgar” languages had no merit.

Nomic is a game created in 1982 by philosopher Peter Suber in which the rules of the game include mechanisms for the players to change those rules, usually beginning through a system of democratic voting.

Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus's neurons are not in the brain; they're in its arms.

"It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,"... For example, researchers who cut off an octopus's arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it.

"Meeting an octopus," writes Godfrey-Smith, "is like meeting an intelligent alien."

This, I take it, is what many readers meant when they said, in a tone of triumph, that science works. Yes, it does, but so does literary criticism (it settles interpretive disputes, at least for a while) and so does therapy (it enhances the ability to socially interact, at least sometimes), and so does religious faith (it gives meaning and direction to life, at least for some people).

Every project has friction between members, disagreements, conflicts over style and philosophy. These social problems are counter-acted by the fact that no large project can be accomplished otherwise. "We must all hang together, or we will all hang separately." But the expressiveness of Lisp makes this countervailing force much weaker; one can always start one's own project... This is the Lisp Curse.

Our goal is not to please those whom we report on or to produce stories that create the appearance of balance, but to seek the truth.

I think part of what we’re trying to do with the Books is to break the back of language, to bend it until it snaps and then examine the pieces to see what of it’s essence remains. Poets and songwriters have been in business so long, trying to say things in just the perfect way that they’ve crowded out the front door to meaning which is all tightly locked up by cliches. Essentially we’re looking for the back way around. So it’s really heartening to find a site like freetranslation.com that so egolessly shreds language like it’s making a vat of sauerkraut out of your precious word cabbages.

These are the only things you need to do to be successful*. You can get away with just doing one of the two, but that's rare, and usually someone else is doing the other part for you.

If you you don't have any marketable skills, learn some. It's the future. We have Khan Academy and Wikipedia and Codecademy and almost the entire world's collective knowledge at your fingertips. Use it.

By modifying the metabolism of pigeons, synthetic biology allows us to add new functionality to what is commonly seen as “flying rats.” A special bacteria is designed and created that, when fed to pigeons, turns faeces into detergent and is as harmless to pigeons as yoghurt is to humans.

Through the pursuit of manipulating pigeon excrement and designing appropriate architectural interfaces, the project explores the ethical, political, practical and aesthetic consequences of designing biology.

The case method is a teaching approach that consists in presenting the students with a case, putting them in the role of a decision maker facing a problem (Hammond 1976). The case method overlaps with the case study method, but the two are not identical.

Case studies recount real life business or management situations that present business executives with a dilemma or uncertain outcome. The case describes the scenario in the context of the events, people and factors that influence it and enables students to identify closely with those involved.

"Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward."

Bret Victor invents tools that enable people to understand and create. He has designed experimental UI concepts at Apple, interactive data graphics for Al Gore, and musical instruments at Alesis.

I have noticed one overarching theme among smart people: they ask questions. When someone explains something new to me, I’ll usually just nod my head like I know what they’re talking about. If I don’t understand something, I’ll just Google it later. After all, I don’t want this person to think I’m a moron. Smart people are different. If they don’t understand something, or even if they think they understand something, they’ll ask questions.

Not only do smart people ask questions when they don’t understand something, but they also ask questions when the world thinks it understands something.

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

Some say they are in a “Debt Trap”, and indeed they are– a cycle where debt piles on debt and becomes difficult to escape. The average household debt in just credit cards is over $15k and the average interest charged on this debt is over 13% per year[1]. Debt payments absorb between 11% and 24% of people’s incomes, depending on what is counted.[2] But if we pull back, there is a game, a “Debt Game” if you will, that has winners and losers. A well-designed game makes the winners think they deserve to win, and the losers feel that if they just try again they might just win. But it is important to know it is a game, because games have rules. These rules are made up, they are an invention, and so, in theory, they can be changed.

[The MIT/Stanford style of design] can be captured by the phrase ``the right thing.'' To such a designer it is important to get all of the following characteristics right:

Simplicity-the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the interface to be simple than the implementation.

Correctness-the design must be correct in all observable aspects. Incorrectness is simply not allowed.

Consistency-the design must not be inconsistent. A design is allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness.

Completeness-the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases must be covered. Simplicity is not allowed to overly reduce completeness.

...I will call the use of this philosophy of design the "MIT approach."... However, I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing...

...The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.

Just as New York Times public editor Arthur S. Brisbane is concerned whether his newspaper is printing lies or the truth, we here at V.F. are looking for reader input on whether and when Vanity Fair should spell “words” correctly in the stories we publish.

There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer.

It’s a pretty shallow insight to say that a comedian who has a special named Shameless creates his comedy about shame, but I never noticed. Louis CK has jokes because he is ashamed of his body, ashamed of his thoughts, his culture, his whiteness, whatever. Every joke seems to be about shame in some way. Ashamed of the things he doesn’t do that he knows he should. Ashamed of the things that he does do that he knows he shouldn’t. Ashamed of his privilege, and ashamed of how he doesn’t do anything to help others who don’t have it.

You could look at this trend and say, “As software improves, it respects its users more. It works better and looks better, is easier to learn, and leaves out the things that waste a user’s time.”

Or you could look at this trend and say, “As software gets simpler, it gets dumbed-down — even toddlers can use iPads. Users are now on the mental level of children, and we should design accordingly. What do children like? Games.”

"Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass" "Why?" "Because, they are all the same electron!" And, then he explained on the telephone, "suppose that the world lines which we were ordinarily considering before in time and space—instead of only going up in time were a tremendous knot, and then, when we cut through the knot, by the plane corresponding to a fixed time, we would see many, many world lines and that would represent many electrons"

Many people seem to assume that the Web will one day become the one and only client computing platform on Earth, therefore it must not be controlled by anyone. This is a dangerous assumption. The HTML, CSS, and JavaScript triumvirate are just another platform, like Windows and Android and iOS, except that unlike those platforms, they do not have an owner to take responsibility for them.

The Primes of the Story," which could be considered the certain hooks that you latch on to when rollicking about in someone else’s tale. What’s interesting is that you could interpret the primes of the story as the places where stories are unable to be forked.

So, maybe what we remember first from Hamlet isn’t the plot or relationships between characters, but rather the images... What’s more important than staying true to the central story is to have your Hamlet stab a man behind a curtain, and hold a skull deciding whether to be or not to be. The atomic level of a good story seems to be memorable moments rather than plot structures, and everything else can be forked.

You want to hire a new programmer and you have the perfect candidate in mind, your old college roommate, Guillaume Portes. Unfortunately you can’t just go out and offer him the job. That would get you in trouble with your corporate HR policies. So what can you do? The solution is simple. Create a job description that is written specifically to your friend’s background and skills.