Thought stream

"All of the analytics in the world won’t matter if it remains inaccessible to the people driving an..."

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:10:31 -0400

“All of the analytics in the world won’t matter if it remains inaccessible to the people driving an organization — the human decision-makers.”

- The Data Singularity, Part II: Human-Sizing Big Data : Dataspora Blog

"A discovery is premature if its implications cannot be connected by a series of simple logical steps..."

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 10:48:02 -0400

““A discovery is premature if its implications cannot be connected by a series of simple logical steps to contemporary canonical or generally accepted knowledge.””

- History of the Actor model - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you..."

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 01:07:57 -0400

“If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you’ve thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one.”

- Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

"I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth..."

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:55:43 -0400

“I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.”

- Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

"It’s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable..."

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:32:53 -0400

“It’s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don’t work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn’t believe that they will lead to important problems.”

- Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

"So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let..."

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:29:54 -0400

“So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.”

- Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

"Referring to social media as a “media” perpetuates our bias towards it is as a marketing tool, as..."

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:29:56 -0400

“Referring to social media as a “media” perpetuates our bias towards it is as a marketing tool, as opposed to an enterprise-wide brand building capability, and that it does belong squarely in the marketing department’s domain.”

- Forget Social Media: Think Social Profitability | LEVEL5 Strategic Brand Advisors (Toronto) | brandchannel.com

"Jean Renoir wrote in his autobiography that someone once asked his father, the painter Auguste, why..."

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 22:37:45 -0400

“Jean Renoir wrote in his autobiography that someone once asked his father, the painter Auguste, why he painted from nature. Renoir père answered that if he were to try painting a tree in the studio, he would be able to draw four or five different kinds of leaves, and the rest would all look like them. But nature creates millions [his count] of different kinds of trees. I like working in industry for the same reason Renoir liked to paint from nature.”

- Mihai Budiu’s Blog » An interview with Leslie Lamport

"The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems..."

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 01:38:07 -0400

“The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn’t believe that they will lead to important problems.”

- Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

"Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they..."

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 01:34:18 -0400

“Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you’ll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won’t get started.”

- Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

"`Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the..."

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 19:48:12 -0400

“`Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest.”

- Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

"When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After..."

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 19:45:32 -0400

“When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn’t the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you.”

- Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

"One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up..."

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 19:43:42 -0400

“One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can’t, almost surely you are not going to. Courage is one of the things that Shannon had supremely.”

- Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

"Is it luck that he finally created special relativity? Early on, he had laid down some of the pieces..."

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 19:41:41 -0400

“Is it luck that he finally created special relativity? Early on, he had laid down some of the pieces by thinking of the fragments. Now that’s the necessary but not sufficient condition.”

- Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

"The HTML parser will ignore tags which it does not understand, and will ignore attributes which it..."

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:45:10 -0400

“The HTML parser will ignore tags which it does not understand, and will ignore attributes which it does not understand of CERN-SGML tags.”

- Early History of HTML - 1990 to 1992

"I haven’t seen another high performance server design that tries to do this — they..."

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 10:10:12 -0400

“I haven’t seen another high performance server design that tries to do this — they mostly focus on peak performance, not performance under overload conditions, which was my main concern. I also think that SEDA makes it easier to design services that are load aware, though I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine how you would do it in a conventional thread or event-driven framework.”

- Volatile and Decentralized: A Retrospective on SEDA

"The secret of the modern world is its gigantic interconnectedness. Ideas are having sex with other..."

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 22:35:51 -0400

“The secret of the modern world is its gigantic interconnectedness. Ideas are having sex with other ideas from all over the planet with ever-increasing promiscuity. The telephone had sex with the computer and spawned the Internet.”

- Ideas Having Sex - Reason Magazine

"According to research led by Dr. Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia, money can buy..."

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 22:23:50 -0400

“According to research led by Dr. Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia, money can buy happiness … as long as you spend it on other people.”

- Why Friends Matter at Work and in Life - Peter Bregman - Harvard Business Review

"In fact, the class of programs that exhibit high sensitivity to network latency – a combination of..."

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 22:18:30 -0400

“In fact, the class of programs that exhibit high sensitivity to network latency – a combination of I/O-boundedness and synchronization-boundedness – is large and growing.”

- Canned Platypus » Blog Archive » It’s Faster Because It’s C

"Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose..."

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 01:37:18 -0400

“Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “he who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.” Notice that he uses the word lead. Leadership means finding a new direction, not simply putting yourself at the front of the herd that’s heading toward the cliff.”

- Solitude and Leadership: an article by William Deresiewicz | The American Scholar