If you ask him where he went to high school, he likes to boast that, actually, he went to an all-girls school. That was sort of true—he was one of five males at a progressive private school that had gone co-ed just before he’d enrolled. People always reply: Ooh la la, lucky guy! You must’ve had your…

The majority of meetings are a waste of time. And in my opinion, one flavor of meeting that tops the charts in uselessness is the “status update” meeting. You know this meeting— the meeting where everyone gets together to share what they’ve been doing. It’s ironic that meetings like this exist…

Those who know about us have power over us. Obfuscation may be our best digital weapon. There are still ways to carve out spaces of resistance, counterargument, and autonomy. Image: Lianhao Qu, via Unsplash By: Finn Brunton & Helen Nissenbaum Consider a day in the life of a fairly ordinary person in…

Top highlight A plain language word list for UX writing and help content to make your writing sound more human. Illustration by Anne Smith At SurveyMonkey, we write words that are simple, direct, and human. These basic content principles align with most style guides for writing on the Internet, and…

Jasmin Merdan / Getty Images Nominate a nonprofit for The Renewal Awards. Help a local organization win $40,000 in funding and make an even bigger impact. Nominate now “I cheated on my ex during our relationship and she found out shortly after we broke up,” a Reddit user posting from the burner…

Engadget investigates: Is it "iPod shuffles" or "iPods shuffle"? https://t.co/XFHYsqQunn

How Pebble’s watches have stuck around is a fascinating story. A crazy dedicated community reverse engineered their servers and set up their own infrastructure. The watches are still running strong, three years after the company failed. https://t.co/AyA6LOVURb

Photo by Sabri Tuczu/Unsplash We are being lazy if there’s something that we ought to do but are reluctant to do because of the effort involved. We do it badly, or do something less strenuous or less boring, or just remain idle. In other words, we are being lazy if our motivation to spare ourselves…

Photography Voigtlander Glass Someone reached out to me via a comment on my last post and the more I considered it, the more I thought it would be best to take a quick dive into my camera and lens choices, something that I think deserves more than a “because its cool and takes nice photos” kind of a…

Most of the ideas in this post come from the book Being A Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell by Alexandra Horowitz, which is my favorite nonfiction book I’ve read in a long time. She, in turn, took much of what I discuss from Kate McClean, an artist who makes sensory maps of urban…

It’s hard for me to write about the differences between Android and iOS, and I struggle to comprehend how people go about it. So if you are looking for that kind of overview you are going to be disappointed, I simply wanted to talk about some thoughts I had in using the two operating system without…

neuroscience By Jordana Cepelewicz September 24, 2019 A brain circuit that suppresses distracting sensory information holds important clues about attention and other cognitive processes. 3 Read Later We attend to only a fraction of the sensory data available to us. New results are helping to explain…

11 Answers 11 active oldest votes 46 This is a topic near and dear to my heart... This makes me think there's something systemic that's contributing , something that works against good people trying to do good things. That thing is people . I'm not saying here that people are inherently evil and any…

Orlando Ferguson's Flat Earth Map of 1893 mocked 'round earth believers' as seen in this detail from the map's margins. Public Domain Cory Doctorow is the co-editor of Boing Boing and a writer whose books include Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free . He will be appearing at 6 Degrees Toronto . A…

Rebecca Nelson / Getty In the past year, I’ve been on a mission to pester as many people in my life as possible. The first victim was my editor, whom I abruptly asked one morning to stop messaging me about story ideas on our office’s chat platform, Slack. Instead, I said, let’s talk the ideas out…

I had my fair share in designing and building large systems. I've taken part in rewriting Uber's distributed payment systems , designing and shipping Skype on Xbox One and open-sourcing RIBs , Uber's mobile architecture framework. All of these systems had thorough designs, going through multiple…

Lockheed's A-12 Oxcart spy plane, which the company developed for the Central Intelligence Agency, was a direct response to the growing vulnerability of its earlier U-2 Dragon Lady to hostile air defense networks. As such, the plane – the predecessor to the U.S. Air Force's iconic SR-71 Blackbird –…

Every now and then an idea just hits you like a ton of bricks. Have you ever experienced that? You’re reading something, or listening to something, or driving to work and thinking about nothing in particular, but then a couple of dots connect in your head and kapow ! It’s something that just CLICKS…

The taste of mussels is good. Your taste, in serving them to your dinner guests, is impeccable. [Photograph: J. Kenji López-Alt] Back in 2012, in a possibly unasked-for departure from his usual writing on food (classic Kenji!), Kenji published an article called "Our Secret List of Banned Words," in…

Marianne Bellotti Aug 20, 2018 · 7 min read Our quest for meaning ultimately distorts our understanding of what creates success. I’m going to take a break from writing about mainframes to do something a bit different: a book review! I’ve been spending the better part of a month working through Adam…

T he ideal woman has always been generic. I bet you can picture the version of her that runs the show today. She’s of indeterminate age but resolutely youthful presentation. She’s got glossy hair and the clean, shameless expression of a person who believes she was made to be looked at. She is often…

Actually quite clever: "Why the trial by ordeal was actually an effective test of guilt" – Peter T Leeson | Aeon Ideas https://t.co/QQQOjC66nd https://t.co/8BFAVbW0DO

I can’t keep track of the number of articles I’ve read about hiring in the past few years. Inevitably, they all follow the exact same format. First, they claim that hiring is broken . Next, they describe the hiring practices used by XYZ company. The present an extremely thorough analysis of every…

07.29.2019 Australians have an odd relationship with Antarctica. The fact that there's an even less hospitable piece of territory further to the south seems to soothe the young country, reassuring them that the attempt to re-create rural England on a vast slab of desert using convict labor wasn’t a…

Home 02/22/2019 A friend and I had a discussion about the basic skills that are often lacking in experienced programmers. How can a programmer work for ten or twenty years and never learn to write good code? So often they need close supervision to ensure they go down the right path, and they can…

Accept this nice Lewitt as my apology. Just your typical mea culpa on a Wednesday I’ve done some regrettable things in my life, and most of them have come back around to punish me, in one way or another. That’s how I know, when I spend a few hours each day elbow deep in spreadsheets, that it’s all…

MISCON | ELECTRICITY FAQ | ELECTR. ARTICLES | NEW STUFF | GOOD STUFF | SEARCH Powered by Translate WHY THREE PRONGS? ©1996 William Beaty, BSEE QUESTION: WITH AC POWER, AREN'T BOTH WIRES OF THE PAIR INTERCHANGABLE? Why is onewire called "neutral?" What's all this stuff about "grounding?" Why are…

Here at Trail of Bits we review a lot of code. From major open source projects to exciting new proprietary software, we’ve seen it all. But one common denominator in all of these systems is that for some inexplicable reason people still seem to think RSA is a good cryptosystem to use. Let me save…

Before his resignation in late 2017 , Uber's then-CEO Travis Kalanick faced more than his fair share of scandals . But by far the most (read: least) important of these was Kalanick's oft - repeated claim that, at one point, he "held the world’s second-highest score for the Nintendo Wii Tennis video…

When I graduated and started at Atomic, I had a lot of anxiety because I felt like I was surrounded by wizards . I’ve spent the last three years learning to think like a wizard, to conjure joy from pain and cast protection spells over the important things . I finally feel like I’ve grown into a…

An ‘Atlantic’ cover article claimed to have closed the case on the unexplained disappearance of MH370 in 2014, but there are still gaps in the story Jeff Wise Jun 28 Credit: How Foo Yeen/Getty Images W illiam Langewiesche is a titan among aviation journalists. He has covered, in depth, some of the…

Jun 27 · 3 min read Images from Hand Signals on Wikipedia I take issue with a lot of standard advice. “Pick your battles” is terrible, and “Stay in your lane” is something of a trigger phrase for me. Today, though, my sights are set on: “ It’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission ” Although…

If I have to listen to one more banal ode to “hard work”, I’m going to puke. It’s such a trite tribute that keeps getting heaped on anyone who’s ever become even mildly successful, as though it was somehow this unique aspect of their achievement. The first rebuke to this reflexive compliment should…

A common debate in software development projects is between spending time on improving the quality of the software versus concentrating on releasing more valuable features. Usually the pressure to deliver functionality dominates the discussion, leading many developers to complain that they don't…

Continue reading the main story The Surprising Benefits of Relentlessly Auditing Your Life We tend to think that good marriages and happy families are born of love and care, not spreadsheets. But what if that’s wrong? Ms. Westervelt is a journalist and podcaster. Credit... Script & Seal Leer en…

The Big Bang Theory gang will gather one last time Thursday night. CBS One of the biggest TV shows in recent history is about to end, after a long, hugely successful run. Viewers are sharply divided. Some have argued that the show is a massively enjoyable example of the power of the monoculture,…

A new science of happiness has blossomed. Observing that wealth has not made people happier, some economists have proposed that Western nations should focus on happiness rather than growth. Psychologists, too, have offered formulas for well-being. Jonathan Haidt’s ideas about the sources of…

Many writers rely more heavily on pronouns than I’d suggest is useful. For me this sort of thing comes under the heading Remember that Writing Is Not Speaking. When we talk, we can usually make ourselves understood even amid a flood of vague “he”s and “she”s. On the page, too many pronouns are apt…

Alcohol plays a dominating role in American social, political, and economic life — particularly for urban professionals, getting drinks can be as important a form of social currency as it was in college. But the odds are getting higher that liquor stores, bars, and restaurants will start to offer…

Get That Money Brought to you by: Abigail Disney. Photo: Jemal Countess/Getty Images Get That Money is an exploration of the many ways we think about our finances — what we earn, what we have, and what we want. Abigail Disney, 59, is an activist and Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker. She is also…