June 25, 2008
⇒ Yahoo: Do What You’re Great At.“… snort news off the tits of more news.”
0.
(Aside quotable, yahoo) June 11, 2008
⇒ Khoi Vinh: Investing Strategies for iPhone Customers.“It’s certainly not as steep a trend as my iPhone’s devaluation, but it’s significant. In the year since I bought my first iPhone, AAPL has gained roughly 50% in value. If I’d spent that original US$599 on Apple stock instead, I’d be able to buy a new iPhone 3G and have about US$599 in assets to my name. Oh well.”
2.
(Aside appl, apple, graphs, investing, iphone, quotable) June 4, 2008
⇒ John Waters: “Moving [to New York] proves that you believe in irony”.On New York’s facsimile driven aesthetics. via Buzz
0.
(Aside irony, john waters, nyc, quotable) May 24, 2008
⇒ E.B. White: “There are roughly three New Yorks.”.“There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. […] Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.”
3.
(Aside e.b. white, geography, new york, nyc, place, pyschogeography, quotable) February 20, 2008
⇒ Steve Loughran: “How do you know you have a SPOF (single point of failure)? You always have one. How do you find it? You don’t: it finds you”.Truer words…
1.
(Aside, quotable, scalability) “If a fish market in the right Manhattan neighborhood today could get hold of “wild native oysters” and market then as such, because this is how New York operates, it would probably be able to charge outstanding prices and have New York Times readers, after the article on wild oysters came out, gladly paying the price. [...] And for all that, they would taste like cultivated ones.” - Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster
“…it should take energy and thought to push issues upstream due to the associated costs of having to deal with them once they are propagated… when you optimise something you always do so at the expense of something else.” - Bill de hOra
“Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other person, that we value them enough to spare our time and attention. Cost does not have to be about money. … Spending time with someone is a valuable signal that you care.” - Danah Boyd
Photo by bowbrick
December 16, 2007
⇒ Aidan: “I am annotating a 17 page article on an Indian cricket player.”.“I think I understand why India is so interested in cricket these days: the one thing that could possibly make cricket more arcane and confusing is Indian names.”
0.
(Aside, aidan, cricket, powerset, quotable) October 16, 2007
⇒ Mark Bernstein: NeoVictorian 1: Civilization and its Discontents.“I think we all woke up one day to find ourselves living in the software factory. The floor is hard, from time to time it gets very cold at night, and they say the factory is going to close and move somewhere else.”
0.
(Aside, quotable) September 12, 2007
⇒ Aidan: “the increases in human intelligence that have evolved since our split with living relatives have been driven significantly by specific need for social processing skills rather than a drive toward general intelligence.”.Also points to how complicated and difficult the social is, something we encounter everyday trying to replicate social patterns into software.
0.
(Aside, evolution, intelligence, quotable, social) August 21, 2007
⇒ Jakob Nielsen: “In 1997, I chose to suppress similar findings…”.The truth about this dreadful cover up is coming out.
0.
(Aside, nielsen, quotable, scandal, usability) June 5, 2007
⇒ Stewart: “expression of human creativity is one of the things that gives purpose to the universe.”.For the times when its all ajax, and tags, and platforms, and Alexa, and APIs.
0.
(Aside, flickr, quotable) March 6, 2007
⇒ Q: How do you guys get any work done with all of the things you are involved in?.A: I wasn’t aware there was a difference between the two…I realized long ago that cutting back on the latter, rendered the former banal.
1.
(Aside, community, inspiration, quotable) “Pipes has all the ingredients of something that should really set me off. Pipes, filters, mashups, RSS, Atom, RDF (singing) these are a few of my favorite things! So, what gives? I’m genuinely worried that I’m sick, depressed, losing it, or otherwise replaced by a pod alien. Possibly all the above. … So, it’s not you, it’s me.” - Les - Thoughts on Pipes on the Web
Yeah, exactly that.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say they wouldn’t use Ruby because it lacks automated refactoring tools. Ruby doesn’t actually need them in the way Java does; it’s like refusing to switch to an electric car because there’s no place to put the gasoline.” - Steve Yegge on the NBL
“I think the fact that we gave him notice at all was pretty generous.”
- GoDaddy General counsel Christine Jones on following the DMCA takedown laws (already lousy!)
A pyschotherapist in Glasgow:
“Dave confirmed that Guy Fawkes is the badgers’ Special Day. … My [grandpa] would say that in shamanistic terms, Dave’s badgers are trickster figures who act as his power animal and enable him to creatively channel power from the Lower World. However, I suspect that Dave prefers not to put ideas into their heads, so he simply refers to them as “sociopaths.”
July 20, 2006
⇒ Tim Bray: “Python programmers are Serious Men and Women who Don’t Have Time For Ponies.”.No luv for Perl, the original pony enabled language?
0.
(Aside programming, quotable, tim.bray) May 10, 2006
⇒ Bush: “The best moment of my presidency was catching a perch on my lake”.Like Rafe said, something the President and I can agree upon. Make sure to vote in the poll
0.
(Aside bush, politics, quotable) Great quote from Thomas Hawk comparing image search engines
“If I were Google and Microsoft right now I’d be thinking about where I could find about 2 million or so users to rank my pictures on the cheap rather than wasting time on all this other stuff.”.
Still I think 2006+ is going to be about rediscovering that smart computers can help us get value from the rankings of handful of personally relevant opinions as well as 2M strangers in aggregate.
update [2006/4/3]: It was pointed out to me that Google has a stake in von Ahn’s ESP game (not to mention a whole new CMU/Pittsburgh lab focusing on data mining and AI).
You're reading Laughing Meme, personal website of Kellan Elliott-McCrea.
I tend to write about books, coffee, the Web, open source, collaboration technologies and XML.
I spend most of my days writing code, and occasionally fomenting dissent.
Currently Residing: San Francisco
