What public figures publish and believe, in their own words.
About this feed
Highlights: posts that did unusually well for the person who wrote them, everything
they published at length, each release and new project, and every belief — at most
two a day from anyone. Day by day, newest
day first; within a day, the people with the most beliefs on this site come first. Nothing
else orders it. Show everything instead.
The quoted blocks are what people actually said; a beneath one is
the belief those words support, in korrents' wording. Nobody here wrote their own page.
Top people are the people in this feed with the most beliefs on this site, then the
most here. Choose an area and the row leads with the people whose beliefs are about it;
tap a face for their feed.
If I were an enterprising young researcher looking for an idea and experiments that will prove powerful in five years, I would try to find the stake I can drive into the heart of the cash transfer movement.
The real problem is the absence of firms small and large to employ people productively. The root of the problem is political instability, economic uncertainty, and a country’s high cost structure, among other things. A government’s attention is properly on these bigger issues.
If a poor person is enterprising, and their main problem is insufficient capital, terrific. If that’s not their problem, throwing cash will not do much to help.
It is not, “Cash transfers to the poor are a panacea.” More like, “They probably suck less than most of the other things we are doing.” This is not a high bar.
Police already abuse the immense power they have, but if everyone’s every action were being monitored, and everyone technically violates some obscure law at some time, then punishment becomes purely selective. Those in power will essentially have what they need to punish anyone they’d like, whenever they choose, as if there were no rules at all.
I use Rob Pike's Sam editor most of the time – that's what I'm using right now – and vi the rest of the time, because I know it well enough that there's no need to think.
As the last representative of the dinosaur era, I read mail mostly with Alpine, which is faster and easier than any web-based system I know, and does a nice job of storing my mail locally.
Mostly Macs at this point. I have a 27-inch iMac at work (big screen) but with the tiny wireless keyboard; I long ago got tired of keyboards that, with wheels, could double as skateboards, so it's nice to have a little one made by a reliable manufacturer.
YoruFukurou (which apparently means "Night Owl" in Japanese) is extremely powerful for filtering and reading tweets, but doesn't overwhelm me with information.
I use NetNewsWire for the rapidly dwindling number of RSS feeds that I still follow (fewer than ten), as Twitter has supplanted my webpage discovery process.
I chose Nausea for several reasons. One is that it's the first existentialist book that I ever read. It's what first made me curious to learn more, and that's exactly what the book does. It's readable, it's powerful, it's sometimes a bit ridiculous, but it's intense.
I chose this book because it's an incredibly powerful and moving example of what existentialist thought can actually be for in real life, what good it can do, how it can help people.
Richard's Polt's Heidegger: An Introduction is one of the best I've come across. It's a fantastically clear and concise exploration of Heidegger's philosophy, concentrating on his first great work, Being and Time, though he also covers the later writings of Heidegger.
Then, once you've read an overview and feel equipped and ready for it, it's really worth plunging into either Being and Time itself, Heidegger's greatest and richest work, or to a compilation.
Design thinking is a public relations term for good, old-fashioned creative thinking. It is not restricted to designers. Great artists, great engineers, great scientists all break out of the boundaries. Great designers are no different.
Their words now
As a result, I have changed my mind: Design Thinking really is special. Alas, it isn't embraced by all designers, but where it exists, it is powerful.
It is by questioning the obvious that we make great progress. This is where breakthroughs come from. We need to question the obvious, to reformulate our beliefs, and to redefine existing solutions, approaches, and beliefs. That is design thinking.
I was correct in my original article: what we call design thinking is practiced in some form or other by all great thinkers, whether in literature or art, music or science, engineering or business. But the difference is that in design, there is an attempt to teach it as a systematic, practice-defining method of creative innovation.
Black Mirror is by far the best TV series I have seen in years. Production levels that are through the roof and features just absolutely insane writing and plot twists.
We were told that flying in the space shuttle was just as safe as flying in a commercial airliner, so we denied the crew parachutes and pressure suits.
It's hard to learn, but Logic is a beautiful piece of software. It's also hard to learn how to record using real studio equipment, so it should be no surprise that learning how to record with professional quality music software is difficult.
Increasingly, I've been using Vimeo for watching videos. This may seem like a strange thing to list here because it's technically just a site you browse as opposed to "use". But have you seen the "watch later" feature? You can sign in, mark videos to watch later, and then watch them on your tablet or Apple TV.
The last important piece of software I use is Counter-Strike. I've been playing Counter-Strike for well over 25% of my life now. These days I specifically play a modification of the game called Gun Game. It's ridiculous and mindless. The reason I play it, and the reason I say I "use" Counter-Strike is that you can get in 5 minutes of stress relief with Gun Game without having to commit to playing for 30 minutes or an hour. Each round lasts only around 5 minutes, you have fun, then you get back to being productive.
I have a MacBook Air 11", MacBook Air 13", MacBook Pro 15", Mac Pro, Chromebook, iPad Mini, 24" iMac, hideous HP laptop running Ubuntu, iPhone 4s, Nexus 7, and a Windows Surface with the terrible non-clicky keyboard cover.
That book struck me as embodying the worst aspects of where string theory has ended up, promoting to the public in a high-profile way a dangerously pseudo-scientific excuse for string theory's failure.
The field of programming need to see a renaissance in fundamental reinvention, just as it did in the 1950s when programming machines using levers and buttons was replaced by programming machines using textual sequences of computer commands.
When I was very young, I loved the fact that Bernstein's language was so vivid. I was already sold on the music. As far back as I can remember my parents had the records and were playing them, and I took to them immediately. It was really the only music that I cared about, early on. Bernstein allowed me to have a conversation – only with myself at first – about the music.
The other thing about Nietzsche's writing about Wagner is that it's wonderfully brilliant, unpredictable vivid and perceptive, even when he's deliberately distorting the material for a certain effect or working out his own profound ambivalence about Wagner.
I read Doctor Faustus when I was around 18 and something about the book just overwhelmed me. It was one of the most intense reading experiences of my life.
Silence is one of the great music books. Purely on a literary level, there's something about Cage's style which is tremendously unique, something quite special in the history of literature.
This is a wonderful book, and somewhat forgotten. It's currently very hard to find, here in America at least. It's fantastically vivid and passionate writing about music of all kinds.
That's the recipe for a delicious documentary, and this one delivers. A fanatical tea drinker in California becomes a connoisseur of fine teas, and then goes on to restore now forgotten traditions of organic artisan tea growing in China.
The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth.
The web was an interesting and different place before links got monetized, but by 2007 it was clear that Google had changed the web forever, and for the worse, by corrupting links.
This was a sensible reaction to the realization that big sites rise and fall in popularity, but that regular people need an identity that persists longer than those sites do.
I use my knitr package to generate reports directly from code (literate programming); the "reports" may include homework, blog posts, websites, papers and books.
She is one of my heroes and this is a book about how someone who grasps dignity, which is a form of honour based in our humanity, can resist the world of the negative side of honour, where women are punished because they are pawns in a game of honour between men.
I disagree with a lot of what he says – in particular that he wants to give up on honour because it has such negative connotations: I think it needs reform as a concept – but I think it's a very lovely piece of scholarly analysis.
This is another beautiful piece of scholarship by an eminent historian, but you don't have to be an academic to read it. It's about a really interesting subject that I think would interest anybody.
It's just so marvellous, the description of these professional-class Russians, far, far away from Moscow in the provinces, and their preoccupation with status and all that, and these two guys in a completely pointless duel.
This is a book by a philosopher and an economist about a topic that was neglected for a very long time in social analysis. So there's lots about it in the 18th century – Adam Smith and people like that – and it's about how esteem, which is their word for the respect that you give to people who have achieved things against a certain standard, can be used to motivate people to do good things.
Combined with git, the best source code control tool I've ever used (and I've used them all), I can set up a bare machine in a matter of minutes and have full access to all of my kernel trees, emails, and development tools.
Thanks to Amazon's generosity, I've been doing a lot more kernel build testing on their AWS systems, utilizing a 32 processor, 64Gb virtual machine, allowing me to build multiple kernels at the same time all on a RAM disk in minutes.
I download my mail with offlineimap, as well as blogs converted to mail with rss2email I use distributed version control extensively, and use my git-annex to maintain large quantities of local data and queue up large files to transfer in the rare times when I'm around fast internet.
my two-year-old 11" MacBook Air is the only piece of computing hardware to make me happy since I can’t remember when. For what it does, as opposed to what my dream setup would be, it’s fast and light and smooth and comfortable.
However, two things always come along: The Go installation of course, and Plan 9 from User space, also known as plan9port, Russ Cox’s port of the Plan 9 user experience (if not world view) to Unix.
However, two things always come along: The Go installation of course, and Plan 9 from User space, also known as plan9port, Russ Cox’s port of the Plan 9 user experience (if not world view) to Unix.
I mostly live inside acme, an editor-shell-IDE-oddball I wrote a while ago that has a different worldview and a very different user interface but that, when used well, is powerful and expressive.
These systems often benefit from cooperative multitasking, in particular coherent, specialized systems (unlike operating systems which are general by nature).
Register-based virtual machines avoid the push and pop operations usually surrounding other instructions, reducing code size, but in several cases also increases speed of execution (compared to stack-based virtual machines).
But it's HARD to start this. NOT because of all the academic reasons of lack of vocabulary and grammar, but because you need to be cool with the fact that you are not going to know the simplest of words.
Perfectionist and elitist learners will never accept being perceived as less than geniuses the entire time, so they will never expose themselves to sounding “stupid”, as they may perceive it.
I learned a long time ago that speaking like “Tarzan” is an absolutely necessary stage to go through, so you get used to using the language in SOME way. You learn to get used to the embarrassment and get on with learning quicker.
I've been using Adobe Illustrator for interface design. My favorite technique is to set up all the UI elements on separate artboards and then I can quickly export them out with full name to all sorts of different resolutions with a single dialog.
There's also a Wacom tablet as well for when I do digital paintings but lately my art has been leaning towards a more graphic vector style so it doesn't get quite as much love.
For the games themselves, we've used Flash, Unity or HTML. Essentially, we want to be cross platform so that once we've found an interesting game mechanics, we can quickly distribute it to as many people as possible.
Many of our prototypes store their balancing data in Google Spreadsheets and then we can quickly tweak a value and have it published live to the game. So you get all the version control and group editing of Google Docs feeding directly into your game… this is much nicer than throwing XML files back and forth.
I'll use GIMP for many image editing tasks (for me, this usually is just making test images for themes, or making small tweaks to existing images). I prefer Photoshop but find it to be ridiculously overpriced, and I am terrible with either of them anyway and will let the professionals make things.
In his excellent book “Deep Simplicity,” John Gribbin describes the Red Queen Effect in terms of an imaginary species of frog that feeds on an imaginary species of fly.
I have an ASUS EEE PC S101 (10.1" screen with SSD disk) that I use to bring with me when I travel light and I use it as presentation computer when I do talks at conferences and similar arrangements.
I'm using my Android phone for that purpose now - still using an HTC Desire HD that hangs in decently and haven't yet made me upgrade the phone even after over 18 months.
But it’s not something that you “follow” (which implies you can identify it in advance). It’s instead something you have to purposefully cultivate over time.
Ruby is my language of choice. I used to use C++, but I was enchanted by the flexibility of Ruby: it lets me focus on creating the proper design and architecture for the system.
But on the whole, the RX100 gets it right – it is undoubtedly the best compact camera available today, especially from the point of view of image quality.
It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.
It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.
In her excellent book, “Damn Right!: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger,” the author, Janet Lowe, relates the 1967 story:
I have a script which mails to Instapaper the Hacker News front page twice a day. From there I can just tap on things and read them later, at any time, with Instapaper on my iPad or Windows Phone.
I use Pine rather than other mail clients primarily because of important features that few other mail clients have: it lets me reply to multiple e-mails all at once, combining the e-mails I'm relying to into one and merging the recipient lists
Irssi I use because it's the only IRC client I've come across that supports many networks and channels well while being a text mode client that I can use over SSH.
I use a lot of Manfrotto 035 Superclamps and articulated arms like the 244N Magic Arm to mount gear to either the Grip Desk or to a standard table surface (as microphone boom, document holder, etc.).
If you don’t know the book, Content Rules is the how-to field guide to creating the kind of blogs, videos, FAQs, product pages (or any kind of content!) that will help your organization grow.
This is one of the great political biographies. Teddy Roosevelt was like a character out of a novel, so it's not surprising that his biography reads like one.
Why Nations Fail is by two of my favourite economists, two very close friends and co-authors of mine, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. They're tackling a subject that I've worked on with them, and they do a great job of bringing it to life and making it vivid.
This is my competition. I chose it because I think we need more of these intelligent, thoughtful, well-documented books that scare the pants off you and convince you that action is needed.
Can I recommend the lens? For D800 users, honestly, no. You're better served by the 85/1.8G; use the balance of funds for other glass, or buy one of my prints with some of the money you've saved (shameless plug). It simply lacks the crispness I've seen with other bodies.
You're better served by the 85/1.8G; use the balance of funds for other glass, or buy one of my prints with some of the money you've saved (shameless plug).
The concept of narrative is not absolute. It is merely a label for a cluster of emotional triggers which games happen to share with certain traditional media.
I am a strong proponent of wanton notetaking - words, names, scraps, passages, whole articles, just dump it all in there - and I’d recommend this setup to anyone.
I’ve been places in Turkey and Greece where my shiny iPhone showed no bars but the quiet resourceful Kindle could reach Gmail without a hitch. Strange and miraculous.
AutoHotkey - I used to use a program called Winkey, but that got discontinued, so now I use this. It's free software that lets you map all sorts of actions to the keyboard.
I guess I should mention I also got a 3G Kindle which I love and a Withings scale that posts my weight to Twitter, which is lots of fun, but also kinda cheesy because every post has their URL slapped on the end of it.
I had a jailbroken iPhone 3GS till its cell receiver died making it a very thick and expensive iPod, so now I've got a Motorola XT 860 because I wanted a physical keyboard. Guess what, it's kinda sucky too!
It's being replaced with a Lenovo T520 with a "Thinkpad Mini Doc Plus Series 3 170W" dock (that's what they call it!) that supports 3 external monitors.
I would be suspicious of anything like 100% - it would smell of someone writing tests to make the coverage numbers happy, but not thinking about what they are doing.
If you make a certain level of coverage a target, people will try to attain it. The trouble is that high coverage numbers are too easy to reach with low quality testing.
However, the real kicker here is that the images presented aren't just the single 'selected' iconic ones, but also the ones before and after – i.e. a contact sheet of that entire roll of film.
I use Arq for backups, LastPass for passwords, Chrome for my browser and have four users set up inside Chrome to handle business and personal account separation.
I use Arq for backups, LastPass for passwords, Chrome for my browser and have four users set up inside Chrome to handle business and personal account separation.
Editing for the books usually happens in either Word or Pages; I have no love for either, but Word plays nicely with InDesign, so we're a little but stuck with it for now.
I use Propane to connect to Typekit's Campfire account; we're virtual, with folks spread out between San Francisco and Berlin, so this is where much of our work happens.
He is important to read because he's simultaneously critical of his characters and sympathetic to them. It's very difficult, now, to think back into that time, when people had very limited choices. If you chose to oppose the regime, that might mean you couldn't get medicine for your sick mother, your children couldn't go to school and you might get kicked out of your apartment. We don't have to face those choices. Miłosz is very good at explaining them.
He wasn't in the Gulag for long – only a couple of years, until 1941 – but what I like about his book is that, unlike many memoirs, it's not just about his story or what happened to him. It's more like a series of short stories, of the kind written by [Varlam] Shalamov or one of the Gulag novelists. Each chapter is a story about a different person or situation, together with an accompanying set of thoughts or meditations.
Sándor Márai is one of the great Hungarian novelists. He was in Hungary during the war, and left in 1948. This book is about a neutral intellectual's encounter with communism, and it records what he saw as it happened.
I really like the fullscreen text editor Dark Room for taking notes, and I've found I find it a lot easier to get to sleep since I started using F.lux.
Somehow, just in the past few days, I've finally moved from Monaco to Consolas. I never thought I'd switch from Monaco. (I would have gone with Menlo, but it's a bit too blurry for me.)
Inside of these bags, my air lives in its own Pack and Smooch Hampshire pouch. It is felt and leather and was designed to not scratch up your air. Looks great too.
I also use Terminal, Mail.app (though I mostly check email on my phone these days), TextMate, iTunes (cannot get into Spotify or Rdio for whatever reason), Photoshop (grudgingly), Sequel Pro, and very little else.
I also use Terminal, Mail.app (though I mostly check email on my phone these days), TextMate, iTunes (cannot get into Spotify or Rdio for whatever reason), Photoshop (grudgingly), Sequel Pro, and very little else.
My white desk doesn't work so well with the optical mouse, so for some dumb reason I'm using a 242-page book called Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer as a mousepad.
Outside the dynamic interactive one-big-process environments I'm a big fan of simple orthogonal tools that work well together, so I use xbindkeys for all my launchers and mpd for my tunes.
Debian's installer is less polished, but I appreciate their conservative get-it-right-at-all-costs approach a lot more these days than when I was in college and had a lot of time to mess around with goofed-up packages.
The reason why I am so fond of Homage to Catalonia, and see it as an even more relevant precursor to dissent, is that in it you can see a man of the Left learning to make the distinction that breaks down the Left with a big L into lots of little lefts.
In The Church and the Left Michnik argues for an untraditional alliance. He says that the left has to talk to the Polish Catholic Church, especially after the Vatican's internal reform [in 1965].
In the end I think Havel will be remembered as the outstanding East European dissident writer, and he will be remembered as such above all for this essay.
It is Bob’s job to get you signed with the company as cheaply as possible, but Bob is not super motivated to do so, because Bob is not spending Bob’s money to hire you. Bob is spending Bob’s budget.
They are all using your previous anomalously low salary — a salary which did not reflect your true market worth, because you were young or inexperienced or unskilled at negotiation or working at a different firm or in another line of work entirely — to justify paying you an anomalously low salary in the future.
This is a roundabout way of telling you that companies are not sensitive to small differences in employee wages because employees are so darned expensive anyhow.
Close to 100% is subject to the results of salary negotiations. Thus, your salary negotiations are probably going to be the most important financial decisions you will ever make. We socialize middle class Americans to go into them unprepared, demotivated, and fearful of success.
Fission for lossless sound editing (trimming live concerts into separate songs, etc.). Max for converting between audio-file formats. Caffeine for easy control over when my laptop can and can't go to sleep.
Other software I use almost daily: Dropbox for commonly accessed files. Git for my work and personal projects. Audacity for quick clean up of audio files. 1password for password management.
I can't afford time off work to exercise, so I attached a Table Mate II couch desk to a Marcy Recumbent Mag Cycle, and moved it next to the desk in my home office. Honestly, I'm more productive on the bike than off.
In the meantime, below are a few of my favorite books from 2012: Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power – Gordon (my favorite, though it was published in 2005) Jackass Investing: Don’t do it. Profit from it – Dever (unfortunate title, good book) What Works on Wall Street, Fourth Edition: The Classic Guide to the Best-Performing Investment Strategies of All Time – O’Shaughnessy (good update and review of quant stock screens)
In the meantime, below are a few of my favorite books from 2012: Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power – Gordon (my favorite, though it was published in 2005) Jackass Investing: Don’t do it. Profit from it – Dever (unfortunate title, good book) What Works on Wall Street, Fourth Edition: The Classic Guide to the Best-Performing Investment Strategies of All Time – O’Shaughnessy (good update and review of quant stock screens)
In the meantime, below are a few of my favorite books from 2012: Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power – Gordon (my favorite, though it was published in 2005) Jackass Investing: Don’t do it. Profit from it – Dever (unfortunate title, good book) What Works on Wall Street, Fourth Edition: The Classic Guide to the Best-Performing Investment Strategies of All Time – O’Shaughnessy (good update and review of quant stock screens)
My main desktop at home is 2005 Mac Mini running Linux. I upgraded the RAM and added an Intel SSD to it. It's very old and slow but it's pretty quiet and I'm too lazy to replace it.
My main desktop at home is 2005 Mac Mini running Linux. I upgraded the RAM and added an Intel SSD to it. It's very old and slow but it's pretty quiet and I'm too lazy to replace it.
The book is well written, though not very inspired, and the scientific explanations are well referenced and, for all I can tell, flawless. I'd give four out of five stars if I had stars to give.
When I get home all of my documents automatically upload to Flickr on private mode, so that I can choose which ones to reveal or delete with a minimum of work. I use an EyeFi Connect 4G SD card for this.
The point of the giant setup is that in my freetime I like running giant network visualizations using NetDraw, a free program written by Steve Borgatti for visualizing both 1-mode and 2-mode social network data.
The most important thing to realize about the future is that it's a choice. People choose which visions to pursue, people choose which research gets funded, people choose how they will spend their careers.
Hands do two things. They are two utterly amazing things, and you rely on them every moment of the day, and most Future Interaction Concepts completely ignore both of them.
To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.
The person who has decided to bring on one more engineer is not doing it because they love having a geek around the room, they are doing it because adding the geek allows them to complete a project (or projects) which will add revenue or decrease costs.
Articles happen in Word, but I'm leaving it behind more and more, and just writing in Textedit to save myself all the time and energy associated with Microsoft.
The most powerful tools I wield continue to be: grep, awk, sed, tcpdump, and strace/ktrace/truss. Call me old, but they've never failed me and feel like comfortable and familiar tools.
A dream setup for me is a 27" monitor (anything bigger is a pain for me), a well-designed chair, and an internet connection. The entire Ashgate Resilience Engineering series. Anything else is ancillary.
I use all the Web browsers a lot since I'm constantly chasing browser bugs, and don't currently really like any of them though I lean towards Chrome (but currently am annoyed at it because it keeps crashing on me).
Another book I would like to mention is Josiah Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas [about the Kennedy footage]. It's an early example of an attempt to do just what we're talking about – piecing together reality through photography, or in this case film.
These images answer certain people's hopes and dreams – that they can reconnect with those that are lost, that the deceased are always with us. One example is William H Mumler, the famous spirit photographer who created a picture of Mary Lincoln with the ghost of her deceased husband hovering in the background.
It's an obvious precursor to what I've been trying to do. It's also a great book in its own right. Unfortunately, Klüver died just a couple of years before I started working on my own book. I would have loved to talk to him.
There's this wonderful photograph of Lee Miller in Hitler's bathtub, taken by her boyfriend at the time – a Life photographer she had teamed up with, David Scherman.
I feel the pull of The Auschwitz Album very powerfully. We're looking at something that is indecent, it's cruel beyond imagination and yet it's real. It concerns real people and real historical events.
This is a general introduction to the history of probability and the way it comes into everyday life. It intersperses the historical development with modern applications, and looks at finance, sport, gambling, lotteries and coincidences.
This book is somewhat similar to The Drunkard's Walk in that it covers the history of probability. But since Stephen's background is in medical statistics, he looks at clinical trials and other medical studies.
Yes, this is a completely non-technical book, which is looking at things from the point of view of psychology. It is essentially a review of the recent research on risk perception.
I like this book because one of the things that really irritates me as a statistician is when numbers are bandied around as though they are God-given truths and can't be argued with.
This is part of the Murderous Maths series, and is my favourite book. It is great. It is a book for secondary school kids full of cartoons and lovely characters like this filthy boy called Pongo McWhiffy, or the one I like best is an upper-class idiot called Binky Smallbrains who falls for every trick. It is a book about chance, luck and probability, and these are difficult things that people have to learn about at school. This book really cracks through it. It starts with probability trees
I create Fluid installs for each of my major web applications (Mail, Google Reader, Slashdot, Google Docs, we use Jira for bug tracking internally, etc).
Suetonius's work is a collection of biographies of the first 12 Roman rulers, from Julius Caesar through to Domitian. And it really had a crucial sense of shaping our understanding of Imperial Rome as a place of vice and savagery and sexual depravity and violent, brutal, bawdy splendour.
But the truth is that it remains incredibly readable. As I said before, it takes Tacitus as its model, who was famous for his waspish style, and a careful balancing and modulating of the sentences so that irony would be generated. This is what Gibbon does as well, and it means that not only is it an incredible work of scholarship but it is also compulsively entertaining. I really think that anyone who is prepared to give it a chance will find themselves smiling at the very least throughout it.
But there is also a deep pleasure in looking at some of the things that we think we know about Rome, or the myths that we know are not actually true, taking the mystery to pieces and examining the works and seeing what is there. This is what Mary Beard does in her book.
Yet it seems that when people are valuing one action far above others, based on thin information, this is the time when skeptical inquiry is needed most.
In such a world, it seems that nearly all altruists would put nearly all of their resources toward helping people they knew little about, rather than helping themselves, their families and their communities. I believe that the world would be worse off if people behaved in this way, or at least if they took it to an extreme.
EEV doesn’t seem to allow rewarding charities for transparency or penalizing them for opacity: it simply recommends giving to the charity with the highest estimated expected value, regardless of how well-grounded the estimate is.
And we generally prefer to give where we have strong evidence that donations can do a lot of good rather than where we have weak evidence that donations can do far more good
I feel that any giving approach that relies only on estimated expected-value – and does not incorporate preferences for better-grounded estimates over shakier estimates – is flawed.
Of course, with the suburban model, it is physically impossible for a city of finite dimension to grow indefinitely, let alone at amounts that accelerate forever.
Put these two characteristics together and you have a key insight; Cities routinely trade near-term cash advantages associated with new growth for long-term financial obligations associated with maintenance of infrastructure.
Interestingly, the most-used new app I've started running on an almost-daily basis this year is Facetime, either on my laptop or more frequently on my phone.
I really love the Google Authenticator app, which is a token generator for Google's 2-factor authentication, but makes me feel very safe and high-tech every time I open it up.
For browsing the internet I use Google Chrome. The Chrome team is quickly demonstrating that they have the skill and courage to push the limits of what we expect a modern browser to do.
I have five different Google Mail accounts. Mailplane makes it easy to switch between these accounts and keeps my email separate from the rest of my browsing, just the way I like it.
I also use Skype for international calls, Preview for reading PDFs, iTunes for listening to music, and iStat Menus (displaying network activity, memory usage, and cpu usage) to keep me informed of what foolish things my Mac is doing.
I just bought a Panasonic Lumix GF1 a few months ago and I love it. It makes me feel skilled rather than like an idiot. That's what good technology does.
I like Muji notebooks and Muji pens because they work well, yet don't feel precious. In my case, the more I treasure a tool, the less likely I am to use it.
More recent additions include an Apple Time Capsule for backing up the Mac and running the home network, a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo (with mirrored disks) for networked storage, and a Fujitsu ScanSnap S510.
I try to live with what's already there, like using Spotlight instead of Alfred or Quicksilver which surely have more features, but are new tools to learn and master.
Other peripheral stuff I use include Droplr for sharing screenshots, MenuMeters for understanding "why the hell is my computer suddenly slow?", TotalFinder which provides tabbed Finder windows and a bunch of less visual stuff related to the shell.
GitHub is an amazing place, product and breeding ground for ideas revolving around software development, created by the ever so humble Chris Wanstrath (and Tom Preston-Werner).
Also, Windows XP in a number of VMware Fusion instances - one for each major IE release plus an extra "baseline" instance in case I have to build up a new one from scratch.
Adobe Photoshop gets some use, mostly when my business partner sends me designs and buttons and such to turn into markup and CSS, but also when I want to goof around a bit with images or process screenshots for my writing.
Meir Statman, one of my favorite behavioral economists, has written a great book on how investors can overcome their base urges and make better decisions:
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.