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Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Atheism and Ricky Gervais’s holiday message
Ricky Gervais, on giving explanations:
Why don’t I believe in God? No, no no, why do YOU believe in God? Surely the burden of proof is on the believer. You started all this. If I came up to you and said, “Why don’t you believe I can fly?” You’d say, “Why would I?” I’d reply, “Because it’s a matter of faith.” If I then said, “Prove I can’t fly. Prove I can’t fly see, see, you can’t prove it can you?” You’d probably either walk away, call security or throw me out of the window and shout, ‘’F—ing fly then you lunatic.”
A must-read, this holiday season.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Not a single wasted word
John Gruber, writing about Daring Fireball:
What makes DF an efficient and effective soapbox is exactly that it is not noisy. My goal is for not a single wasted word to appear anywhere on any page of the site.
A noble goal that more people should have—except that most seem to have the exact opposite purpose in life. Add that to the substantial absence of typos and grammatical errors, and anyone can see how Daring Fireball is one of my favorite reads.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
About narrative understanding
Jason Mittell (a.k.a. @jmittell):
Lost is a show featuring time travel, smoke monsters, and clairvoyance—do we really need to understand how everything works enough to recreate the island in our basement?
That’s exactly what I think too. Wanting to understand everything about a story often leads to missing the point of the story itself. (Another reason why I keep thinking of Donnie Darko when I watch Lost. But that’s another story, indeed.)
Sunday, May 9, 2010
What the web is
Want to know if your ‘HTML application’ is part of the web? Link me into it. Not just link me to it; link me into it. Not just to the black-box frontpage. Link me to a piece of content. Show me that it can be crawled, show me that we can draw strands of silk between the resources presented in your app. That is the web: The beautiful interconnection of navigable content.
Friday, April 23, 2010
About being corn-fed
Michael Pollan:
We’ve come to think of “corn-fed” as some kind of old-fashioned virtue, which it may well be when you’re referring to Midwestern children, but feeding large quantities of corn to cows for the greater part of their lives is a practice neither particularly old nor virtuous.
From The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, I.4.3 (Kindle location 1312).
I wasn’t prepared for the amount of new information I have been finding in this book. I’m glad I’ve been gradually changing my eating habits—not in the sense of abandoning meat (not going to happen), but of trying to stick to more sustainable and healthier ways.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Ihnatko sums up the iPad
Andy Ihnatko, in one of the best early reviews/beginner’s guides I’ve read so far:
I’m already impressed as hell with the iPad. I think it won’t really shine through as the utterly refreshing new articulation of personal computing that it is until late this year, when these knockoffs enter the market and we can fully appreciate how hard it is to do this sort of thing right.
The iPad is new, and revolutionary. And after a week of using it in my office, a day of using it freely in the real world, and after sampling the first releases of third party software, I know for sure that it’s been done right.
The quote comes right from the end of the article, a very long one that deserves to be read in full. If you’re interested in these sorts of things, that is.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Real work and computers
The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.
The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.
The original article was published almost two months ago, after Apple announced the iPad. I stumbled upon it again today, still appreciating how much sense it makes.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
“You’ll wonder why you ever used anything else”
I just stumbled on an old post by Marco Arment:
We don’t use Macs and Mac software because of the eye candy. We use them because of the design. Design and eye candy are very different—design is a combination of how it looks, what it does (and doesn’t do), and how it works.
Use a Mac for 6 months, and you’ll wonder why you ever used anything else.
Couldn’t have put it better myself.
I know where they can go
Found in a job posting:
Santa Clara University does not sponsor any visa applications for this position. The successful candidate must be able to provide evidence of identity and legal authorization to work in the United States.
I’d like to apply only to tell them where they can go.
A great read on e-books and web standards
Joe Clark on A List Apart:
It may be unseemly to dance on graves, but HTML wins again.
And also:
Bet against HTML for online distribution and you’ve backed the wrong horse.
I read this on the day I was told my book will have an electronic version. I hope my publisher is betting on the winning horse.
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