Random

  • In seeking resolution, our primary goal is to preserve our sense of self-value

    When we join a health club that is too far away, we may justify the purchase by telling our friends that the workouts are so intense we only need to go once a week; when we fail to get the grade we’d like in organic chemistry, we tell ourselves that we didn’t really didn’t want…More

  • Chinese re-education camps

    In the “transformation-through-education” camps, life and death do not mean the same thing as they do elsewhere. A hundred times over I thought, when the footfalls of guards woke us in the night, that our time had come to be executed. When a hand viciously pushed clippers across my skull, and other hands snatched away…More

  • Sneak peek of Peter Jackson’s upcoming Beatles documentary

    This looks terrific. Stones fans – is 4:47 a glimpse of Mick Jagger? (Via Kottke)More

  • World first: Dutch brewery burns iron as a clean, recyclable fuel

    If burning metal powder as fuel sounds strange, the next part of the process will be even more surprising. That rust can be regenerated straight back into iron powder with the application of electricity, and if you do this using solar, wind or other zero-carbon power generation systems, you end up with a totally carbon-free…More

  • “Humor often involves identifying contradictions and revealing new perspectives, which suggests that the less you are in touch with reality, the less likely you are able to identify that something is amiss. This is because rational thought often depends on the ability to view a situation from multiple angles to get a less biased overview.…More

  • In defense of Not-Invented-Here syndrome

    Pick your core business competencies and goals, and do those in house. If you’re a software company, writing excellent code is how you’re going to succeed. Go ahead and outsource the company cafeteria and the CD-ROM duplication. If you’re a pharmaceutical company, write software for drug research, but don’t write your own accounting package. If…More

  • Twitter via RSS

    I’ve been experimenting recently using my RSS reader to follow Twitter accounts. This turns out to be great. Here’s why: You get your feed chronologically, with no engagement-driven algorithm re-ordering things, making suggestions, or showing you what other people like You get to see tweets even when they’re deleted You aren’t exposed to the replies…More

  • What I’ve learned about isometric rendering

    As part of my work on Agave, I needed to find a way to render a virtual office in a web application. I also needed the ability to maintain a high engineering velocity and get high leverage out of the libraries we chose. So far, the biggest learning experience for me has been isometric rendering.…More

  • Industrial Literacy

    An excellent, short post from Jason Crawford containing things that everyone who lives in a modern industrial society should know. My favorite: That plastics are produced in enormous quantities because, for so many purposes—from food containers to electrical wire coatings to children’s toys—we need a material that is cheap, light, flexible, waterproof, and insulating, and…More

  • Social Media

    When I was a kid and my parents first paid for AOL, it opened up an entire world for me. While I could talk a lot about the web (even the crippled web that AOL enabled for me) what I remember most was participating in forums as a middle schooler. And nobody knew I was…More

  • Ideological Competition With China

    Many of the party’s most opprobrious policies — from cultural genocide in Xinjiang to ‘interference’ operations in foreign countries — are an attempt to address threats to the party-state’s cultural or ideological security. CCP directives warn cadres of forces that threaten to “dismantle [their] party’s social foundation.” The threats identified are not military, such as…More

  • Agave

    I’ve really been enjoying working on Agave with Jared. There are lots of reasons, but I want to focus on one in particular. At first, it was a little weird starting a company with someone while remote from the start. Jared’s in Mountain View, I’m in South Lake Tahoe. We were using the standard toolset:…More

  • The Management Flywheel

    The great Camille Fournier has another blog post that is worth reading: The managers who succeed in this may have big ideas about the technology, the product, and the talent and culture of the team, but they don’t just start with these ideas. Instead, they identify the little things that can be changed. Questions like…More

  • PJ O’Rourke: This is why millennials adore socialism

    As they say, the root of humor is truth. I know many people who will read this piece and won’t make it past the first paragraph. But you should anyway. Try not to take it too seriously. A taste: Marxism puts inarticulate notions of a sharing-caring nicer world into vivid propaganda slogans. Slogans such as:…More

  • TikTok: Due process?

  • Orion in depth

    Orion is a familiar constellation. The apparent positions of its stars in two dimensions create a well-known pattern on the bowl of planet Earth’s night sky. Orion may not look quite so familiar in this 3D view though. The illustration reconstructs the relative positions of Orion’s bright stars, including data from the Hipparcus catalog of parallax distances. From today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day…More

  • Ice

    Huh: Scientists have posited that the West Antarctic Ice sheet, which is sitting on bedrock below sea level, could potentially experience a catastrophic collapse event if sea water was able to access the roots of this glacier… the entire ice sheet could collapse over a period as short as a few years, which, if the…More

  • Friday links

    Anger increases susceptibility to misinformation – on both sides, this seems important The arctic is shifting to a completely new climate (from ice and snow to water and rain) The media learned nothing from 2016 A neat meditative sculpture exhibit On North Korea and nuclear war in 2017 Rare footage of Jimi Hendrix performing Voodoo…More

  • Frank Chimero on Meditation apps

    I re-downloaded the leading meditation apps after a few years away, and I was surprised by what I saw. So much! Like, a lot. A lot, a lot. Screens and screens of options: meditations for sleep, meditations for exercise, bedtime stories, soothing soundtracks of ambient music with new age influences, DJ mixes, nature sounds, literal…More

  • The Weaponization of Diversity

    I’ve had this on my reading list for a long time. I finally got around to reading it, and I highly recommend it. It’s a clear-eyed, direct, honest post by My choice quotes: Many people fail to appreciate how success is just as much about emotional stability and health as it is about intellectual and…More

  • Friday reading

    Some interesting reading for you today: Oliver Burkeman’s Eight Secrets to a (Fairly) Fulfilled Life One theory about the relationship between specialization and innovation I (re)discovered Lara Hogan’s excellent post about building a Voltron Some crafting wisdom on the humble function An excellent classic: And in case you hadn’t seen it, much of California is…More

  • Fire in the Sky

    With no “experts” to whom we could cede our thinking, we skipped the thinking piece completely. But now, with so many reports in want of serious consideration, probing, and challenging, we can’t ignore this. The problem is there still aren’t any “experts” in the mold we tend to look for. If we’re interested in the…More

  • Pyrocumulonimbus

    I was hiking with a friend this weekend in Ansel Adams Wilderness in the eastern Sierra. This was our view as we entered the wilderness. Note the clear blue sky! Over the course of the day as we hiked our loop, we noticed more smoke. “Must be the Slink Fire or something”, I thought. Which…More

  • Brad Feld on the Commercial Real Estate market

    I think we are in a phase of total denial by the commercial real estate industry about the dynamics going on. It’s a classic example of short-term, zero-sum thinking.. Read the whole thing.More

  • OpenSummit

    I finally caved and bought an all-access pass for OpenSummit. I should’ve done it sooner. Here’s what I like about it: Temperature, weather radar, and surface smoke overlays on the map. I can see the next 24 hours of conditions much more easily than using a bunch of different websites. OpenSummit Learn: Super high quality…More