The System
Change it up
Do something new every three years:
I was thinking about the three-year rule while reading about Malcolm Gladwell's observation that it takes 10,000 hours to become truly expert at something. If you really throw yourself into a job, you'll spend 60 hours a week working. That's 3,000 hours a year (allowing for vacation), which means you'll hit the 10,000 hour mark a few months after your third year.So maybe that’s where the three-year rule comes from. You’re now expert at what you set out to master. Great. Now go do something else.
Great idea! The article also reveals some of the inner workings of The Economist. A highly recommended, quick read.
Dallas' multitudes
The Dallas Myth, Again quotes Molly Ivins:
There is a black Dallas, there is a Chicano Dallas, there is a Vietnamese Dallas, there is a gay Dallas, there is even a funky-Bohemian Dallas. But mostly there is North Dallas, a place so materialistic and Republican it makes your teeth hurt to contemplate it.
For the record, Dallas-proper, like all the major Texas cities, went for Obama this time around.
Awesome writing
I want to take that video behind the middle school and get it pregnant.
Read slightly less, practice slightly more
Chris Wanswrath, a smart and distinguished fellow, advises us to burn our news readers and just “hear it through the grapevine.” But how far can one go with that?
For myself, reading feeds gets me a few things:
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Aesthetic where I have none. Feeds like BLDGBLOG and Coudal point me to things that make me better at what I do, in a tangential way, and a more interesting person. These are things that otherwise I wouldn’t know where to start.
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Awareness on the edges. Reading folks like Simon Willison or Jason Kottke make sure that interesting topics in programming or erudition don’t go unseen even though I am focused on that topic.
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Aggregation of ideas. This cuts two ways. Most people worth reading compress a bunch of different sources down to a manageable stream. This gives me more bang for the buck in my feed reading time. On the other hand, if a link is mentioned several times in the aggregate of feeds I subscribe to, then its probably worth checking out.
I can see how following interesting folks on Twitter and reading aggregators occasionally can you get you some of this, but not all of it. With sources like Reddit or Hacker News, signal to noise is a problem - you can’t control who posts what. Some people have a lot of extra angst and/or spare time. Which is also the other side of the Twitter story. Some people are great to read, but a pain to put up with at times. So it goes.
When Chris' essay first hit the wires, I was tempted to adopt his ways. But, I think I’m pretty good at ignoring the need to unbold things and cut down to business. What has proved immensely useful to me was has encouragement to just code all the time and make lots of stuff. I’m just getting started with this, but already I’m liking the increased feeling of accomplishment.
Regardless, we could all probably stand to trim our feed lists and hunker down on our projects, no?
Freakonomics
Freakonomics. Its not about economics in the dry, dismal sense that I remember from college. This is more about counterintuitive turns of logic, data showing causations that no one really supposed made sense. In the end, its about economics in the sense that real estate agents, sumo wrestlers and criminals respond to financial, social and lifestyle incentives.
Oh, and the book features twenty misspellings of the name “Jasmine”, a bit on two brothers named Winner and Loser, and a person named Shithead. Predictably, the last was my favorite.
Guns, Germs and Steel
Guns, Germs and Steel is one of those essential books that makes more sense of the world. Specifically, it address in rational terms, how it came to be that the modern world is arranged as it is where it concerns the haves and have-nots on the global scale.
The author, Jared Diamond, does so by taking an extremely long view on history, over the course of the last ten thousand plus years). From there he tries to build models and theories that predict why some societies advanced faster than others. To make a long story short, the societies that have become the contemporary first world were able to:
- Move knowledge and technology on an east-west axis, an axis that allows easy migration and translation of farming knowledge because the climate is roughly the same
- Develop immunity to epidemic diseases like small-pox that are tied to living near agriculture, thus making them less likely to get killed off by certain foreign invaders or to kill off natives as they travel to foreign lands
- Organize people into ever-large structures that can sustain invasions, research and other useful forms of specialization
Of course there’s more to it than that. It’s a great read and illuminates all sorts of topics I’d never even thought of, let alone correlated. If you, like me, seek a greater understanding of the abstracts that define the world, this is a book for you.
American demographic inversion
In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.
A fascinating read for those who like to think about how our cities evolve.
Why is oil so damn expensive?
Great article in The Economist on oil prices and what’s causing their painful rise. Double, double, oil and trouble | Economist.com:
In the short run, neither demand for nor supply of oil is very elastic. It takes time for people to replace their old guzzlers with more fuel-efficient cars, or to switch to jobs with shorter commutes, or to move closer to public transport. By the same token, it can take ten years or more to develop an oilfield after its discovery—and that does not include the time firms need to bolster their exploration units.
In short, nothing related to oil consumption changes quickly. It takes a decade for consumers to fully adjust to prices and the same amount of time for producers to field new technology and start mining new discoveries.
In the mean time, this little scooter is looking better and better!
The Joy of Science
Put a Little Science in Your Life:
Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations…
Since my run in with Bachelor of Science-grade Physics, I’ve considered myself someone who sucks at science. However, I suppose by Brian Greene’s definition, I am a consummate scientist. I really enjoy diving into a deep subject (economics, linguistics, etc.) and trying to figure out what makes it tick. Its a fun way to go about life.
At the root of this pedagogical approach is a firm belief in the vertical nature of science: you must master A before moving on to B. When A happened a few hundred years ago, it’s a long climb to the modern era. Certainly, when it comes to teaching the technicalities — solving this equation, balancing that reaction, grasping the discrete parts of the cell — the verticality of science is unassailable.
A hearty "Amen!" here. So many topics seem intimidating to the neophyte. "You can’t do this until you’ve learned this, that and the other." Stacked knowledge as barrier to entry is a total bummer.
I think something immersive is more rewarding. They say the best way to learn a foreign language is to surround yourself in it. I think this is true of any endeavor that, at some level, rewires your brain.
Pretty hiring trends
Pretty graphs at Simply Hired:
- Interesting how Ruby, Python and PHP so closely track each other
- I would have never guessed how close JS and C# are, especially given that one has basically no vender and really spotty implementations while the other has a massive vendor and two pretty good implementations
Some low-brow erudition
I want to write something rambling, like Matt Webb. Hopefully interesting too. So in Webbian style, let’s start someplace completely random.
Chaim Witz! — you know him as Gene Simmons. He’s got this tough, misogynist attitude for which he’s famous. But, from the way his kids talk about him, he is mostly harmless. And there is in fact one woman who would seem to have complete control over him — his mom. Go figure.
I don’t eat fish because I might cross one that looks like these guys. And then things would be awkward. “Oh hey, you’ve got about a billion crazy teeth. I ate your third cousin three times removed about ten years ago.”
Finding pattern languages always amuses me. Comedy has its dick and fart jokes. Rap has its hype men. I’d love to find a Gang of Four book on either of those topics.
I saw CBQ (Charless Brian Quinn, for those not in the know) at acts_as_conference this weekend. I want to make a movie shot entirely with the rear-view camera of his Prius. His presentation on teaching Rails was pretty groovy too.
I’m finding that I’m not satisfied to just link to the Wikipedia. Like its not cool enough to link to it. Something more edgy, something old school. Like the C2 link above, having cgi in the URL helps. Pretty URLs are so establishment, man!
Oh, and today I completed my collection of original (Diamond Dave) Van Halen albums. Inspiration? The “Schmitts Gay” commercial sounds like “Beautiful Girls”. “AH, YAH!”
What good could come from MicroYahoo?
Microsoft Proposes Acquisition of Yahoo! for $31 per Share:
REDMOND, Wash., Feb. 1 -- Microsoft Corp. today announced that it has made a proposal to the Yahoo! Inc. Board of Directors to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion.
So everyone’s probably gonna spazz out on this one. Understandably so – in Flickr, Upcoming and del.icio.us you’ve got three of the most trusted and loved sites out in the nerdwebsphere. In addition, there’s a lot of respected people, both in web development and open source, at Yahoo. Joining Microsoft, an organization that has minimal respect in the web development and open source communities, would reduce those people’s cred right out of the gate.
But, were this bid successful, here’s what I hope would happen. Microsoft uses it as an opportunity to rebuild themselves organizationally. They bury the hatchet with open source and open up the development of IE. Yahoo continues building apps like Flickr and del.icio.us like they always have. A rewrite on .NET technologies isn’t imposed like it was on Hotmail. In the end, Microsoft becomes an organization where closed source, proprietary development can flourish with open source, standards-based processes.
This is just wild guessing on my part. That said, if you look at Microsoft, its clear they are having major execution problems. Xbox is the only group that is widely successful and even they have hardware problems. All the other groups are missing timelines and customer/developer expectations. Just like Yahoo was before they picked up Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming, etc.
If Yahoo can make acquisitions to rebuild their culture, perhaps Microsoft can too.
Carbon trading and failed MBAs
Explain this to me. The White House opposed the notion of global warming and/or the Kyoto Treaty because doing something about it and/or enforcing the treaty would “adversely affect business”. But if you take a stance like the Kyoto Treaty and create a market for carbon, aren’t you creating new business?
I’m not really sure who loses here. Oh sure, the fat cats in Carson’s Crazy Coal factory have to rewrite their business plans. But is that the only reason? If so, then someone’s not getting their money’s worth from whatever MBAs they have lying around.
Oh, our president is a failed MBA. Crap, there goes that zinger of an argument.
(As a point of interest, The Economist tackled something like this: Picking winners or making markets?)