Month: October 2008
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Fight Club’s 8 Rules to Live By
Simple yet excellent. Lateral Action presents 8 Fight Club quotes everyone (not just ‘creators’) should live by. At its core, Fight Club is about living the life you truly want to live, and the hard path to getting there. Tyler helps the story’s nameless hero (usually referred to as Jack) down that path to enlightenment,…
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10 Links for a Better Understanding of Today’s Financial Crisis
One of the few people I listen to on financial matters, Ramit Sethi, has produced a great list of 10 links to walk you through today’s financial crisis — and make you smarter than 99% of other people. I would provide you with the 10 here, but it’s best to go to Ramit’s article for…
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The Negawatt Unit of Power
Seed Magazine highlights the word Negawatt: \né-gə-wät\ n: A measure of the avoided use or the conservation of a unit of energy. Wikipedia goes into more detail: By investing to reduce electricity demand instead of investing to increase electricity generation capacity, this “virtual generation” method can supply growth of supply by improving the efficiency of…
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Data Visualisation: Very Small Array
My latest RSS subscription: Very Small Array Experts in data visualisation (I still can’t force myself to write that word with a ‘z’), each post is full of information and is beautifully presented. Even better, it’s all CC licensed. Some of my recent favourites (some simple, all beautiful): Length of Weekly #1 Songs by Year,…
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World Wide Words
Michael Quinion, the British etymologist, documents the meaning and derivation of words and phrases in the English language. Covering etymology, grammar and neologisms (among others), my favourite aspect of World Wide Words (where he “writes on international English from a British viewpoint”) is the front page Sic! section highlighting common—yet amusing—errors: Charlotte Metcalf’s food column…
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2001: A Google Search
In celebration of their 10th birthday, Google have temporarily opened up their 2001 index for searching. Some interesting searches: 9/11, YouTube, iPod, Ubuntu, flickr. via Link Banana
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Flickr Community Building
Like David, I had seen many people linking to this article profiling Flickr’s Director of Community, Heather Champ, and was unsure why. Once I read it, however, I found it an engaging look at the intricacies of policing an online community. At first glance this parallel society has been made, quite literally, in the image…
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Google Chrome? I’m Sticking with Firefox
A month has passed since the release of Google’s Chrome browser. Disregarding the fact that an official Linux port is still not available, there are two further reason why I’m sticking with Firefox: You can enable Chrome’s best features in Firefox. On testing beta releases (of IE, Firefox and Chrome), there was no stand-out candidate.…
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Obama, Science, and 61 Nobel Laureates
In an open letter to the American people, 61 Nobel Laureates are endorsing Barack Obama for President (pdf). As the largest number of Laureates to ever endorse a candidate for office, surely this will have some influence over the undecided voters (then again, Kerry had 48 and we know what happened there).
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The Peter Principle
The Peter Principle is the maxim that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. Specifically: It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of…