21 Treats from far across the wide web world

And speaking of creativity, Ze now accepts donations (“candy” he calls it) — and gives you homepage ducks for your bucks.

Likely the best blog I’ll find in 2006. You could say it’s about the nontechnical aspects of creating better software but that doesn’t come close to the breadth of topics Kathy’s spunky musings touch upon. Nor does nontechnical means inconsequential or trite here.

Her right favorites sidebar is a good place to start and here’s another star list: Users shouldn’t think about YOU (“Most of the time students don’t CARE how smart you are. They come in assuming that you’re supposed to be here, so stop trying to prove how smart you are and get on with helping them get smarter.”), Learning isn’t a push model, Ease-of-use should not mean neuter-the-software (thinking of product features as superpowers is pure genius), Kicking ass is more fun (“It’s just more fun when you’re faster.”), Remarkable at every level, Fine-grained treats = user happiness (“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.”), You can out-spend or out-teach (“…moments of flow you can help enable are some of the happiest moments in a person’s life. And yes, this applies not just to hobbies and games and sports but even to work.”), How to be an expert, The Koolaid Point (“Remember folks, we aren’t going for user satisfaction. We aren’t going for happy. We’re going for all-out passion. And that comes with a price tag. Detractors. Lots of them. And they talk.”), Better Beginnings: how to start a presentation, book, article… (“as one writer put it, «You can’t be in the room with the reader to say, ‘trust me…it gets better.’»”)

Fail Fast, Write Less Code, Computer Programs Are For People, Do The Right Thing, Reduce State, Know your Shit.

Humble, piercing thoughts on programming.

J.D. and Elliot’s first time as a couple — perhaps the best Scrubs episode ever, astonishingly complex and original. Check TV.com for a summary and criticism. Meanwhile, here’s this totally unrepresentative 1min clip of the episode featuring Dr. Kelso, a dark man, at his very darkest.

(fleft) Excellent long article on Wired explaining University of Chicago economist David Galenson’s theory of genius. The reporting is outstanding, the theory (that “creativity comes in 2 distinct types — quick and dramatic, or careful and quiet”) intriguing, and Galenson himself — “a classic library rat” — a most interesting man.

Perhaps what I liked most were the glimpses of how Galenson set about trying to test his hypothesis, like how he compiled a huge catalog of the auction prices of the work of 42 artists (a simplified graph of those results shown left), or how he tallied artists’ images in art textbooks (searching a way to quantify “the consensus among scholars about which works are important”). Very reminiscent of one young Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “political” experiments.

That above is a meaningful, grammatically correct sentence my friend. A wonderful example of the ambiguities possible in language, its pedia is outstanding not only for carefully decoding the sentence’s meaning but for listing similar examples in other languages.

A title to the wise is enough: listen carefully to this wonderful song (here are the lyrics).

Mine’s definition of treat is broad. On any account, incredible images.

How bittersweet are our own reflections… :))

OK, I’m pandering to my obscure tastes here but I just love this fancy phrase for “dancing”. Read on to belong to the ever dwindling inner circle of people who actually know what it alludes to.

At Pornotube, a clip of the video is one of the all time most watched videos. Here’s a different trailer. The world is one big, strange place.

What with calling it a law and its promises to do magic (some call it a “demonstration of the law of diminishing returns”), it surely looks intimidating, no? (Wired famously called it “awfully technical”) Read along and don’t falter if you see a couple of equations here and there, Amdahl’s law is an important piece of cake.

If I had to choose a favorite ITConversation, this fascinating talk on security — the website’s most listened talk — would be my first candidate. Ranging through cryptography to post 9/11 national practices, both interviewer (Doug Kaye) and interviewee (Bruce Schneier) are interesting, thoughtful, and engaged — and that makes all the difference. Not one more jaded, PR-driven interview.

Regexp search of public source code. Kottke muses on “turning [it] into a job posting board by inserting ‘Like our code? Come work for us!’ text ads in the comments of source code” and it’s not a bad idea at all.

I’ve long been fascinated by legal contracts, by how much they resemble programming code (or math theorems for that matter), and by how much one could facilitate their reading with some computer wizardry. A decent font size would of course be a good start, but even reasonably simple aids like syntax highlighting ^WP could prove revolutionary. Here’s a program that takes a compiler (or antivirus) -like approach: you feed the EULAlzyer an EULA ^WP (an End User License Agreement — those legalese monoliths one mindlessly agrees before installing anything) and it returns a list of potentially abusive parts, sorted by interest level. It’s still only moderately useful but already very intriguing. The name’s great too.

The first YouTube celebrity webapp (see lonelygirl15 ^WP): Scrybe is a super notebook/agenda of sorts that wants to revolutionize the much neglected aide-mémoire sector (long time my dream). This is the demo that started the craze (and that keeps fueling it — beta still not out). Some beautiful ideas here.

Madonna’s eyes a bra (her boobs handcuffs), Steven Spielberg’s beard out of film, Homer’s eyes donuts, John Paul II’s pope hat an apple, Kim Jong Il’s eyes missiles, Macaulay Culkin’s mouth a plunger, Woody Allen’s nose a banana, Boris Yeltsin out of sausage, Bono’s eyes speakers, Barbara Streisand’s nose a mic… Pure Genius.

Peer-to-peer lending ^WP Zopa is a good example of the financial innovation going on on the web right now. Fundable is another one — an extremely simple solution for the common public good ^WP problem.

Paint Fireworks.