mud
Why do I hate Android? It’s definitely one of the questions I get asked most often these days. And most of those that don’t ask probably assume it’s because I’m an iPhone guy. People see negative take after negative take about the operating system and label me as “unreasonable” or “biased” or…
I enjoy a certain aesthetic. I like things made from brown leather and light-coloured wood, from glass and metal and brick, from wool and cotton. I like cheerful (but not loud) colours. I like plants and sunlight, and open space.
View from the window beside my desk, in my home office.
I enjoy things…
Something ugly is going on at the university—a mercenary intensity that has been gathering strength for the past two decades, as the institution made the calculated decision to wrench itself into elite status by dint of its fortune in tobacco money and its sheer ambition. It lured academic…
The bridge rose up and away from the city’s northwest quadrant, spanning the great Yangtze river. And yet, from the on-ramp where the taxi let me off that Saturday morning, it seemed more like a figment of the imagination, a ghostly ironwork extrusion vanishing in the monsoon murk, stretching to…
What does the future hold for search interfaces for users? Today’s familiar Web search interface works well for tens of millions of people and billions of queries a year, but few innovations in search interfaces gain wide-enough acceptance to replace the standard…
Graphical interface pioneer Susan Kare, photo by R.J. Muna
Point, click.
The gestures and metaphors of icon-driven computingfeel so natural and effortless to us now, it seems strange to recall navigating in the digital world any other way. Until Apple’s debut of the Macintosh in 1984, however, most…
Illustration: Martin Venezky
In November 1, 2008, a man named Satoshi Nakamoto posted a research paper to an obscure cryptography listserv describing his design for a new digital currency that he called bitcoin. None of the list’s veterans had heard of him, and what little information could be…
Two of the three founders of Moonbot Studios are festooned in Mardi Gras attire, leading 100 people through the streets of the French Quarter as they push what appears to be a puppet shaped like a gloriously fat woman stuffed into a shopping cart. She wears a pink polka dot dress. Her gray hair is…
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 met…
Norton Juster (right) wrote the book. His neighbor Jules Feiffer did the illustrations.
Our cult of decade anniversaries—the tenth of 9/11, the twentieth of “Nevermind”—are for the most part mere accidents of our fingers: because we’ve got five on each hand, we count things out in tens and hundreds.…
Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance 1. If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if…
A minor portion of Dave Winer’s memorial post on Steve Jobs compares the late Apple CEO to Frank Lloyd Wright. His characterization of Wright is based on mistaken, but common, perceptions about Wright.
[By the way, I’m not criticizing Winer, I merely want to point out one instance…
I met Steve Jobs while I worked at Gizmodo. He was always a gentleman. Steve liked me and he liked Gizmodo. And I liked him back. Some of my friends who I used to work with at Gizmodo refer to those days as the Good Old Days. That is because those were the days before it all went to shit. That was…
Anil and I have had a few conversations lately about building cool stuff for the internet, the Golden Age of the independent web, and how it’s increasingly hard to filter out industry noise. He posted a quote from Dave Winer and it reminded me of our “About” page for Ludicorp, where we outlined our…
Unemployment once again has crept past 9 percent. GDP growth fell below 2 percent this last quarter. Inflation is up. Home values are down. There’s talk of a double-dip recession. According to one market analyst, “We’re on the verge of a great, great depression.” But through it all, there is one…
CHAPINGO, Mexico — At this time of year, when corn grows high, some farmers go into their fields hoping that a disease has infected their crops.
They inspect for swollen husks, a telltale sign that a parasitic fungus has spread into a spongy iridescent mass inside the ears.
The farmers are pleased,…
CLICK TO ENLARGE:
SYLLABUS P. 1
SYLLABUS P. 2
SYLLABUS P. 3
There was a time when I fought against an impatience with reading, concealing, with partisanship, the fissures in my education. I confused difficulty with duplicity, and that which didn’t come easily, I often scorned. Then, in my last year…
November 10, 2009 @ 10:45 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under The academic scene
« previous post | next post »
[Below is a guest post by Dan Everett]
On the 22nd of December, 1942, Franz Boas and Claude Lévi-Strauss were having lunch at the Faculty Club of Columbia University when Boas fell from his…
A riddle for summer: if coffee is best served cold when it’s hot out, why boil and brew what needs to be iced?
Cold-brewing, or Toddy brewing, is the answer. Todd “Toddy” Simpson claims to have tasted cold-brewed coffee while traveling in Peru in 1964, and to have brought the “ancient Peruvian…
Ads via The Deck
When I tell people what we are doing, they want to hear about the room where you produce. I tell them that there is a lot of paperwork. That they take your picture and look at your license. Then they walk you back to the room. You are handed a list of instructions and some stickers…
Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It’s written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don’t have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they’ve either never done the work or have forgotten…
Matthew Carpenter, age 10, has completed 642 inverse trigonometry problems at KhanAcademy.org.Photo: Joe Pugliese
“This,” says Matthew Carpenter, “is my favorite exercise.” I peer over his shoulder at his laptop screen to see the math problem the fifth grader is pondering. It’s an inverse…
Your ability to make money is directly proportionate to how well you solve problems for your customers. Problem solving is one of the most highly valued characteristics you can have as an entrepreneur. Hone this skill and you reap the benefits of saving time, making money and finding the next big…
One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “Baka malamig doon” were among the few words she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend, I…
Celebrities
There are underdog stories…and there’s what happened in North Dakota in 1988
More than 23 years ago, a pair of low-profile junior college basketball teams played a forgotten game on a neutral floor in southeast North Dakota. The favored team was a school best known for its two-year…
Meet Edward Tufte, the graphics guru to the power elite who is revolutionizing how we see data.
Illustrated by Merchant for the Brunswick Review
One day in the spring of 2009, Edward Tufte, the statistician and graphic design theorist, took the train from his home in Cheshire, Connecticut, to…
Healthcare, schools, police, tax breaks: which would you keep, slash, or cut? The axe has to swing, so where, if you were the lumberjack, would you aim it? It’s the central, polarizing question in this age of austerity.
Or is it? Maybe relying on cuts to reboot prosperity is a bit like starting a…
I took a few days to hit the beach and think about innovation and design after my RCA speech. One of the best things I read was this analysis by Kevin MuCullagh on Core77’s site. It’s called Riding the Flux: Design is Changing in a Myriad of Ways. Are You? It mirrors my thinking about innovation in…
We all know that really good designers somehow think differently from you and me about new products. But just exactly what does this difference consist of? The best summary of what makes really good designers tick was a simple post by Bruce Nussbaum back in 2007. Since reading that I’ve often…
Back to Work
Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
Join us via RSS, iTunes, or at 5by5.tv.
On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the…
By Ben Yagoda
Four years ago, I wrote an essay for The Chronicle Review cataloging “The Seven Deadly Sins of Student Writers”—the errors and infelicities that cropped up most frequently in my students’ work. Since then a whole new strain of bad writing has come to the fore, not only in student work…
We asked three of Britain’s leading children’s authors and two of our in-house book experts to each pick 10 books, suitable for Year 7 students.
The authors chose books that have brought them huge joy, while expressing their outrage at the “great big contradiction” of Mr Gove’s claim to wish to…
Buy the book: Amazon | B&N | More… Here’s what a few folks have said about it:
Read an excerpt below… You should follow me on Twitter if you want to keep up with what I’m doing.
I’ll be posting a lot of the research and deleted scenes on my Tumblr.
There’s a fun photo gallery of readers with their…
The lecture below was delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009.
My title must seem like a contradiction. What can solitude have to do with leadership? Solitude means being alone, and leadership necessitates the presence of others—the people…
The existence of suffering in a world created by a good and almighty God—“the problem of pain”—is a fundamental theological dilemma, and perhaps the most serious objection to the Ch
You are viewing issendai
Previous Entry | Next Entry So you want to keep your lover or your employee close. Bound to you, even. You have a few options. You could be the best lover they’ve ever had, kind, charming, thoughtful, competent, witty, and a tiger in bed. You could be the best workplace…
No articles.