All the children had their pencils out and were drawing horses, as the nun had instructed—all, that is, except one little boy who, having finished, was sitting idly behind his desk. “Well,” the nun said, looking down at his horse, “why not draw something else—a saddle, or something?” A few minutes…

12.04. 2013 The platypus is an animal that looks like it was designed in a pub, by a committee, the night before it was due. To make one at home, you'll need a duck bill, a small beaver, four webbed feet, a venomous spur, some spare parts (like five X chromosomes), and a watch battery to operate the…

When I do speaking gigs, I open with a few questions to get to know the audience. I’m looking for a couple of key demographic numbers to gauge how much to focus on and tune different themes in any given talk. I ask: How many self-identified Apple people? (Typography jokes = ok.) How many engineers?…

I don’t like to think of myself as lazy, but when I came across the ideas that inspired this post that suggested being lazy and clever could make you an excellent leader, I was a little less inclined to shrug off the label. This theory revolves around very broad, general behaviors, rather than…

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”?* In other words, what if…

I’ve just come back from Epernay where the biennial VITeff trade show was taking place. All the usual suspects were there: manufacturers of tanks, presses, pumps, packaging/labelling, and bottling lines, in addition to vineyard equipment and vine growers, and more. Wednesday being the “Winemakers…

I’ve written this over dribs and drabs in the past few weeks, and decided to tie this together finally. It’s poorly structured here and there with some glaring tpyos, but I don’t have the time to keep editing it. I worked at Flickr for about 5 years until late 2010, mostly centered around community…

The word “driverless” does not feature in the Operational Strategy Discussion Paper once. Given the amount of times this word has appeared in the press recently, the above statement may seem rather surprising. What it demonstrates, however, is that just as with the topic of ticket office closures,…

“The problem with the introduction of technology is the expectation of 100% accuracy” – Jonathan Agnew, Test Match Special When Aleem Dar, one of two umpires at Trent Bridge last Sunday, raised his finger to dismiss Australia’s Brad Haddin and give the first Test to England, he was playing a crucial…

London, 1772. I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects. This is in…

Meet The Driving Forces Behind Hailo, the Black Cab App Killing the Minicab Trade Mark Nayler , Tuesday, 11th June 2013 Hands up who’s fed up of struggling to find a black cab? You can put your hand down now — literally — thanks to Hailo, an app that uses smartphone technology to do the work for…

A statement of intent, for Dazed Magazine : The internet is made by hand, millions upon millions of words typed up and out, from every blog post, news report and status message, to every line of code which encodes, stores, arranges, transmits and displays them. It is a text, which needs very little…

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A conversation with the Go team 6 June 2013 At Google I/O 2013, several members of the Go team hosted a "Fireside chat." Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, David Symonds, Andrew Gerrand, Ian Lance Taylor, Sameer Ajmani, Brad Fitzpatrick, and Nigel Tao took questions from the audience and people around the…

An Ill-Advised Personal Note about "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable" Bret Victor / May 28, 2013 The talk I released today is called " Media for Thinking the Unthinkable ". It's the most personal talk I've given, in that it was driven by my own motivations as opposed to someone else's. Every talk…

Newspaper Club has two offices: one in Glasgow and one in London. Glasgow is the HQ, where all the customer service, logistics and operational stuff happens. And in London, we develop and manage all the products and services, designing the site, writing code and so on. We chat all day long between…

Three summers ago I was unemployed and sleeping on a friend’s couch. I had nothing much to look forward to, so I spent my time in the past. I pulled interesting-looking books off the library’s history shelves, browsed old aerial photos, and paged through random searches on the website of the Library…

October 15, 2000 by Bruce Schneier Founder and CTO Counterpane Internet Security, Inc. schneier@schneier.com < http://www.counterpane.com > A free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on computer security and cryptography. Back issues are available at <…

distributed systems, startups, semiotics, writing, culture, management April 2, 2013 Companies that build tools, infrastructure, and other products used by engineers and developers are often dampened by business teams that lack technical literacy in their market. Departments that build and maintain…