Walls are a nice invention but if there were no holes in them there would be no way to get in or out –they would be mausoleums or tombs. The problem is that if you make holes in the walls, anything and anyyone can get in and out (cows, visitors, dusts, rats, noise.. cold..). So architects invented this hybrid: a hole-wall, often called a door, which although common enough has always struck me as a miracle of technology. The cleverness of the invention hinges upon the hinge-pin: instead of driving a hole through the walls with a sledgehammer on a pick, you must simply gently push the door …; furthermore—and here is the real trick—once you have passed through the door, you do not have to find trowel and cement to rebuild the wall you have just destroyed: you simply push the door gently back.
Flying a plane is easy; it’s the stalls, weather emergencies, getting lost, instrument failures, and those two essential but special circumstances—takeoffs and landings—that take all the training time.
Beyond fear, by the way, is a great, straightforward book on security, full of examples and insights. It was interesting to get to read it only until now, when terrorism has been far eclipsed as the crisis of the day by the financial collapse.
This Intel ad is so great.Thomas Friedman must be proud. Imagine its impact in India.
I must say, though, that if I were to meet Mr. Bhatt, after swooning I would promptly take him to task for not making USB connections symmetrical (Why is there a side of the connectors that must go up? Why can’t sides be interchangeable? The global amount of annoyance this has caused is not trivial.).
Chinese [writing] does deserve its reputation for heartbreaking difficulty.Those who undertake to study the language for any other reason than the sheer joy of it will always be frustrated by the abysmal ratio of effort to effect.Those who are actually attracted to the language precisely because of its daunting complexity and difficulty will never be disappointed.Whatever the reason they started, every single person who has undertaken to study Chinese sooner or later asks themselves”Why in the world am I doing this?”Those who can still remember their original goals will wisely abandon the attempt then and there, since nothing could be worth all that tedious struggle.Those who merely say “I’ve come this far—I can’t stop now” will have some chance of succeeding, since they have the kind of mindless doggedness and lack of sensible overall perspective that it takes.
So awesome! First Fred product I stumble on but do check out them out, they are one cool, pun-obsessed manufacturer of novelty items that while gimmicky still manage to be classy.
Moreover, it made no game-theory sense for me to tell the truth. The only good outcome for me was getting scott free and however increasingly remotely, that was only possible if I kept lying. Everything else was pretty much the same bad outcome. So I just played the game as long as I could. Just as they also played intimidating and antagonistic as long as they had to.
So I was happy to discover that the same ability of abstraction that allows me to read or think or program for hours on end allowed me to detach from the whole thing and treat it as a game that I had probably already lost, so why not play it for fun now? And it was, indeed, in a bizarre sense, fun—flow.
Until they got into my computer (and my iPhone). That was the part that still angers and shames me the most. Anger, because my computer is not just a tool, as it is for my father say; it is as intimate and integral a part of me as my neocortex and I felt just as violated as if they could read my thoughts and stare at my naked psyche. Shame, because I should have known better, I should have been more careful. Because I know how to protect and hide a computer (they were barely computer literate themselves, I was almost helping them troubleshoot their crappy system afterwards). I had read Little Brother for crying out loud. I should have known better.
Blaise Pascal famously commented in a letter that it was long because he didn’t have the time to make it shorter. Another possibility comes to mind, perhaps more appropriate for our era of small pieces loosely joined, of fragmentation of the units of content(think email, IM, posts, tweets, minute-long YouTube videos, individual iTune songs, Wikipedia articles…): he didn’t have the time to split it into many short letters.
I owe Bill for introducing me to Here comes another bubble, a fantastic parody on bay area culture that most of you will probably have seen by now but that I can’t just not put here because it’s pure genius.
The most interesting part for me was to discover how most every reference was familiar. At a recent Stanford conference on legal futures(ah, I love the bay area!) there was talk of how national newspapers created the national conscience needed for nations to emerge and how something similar may be happening with the web. This video definitely felt like that to me—somehow or other, thousand of miles away in Mexico’s center and having never visited it before, bay area culture became my culture.
I’m reminded of xkcd’s legendary comment: ”I’m waiting for the day when, if you tell someone ‘I’m from the internet’, instead of laughing they just ask ‘oh, what part?’”
Oh, and btw, that glib, charlatanish, bubble milking attitude parodied in the video was one big thing that kept me away from the bay area for a long time. While I have stumbled on it once in a while, it’s easy enough to ignore and often comes not out of guile but out of Sturgeon’s law and just how damn hard it is to predict in advance what will end up being important.
Who of all the wise could have foreseen it? Or, if they are wise, why should they expect to know before the hour has struck?
I went to Adaptive Path’s 7th birthday party last week and was completely at a loss at what to do. What does one do at a crowded party when the music’s too loud to talk and you don’t know anyone? How do you approach people? I’m new at this being social stuff and this was definitely above level—I couldn’t even start one conversation. Anyway, there were free tacos and the paintings in the gallery where quite cool—I loved the one above (which reminds me a lot of Permutation City).
