There are many times I want to leverage jQuery’s strengths to create a custom Google Maps mashup. In this tutorial, I will walk you through how to get started using jQuery inside the Google Maps environment. I will assume nothing, and explain each piece in detail.

1st in a series of video lessons, designed to teach even the most inexperienced guitar player the basics and eventually more advanced techniques.

Sounds like Marco gets this question as much as I do; here's his reply. I wrote my response on Lifehacker in November 2009, and since then LH ran a whole "Night School" series about it. But as Marco said, the question isn't "How do I learn how to code?" The question is, "What do I want to make?" Once you've answered that question, figuring out languages and development tools is literally a matter of reading a beginner's book or watching video tutorials or taking a class. Then, you put in the work.

For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn’t rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner. How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neuro­physi­ol­ogist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition—including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead—evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence.

PeepCode Screencasts are a high-intensity way to learn professional development topics like Ruby on Rails, Javascript, Git, Objective-C and Clojure.

Researchers are increasingly using cell phones to better understand users' behavior and social interactions. The data collected from a phone's GPS chip or accelerometer, for example, can reveal trends that are relevant to modeling the spread of disease, determining personal health-care needs, improving time management, and even updating social-networks. The approach, known as reality mining, has also been suggested as a way to improve targeted advertising or make cell phones smarter: a device that knows its owner is in a meeting could automatically switch its ringer off, for example.

Smarthistory.org is a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook.

While I might use some different language today, this technique I posted in 2004 (inspired by Alexander) is still a major help when I’m designing a UI with many elements to juggle. The reason I come back to it is that it helps me design with language first instead of empty templates. Too often a design starts top-down with empty content areas (maybe a main column and a sidebar) and then we fill those boxes in until its “done.” Filling in the boxes would work fine, except having a bunch of stuff on the page doesn’t mean we served the design goals.

Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from twelve-year-olds and adults. Eight-year-olds learn primarily from positive feedback ('Well done!'), whereas negative feedback ('Got it wrong this time') scarcely causes any alarm bells to ring. Twelve-year-olds are better able to process negative feedback, and use it to learn from their mistakes.

Am so enthralled with the photographic work of Czech artist Miroslav Tichy, who made cameras out of cardboard tubes, thread spools, rubber bands, and other similar things, and then photographed public scenes in his small hometown. He developed the negatives in a bucket at night, because he didn't have a darkroom. Later, he said that the defects and ugliness were where the true art happened.

We don't need 'leadership' or 'leaders'. What we need is experimenters.The way to create working models that work better than the dysfunctional ones we have now, in a complex system where no one is in control and no one has the answers, is to try things.

Luminous Landscape's Understandig series on everything photography related. Great reads!

How to take good notes of lectures

"listeningtowords is a collection of links to free online lectures and courses."

"The positive effects of homework are largely mythical. In preparation for a book on the topic, I’ve spent a lot of time sifting through the research. The results are nothing short of stunning. For starters, there is absolutely no evidence of any aca