Polar Bear in No Snow

This is why so many project managers and CIOs Freudian slip: “automagically”.

zmyaro:

“We are expected to know how to do things we’ve never done before and estimate how long they will take.”

What is coming to get us…

Good points. Part of encouraging people to like something is not calling them stupid for not liking it.

jtotheizzoe:

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote something that I have come to realize is one of the keys to unlocking better communication and appreciation of science in our society. I’m a believer that most people are born curious, they are natural scientists, but most are trained (very effectively, and often by schools) that science is not something that they should like.

Every time you, or I, or someone else shares a tidbit about science, a cool story, some sci-fi fanboy nerdgasm, an educational link, even star porn with no words attached … we are doing a service. We are making science a part of people’s lives in a positive way.

The greatest need in restoring respect for science is not that we need smarter people. It’s that we have to make it a part of people’s lives every day, to let them know that they are not alone in feeling good things about science.

Take it away, Kurt :

“Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.’”

One of the reasons I like working where I do was they gave me a shot to grow. On paper I was not fantastically qualified, but I brought some missing skills to the table. In the subsequent hire, we looked for the same: someone who can grow and brings missing skills to the table. Of course, when we have to do something no one has done, we learn what needs to be learned to make it happen. So we are all always growing. Knowledge workers always should be.

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. “Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

Steve Jobs, Wired, February, 1995

Earlier generations have weathered recessions, of course; this stall we’re in has the look of something nastier. Social Security and Medicare are going to be diminished, at best. Hours worked are up even as hiring staggers along: Blood from a stone looks to be the normal order of things “going…

Very interesting. It could then replace adjuncts in higher education teaching Composition by identifying poor writers and giving them corrective assistance. A Khan Academy : mathematics :: Narrative Networks : writing.

A 2000 psi water drill with a custom 3.4 km hose. Making stuff to test your crazy study is why science is cool.

This was so big even NPR covered it. In the end, “free” is never free when it comes to corporations. Either they get a tax write off, sell advertisement space, sell ancillary products, or sell the user’s data.

Without his contributions to Unix, I probably would be a librarian.

Interesting how many places do not use Facebook. China is a given, as my friends who go there to live disappear and resurface every once in a while. Of course, Qzone and Renren the social networks of choice in China, LiveJournal in Russia, orkut in Brazil.

newsweek:

“Although Columbus Day, commemorating his first landfall in the New World, somewhere in the Bahamas—the precise location remains disputed—seems a quintessentially American holiday, it is a recent invention, established by FDR in 1937. And it has a fairly muddled heritage: Columbus, of course,…

neuropsy:

I love the simplicity of this study.

Thirty-four subjects—almost all white or Asian—looked at digital faces. They had to decide with an instant mouse click whether the face was black or white. Each of the 16 different faces was morphed along a continuum from white to black. And each face was…