Feb 292016 Intercalation Today is Leap Day, so I thought it’d be appropriate to brain-dump on some of the really weird things about calendars. Calendars, like colors, are one of those topics that, on the surface, seem pretty straight-forward, but once you get in to them you realize how horrifically…

There has been more discussion recently on the concept of a “10x engineer”. 10x engineers are, (from Quora) “the top tier of engineers that are 10x more productive than the average” Productivity I have observed that some people are able to get 10 times more done than me. However, I’d argue that…

Have you ever mentioned something that seems totally normal to you only to be greeted by surprise? Happens to me all the time when I describe something everyone at work thinks is normal. For some reason, my conversation partner's face morphs from pleasant smile to rictus of horror. Here are a few…

This post gives a game theoretic explanation as to why we exchange gifts. On twitter @alexip tweeted “‘Let’s agree not to give each other presents for Christmas’ is just another case of the prisoner’s dilemma #gametheory” . This post builds on that and investigates the premise fully in an…

There has been a lot of talk in recent weeks about the MacBook Pro and, in particular, whether it can replace an iPad Pro for getting real work done. Firstly, consider the hardware. The huge issue with the MacBook Pro is its form factor. The fact that the keyboard and screen are limited to being…

Idle Words > Talks > Haunted By Data This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 1, 2015, at the Strata+Hadoop World conference in New York City. The video version is here (20 mins). In preparing this talk I decided to check out the data landscape, since I hadn't seen it for a while. The…

"Somewhat related is abstraction, which is like handwaving." http://t.co/05g6ACil6l

Interesting @eugenewei post on food, particularly his arguing food now > music for signalling. http://t.co/3QiY8Affj9 http://t.co/k9pDzCyG3Y

Ha, @hunterscott wrote a Twitter bot to enter Twitter contests. It won over 1,000. http://t.co/qSAzclHp8l http://t.co/N7KQOVjcix

Today is Pinboard's sixth birthday as an online service, but of course the roots of the site go much deeper. My grandfather started Pinboard all the way back in 1931, when he was a young agronomy student in need of some way to help keep track of cuttings. What began as a simple system of shelves and…

One of the (few) advantages of being in technology for a long time is that you get to see multiple tech cycles beginning to end. You get to see how breakthroughs actually propagate. If all you have seen is a part of the curve, it’s hard to extrapolate correctly. You either overshoot the short-term…