Thought stream

"Every new technology begins with naive euphoria — its inventor(s) are usually submersed in the ideas..."

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:14:53 -0500

“Every new technology begins with naive euphoria — its inventor(s) are usually submersed in the ideas themselves; it is their immediate colleagues that experience most of the wild enthusiasm. Most technologies are overpromised, more often than not simply to generate funds to continue the work, for funding is an integral part of scientific development; without it, only the most imaginative and revolutionary ideas make it beyond the embryonic stage. Hype is a natural handmaiden to overpromise, and most technologies build rapidly to a peak of hype. Following this, there is almost always an overreaction to ideas that are not fully developed, and this inevitably leads to a crash of sorts, followed by a period of wallowing in the depths of cynicism. Many new technologies evolve to this point, and then fade away. The ones that survive do so because someone finds a good use (= true user benefit) for the basic ideas.”

- Dennis Forbes on Software and Technology - Getting Real about NoSQL and the SQL-Isn’t-Scalable Lie

"Schmidt’s thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together..."

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:08:59 -0500

“Schmidt’s thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.”

- Turkey: Archeological Dig Reshaping Human History - Newsweek.com

"There are more than 4000 airports served by commercial airlines worldwide. Averaged uniformly, each..."

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:19:15 -0500

“There are more than 4000 airports served by commercial airlines worldwide. Averaged uniformly, each airport has an outgoing degree of 8 (it has flights to 8 other airports), and is served by 4 airlines. However large airports dominate the system: re-weighted by their number of departures, airports average degree 64. This reflects the hub-and-spoke system used by many airlines, wherein for a given airline one to four airports account for half of their departures. Despite the high connectivity amongst the major airports, the shortest path between two airports chosen uniformly averages 3.5 flights in the United States and 5 worldwide. Amazingly, the graph diameter is often as high as 20: there are airports that can take 20 flights minimum to get between, over 4 days (typically this will be a small airport in Alaska or Canada to another small airport in Africa or Indonesia).”

- The Flight Network

"Humour seems to be a product of humans’ ability to make rapid, intuitive judgements”..."

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:50:51 -0500

““Humour seems to be a product of humans’ ability to make rapid, intuitive judgements” about a situation, followed by “slower, deliberative assessments” which resolve incongruities, says Karli Watson of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.”

- The comedy circuit: When your brain gets the joke - life - 01 February 2010 - New Scientist

"After just a single month, a full 25% of the URLs are what we call “unverifiable”. By..."

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:46:15 -0500

“After just a single month, a full 25% of the URLs are what we call “unverifiable”. By that I mean that the content was either duplicate, included session parameters, or for some reason could not be retrieved (verified) again (404s, 500s, etc.). Six months later, 75% of the tens of billions of URLs we’ve seen are “unverifiable” and a year later, only 20% qualifies for “verified” status. As Rand noted earlier this week, Google’s doing a lot of verifying themselves.”

- SEOmoz | Looking Back at Linkscape’s Trillion + URLs (and Announcing our Latest Index Update)

"While supervised algorithms aim to minimize the classification error, unsupervised algorithms aim to..."

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 13:39:46 -0500

“While supervised algorithms aim to minimize the classification error, unsupervised algorithms aim to create groups or subsets of the data where data points belonging to a cluster are as similar to each other as possible, while making the difference between the clusters as high as possible.”

- Machine Learning - Who’s the Boss? | Awesomeful

"I go into solitude so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern. When I am among the many I..."

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 01:56:48 -0500

“I go into solitude so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think. After a time it always seems as if they want to banish my self from myself and rob me of my soul.”

- Nietzsche on Solitude - Articles - House of Solitude - Hermitary

"On the other hand, there is some good news about being big—it makes it feasible to maintain a..."

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 12:28:07 -0500

“On the other hand, there is some good news about being big—it makes it feasible to maintain a constant body temperature. This has several advantages. For example, it is easier to evolve efficient muscles if they are only required to function in a narrow range of temperatures than if they must perform well over a wide range of temperatures. However, this temperature control comes at a price. Warm blooded creatures (unlike insects) must devote a substantial part of their food energy simply to keeping warm. For an adult human, this is a pound or two of food per day. For a mouse, which has about one-twentieth the dimensions of a human, and hence twenty times the surface area per unit volume, the required food for maintaining the same body temperature is twenty times as much as a fraction of body weight, and a mouse must consume a quarter of its own body weight daily just to stay warm. This is why, in the arctic land of Spitzbergen, the smallest mammal is the fox.”

- Scaling

"This is the exact analogue of an open source software failure mode: often companies think they can..."

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 11:50:24 -0500

“This is the exact analogue of an open source software failure mode: often companies think they can get all the benefits of open source simply by releasing their source code. The best dinner parties are about the other people. Similarly, the best open source projects have great people, attract great people, and the source is simply what they’re working on: necessary but not sufficient. You can build it but they won’t come. All successful open source projects build communities of supportive engaged developers who identify with the project and keep it productive and useful.”

- Rethinking Open Data - O’Reilly Radar

"One thing that is often overlooked about the hockey-stick growth shape: its most distinctive..."

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:24:33 -0500

“One thing that is often overlooked about the hockey-stick growth shape: its most distinctive characteristic is the long, flat part.”

- Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

"Here’s the problem: in my experience, if you know what you’re doing, the odds of a given..."

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 13:41:10 -0500

“Here’s the problem: in my experience, if you know what you’re doing, the odds of a given executive hire working out will be about 50/50. That is, about 50% of the time you’ll screw up and ultimately have to replace the person. (If you don’t know what you’re doing, your failure rate will be closer to 100%.) Why? People are people. People are complicated. People have flaws. You often don’t know what those flaws are until after you get to know them. Those flaws are often fatal in an executive role. And more generally, sometimes the fit just isn’t there.”

- The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 8: Hiring, managing, promoting, and firing executives - pmarca *ARCHIVE* - bit.ly/1z2b3V

"Those who initially scored high for “grit”—defined as perseverance and a passion for long-term..."

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 08:04:49 -0500

“Those who initially scored high for “grit”—defined as perseverance and a passion for long-term goals, and measured using a short multiple-choice test—were 31 percent more likely than their less gritty peers to spur academic growth in their students. Gritty people, the theory goes, work harder and stay committed to their goals longer. (Grit also predicts retention of cadets at West Point, Duckworth has found.)”

- What Makes a Great Teacher? - The Atlantic (January/February 2010)

"This tale of two boys, and of the millions of kids just like them, embodies the most stunning..."

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 08:00:17 -0500

“This tale of two boys, and of the millions of kids just like them, embodies the most stunning finding to come out of education research in the past decade: more than any other variable in education—more than schools or curriculum—teachers matter. Put concretely, if Mr. Taylor’s student continued to learn at the same level for a few more years, his test scores would be no different from those of his more affluent peers in Northwest D.C. And if these two boys were to keep their respective teachers for three years, their lives would likely diverge forever. By high school, the compounded effects of the strong teacher—or the weak one—would become too great.”

- What Makes a Great Teacher? - The Atlantic (January/February 2010)

"You need to build your career not as a ladder, but as a pyramid. You need to have a base of..."

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 01:28:04 -0500

“You need to build your career not as a ladder, but as a pyramid. You need to have a base of experience because it’s a much more stable structure. And so that involves taking lateral moves. And it involves getting out of your comfort zone.”

- Corner Office - Carol Bartz - Imagining a World Without Annual Reviews - Question - NYTimes.com

"But ignorance allows you to “…force yourself to be smart. You use what you know in terms of company..."

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 01:32:12 -0500

“But ignorance allows you to “…force yourself to be smart. You use what you know in terms of company building, supporting entrepreneurs, discovering the market. We will design the product around what the market needs with an intuition, but then we’ll go and test it. We don’t want to be smarter than the market we are entering.””

- The ignorant VC - Venture Hacks

"The machine will be capable of understanding the world around them much as humans do,” Rattner..."

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 23:56:36 -0500

““The machine will be capable of understanding the world around them much as humans do,” Rattner said. “They will see and hear and probably speak and do a number of other things that resemble human-like capabilities, and will demand as a result very (powerful) computing capability.””

- Intel hopes 48-core chip will solve new challenges | Deep Tech - CNET News

"The romantic image of an über-programmer is someone who fires up Emacs, types like a machine gun,..."

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:17:03 -0500

“The romantic image of an über-programmer is someone who fires up Emacs, types like a machine gun, and delivers a flawless final product from scratch. A more accurate image would be someone who stares quietly into space for a few minutes and then says “Hmm. I think I’ve seen something like this before.””

- Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity — The Endeavour

"Since 2004, active bots have grown at a compound annual growth rate of more than 378%. In other..."

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:45:11 -0500

“Since 2004, active bots have grown at a compound annual growth rate of more than 378%. In other words, the number of bots has nearly quadrupled ever year. In 2009, you could find nearly 400,000 active bots engaged in malicious activity on any given day with several million active over the course of any month.”

- 1 Billion Spammers Served | Deep Insights into Spam | Project Honey Pot

"But consider this: lyrics are the number two searched terms of all time on Google, and music comes..."

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 23:49:52 -0500

“But consider this: lyrics are the number two searched terms of all time on Google, and music comes in at number 9. Obviously, there’s a big user need.”

- Marissa Mayer Talks Google Search, Chrome, Online News And More At Le Web

"If you’ve never written anything thoughtful, then you’ve never had any difficult, important, or..."

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:31:25 -0500

“If you’ve never written anything thoughtful, then you’ve never had any difficult, important, or interesting thoughts. That’s the secret: people who don’t write, are people who don’t think.”

- The secret about writing that no one has the balls to tell you - Pete Michaud