“THE New Digital Age” is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between…

codinghorror: revisiting "How to Talk to Humans" http://t.co/6hGC2LfeBn

Steve YeggeSteve YeggeShared publicly - 2012-08-09 Notes from the Mystery Machine BusI’ve spent the past eight years (starting back in June 2004) writing elaborate rants about a bunch of vaguely related software engineering issues.I was doing all that ranting because I’ve been genuinely perplexed by…

Hamilton in the 2009 Amgen Tour of California Prologue. Photo: Richard Masoner/Cyclelicious/Flickr Dan Coyle. Lance Armstrong gives an interview at the 2010 Tour de France. Yesterday afternoon, the Associated Press published the first story detailing the contents of The Secret Race, the highly…

The porn pic being passed around on the students’ cellphones at an Ivy League business-­school party last fall was more prank than smut: a woman in a wool pom-pom hat giving a snowman with a snow penis a blow job. Snowblowing, it’s called, or snowman fellatio, terms everyone at this midweek happy…

{an excerpt from "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big." [ html ]} 2.1 The Rise of Worse is Better I and just about every designer of Common Lisp and CLOS has had extreme exposure to the MIT/Stanford style of design. The essence of this style can be captured by the phrase the right thing . To…

For decades, the U.S. government banned medical studies of the effects of LSD. But for one longtime, elite researcher, the promise of mind-blowing revelations was just too tempting. At 9:30 in the morning, an architect and three senior scientists—two from Stanford, the other from…

"That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place" http://bit.ly/4uHKi

[slimstat f='count' w='ip' lf='resource contains galactic-scale'] views this month; [slimstat f='count' w='ip' lf='strtotime equals 2011-07-01 | interval equals -1'] overall Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we have seen an impressive and sustained growth in the scale of energy…

At a time when we are constantly being told to value the new and the different, it may come as a surprise to learn that the standard, the shared and the common can be strong drivers of transformation. In fact, many of the innovations that have changed the world, including railroads, modern…

It seems America's bankers are tired of all the abuse. They've decided to speak out. True, they're doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don't have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles…

Print - What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 - Popular Mechanics Two years after the Airbus 330 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, Air France 447’s flight-data recorders finally turned up. The revelations from the pilot transcript paint a surprising picture of chaos in the cockpit, and confusion…

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d…

Editor’s note: Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist and the author of “Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age” and “Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take it Back.” (CNN) — The U.S. Postal Service appears to be the latest casualty in digital technology’s…

Part of the sequence: The Science of Winning at Life One day a coworker said to me, “Luke! You’re, like, the happiest person I know! How come you’re so happy all the time?” It was probably a rhetorical question, but I had a very long answer to give. See, I was unhappy for most of my life,1 and even…

Steve Jobs’s resignation from Apple has sparked plenty of commentary on his achievements, his personality, and his vision. He deserves the attention: This is a man who transformed the technology world and helped build Apple into what was, at least for a few hours earlier this month, the world’s most…

[slimstat f='count' w='ip' lf='resource contains can-economic'] views this month; [slimstat f='count' w='ip' lf='strtotime equals 2011-07-01 | interval equals -1'] overall As we saw in the previous post , the U.S. has expanded its use of energy at a typical rate of 2.9% per year since 1650. We…

Stop. Grab a pencil and write down the first and last names of your past three managers. Stare at those names for a bit and re-live those months or years of reporting to this person. I want your off-the-cuff opinion about each one. My guess is your opinion falls into one the three buckets: I love…

I’ve always wanted to write a technical followup to an earlier post, Toward Better Master Passwords , but this time going into some of the math behind it. Today’s xkcd comic does that for me: Indeed, what took me nearly 2000 words to say in non-technical terms, Randall Monroe was able to sum up in a…

If the members of the American medical establishment were to have a collective find-yourself-standing-naked-in-Times-Square-type nightmare, this might be it. They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the phenomenally-best-selling ”Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution” and ”Dr. Atkins’ New Diet…

Drew Westen is a professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.” Atlanta IT was a blustery day in Washington on Jan. 20, 2009, as it often seems to be on the day of a presidential inauguration. As I stood…

Right off the bat, a disclaimer: It's very difficult to answer this question broadly. Not all experiences are the same. However, I can share my personal experience because it might contribute to some larger themes if enough women participate on this thread. So, here's my answer…an answer from a…