I seem to be a verb - posts tagged 'wonder'

"We age because the world changes.While senescence damages individuals and has..."

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 02:47:49 GMT

We age because the world changes.
While senescence damages individuals and has an evolutionary cost, it has a benefit of its own: It allows each lineage to adapt faster to changing conditions. ... When conditions change, a senescent species can drive immortal competitors to extinction.

–FightAging.org

"Misbehavior and punishment are not opposites that cancel each other - on the ..."

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 17:59:24 GMT

"Misbehavior and punishment are not opposites that cancel each other - on the contrary they breed and reinforce each other."

–Haim G. Ginott

[Reposted from konrad via Tellerrand]

"Im Informationszeitalter ist nicht mehr Wissen Macht, sondern Zeit zu haben s..."

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 17:50:07 GMT

"Im Informationszeitalter ist nicht mehr Wissen Macht, sondern Zeit zu haben sich Wissen anzueignen."

–fasel

[Reposted from schlipsnerd]

"There is no simple relationship between what is taught and what is learnt. Me..."

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 14:39:23 GMT

"There is no simple relationship between what is taught and what is learnt. Meaning cannot simply be transferred to students. Students make their own meaning. ... What students manage to construct out of a lecture will depend on what they already know and can bring to bear in constructing new knowledge, and with what they are trying to do.

Lectur[es are] just about the least flexible resource students have. The lecturer cannot easily adjust to individuals' existing ways of seeing things, in the content, pace or manner of treatment of the content of the lecture. There is simply too little scope for the negotiation and construction of meaning for much development of understanding to take place."

–Twenty terrible reasons for lecturing (via @fin)

"There's a reason why there are 40-thousand software implementations of Scrum/..."

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 16:18:06 GMT

[Reposted from fin]

"There's a reason why there are 40-thousand software implementations of Scrum/Agile on the web. Everybody who's ever sat in a team room looking at the wall wanted to "fix" it. ...

"Powerful" Agile tools usually have all sorts of fields, checkboxes, and whiz-bangs. ... The job becomes completing the tool, not working the project. Agile becomes just another way to micro-manage and control."

–Tyranny of the Tools

"In today’s world of maximizing shareholder value, CEOs and their top managers..."

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:45:01 GMT

"In today’s world of maximizing shareholder value, CEOs and their top managers have massive incentives to focus most of their attentions on the expectations market, rather than the real job of running the company producing real products and services. ... Expectations are where the money is, and improving real-market performance is the hardest and slowest way to increase expectations.

In the period of shareholder capitalism, executive compensation has exploded while corporate performance has declined. “Maximizing shareholder value” turned out to be the disease of which it purported to be the cure."

–The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value - Forbes

"The U.S. political system becomes more polarized and more dysfunctional every..."

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 02:38:45 GMT

"The U.S. political system becomes more polarized and more dysfunctional every cycle, at greater and greater human cost. The next Republican president will surely find himself or herself at least as stymied by this dysfunction as President Obama, as will the people the political system supposedly serves."

–When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality? [New York Magazine]

"If our own hearts and curiosity led our [studies], we would be surrounded wi...

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 18:00:27 GMT

"If our own hearts and curiosity led our [studies], we would be surrounded with very interesting, intelligent and self-sufficient adults ... I have hope that the internet will eventually take us there." This! See full comic.

[Reposted from dramaturg via Weks]

"The act of discovery [is] not complete until [you have] taught [what you lear..."

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 21:19:05 GMT

[Reposted from c3o]

"The act of discovery [is] not complete until [you have] taught [what you learned] to someone else."

"There's no "finished," just more acceptable states of incompleteness. Done is..."

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:07:23 GMT

"There's no "finished," just more acceptable states of incompleteness. Done is a beautiful idea, it it is also impossible."

–fchimero

Upgrade Democracy is a new liquid democracy software initiative. Quoting Buck...

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:52:00 GMT

Upgrade Democracy is a new liquid democracy software initiative. Quoting Bucky seems like a good start!

"Sex-positivity is the belief that sex and sexiness are… okay. It’s the belief..."

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 19:22:46 GMT

"Sex-positivity is the belief that sex and sexiness are… okay. It’s the belief that people shouldn’t be judged by the sex they have. It’s the belief that consent matters and social norms do not. It’s the belief that porn and erotica are valid media of expression (not that the current porn industry is hunky-dory, cause it’s not) and that sex work ought to be just work (not that it currently is). It’s the belief that neither “slut” nor “prude” should be an insult. It’s the belief that every sexual and gender identity is valid."

–The Pervocracy: Sex-Pozzie.

[Reposted from sellerie]

"Books are great at capturing ideas, claiming cultural ownership of ideas, gen..."

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 05:26:18 GMT

"Books are great at capturing ideas, claiming cultural ownership of ideas, generating speaking gigs based on ideas and getting authors paid for ideas. But books are much, much less great at actually propagating ideas. ...

Books don’t go viral ...because the thing that makes books lucrative to authors and publishers — their ability to restrain ideas, to wall them off from the non-book-buying world — is antithetical to virality. ...

The system has been designed to advance books within the marketplace, rather than the marketplace of ideas. It aims at publicity rather than publicness, at selling objects rather than propelling the arguments they contain."

–‘Public Parts’ and its public parts: In a networked world, can a book go viral? » Nieman Journalism Lab

Ideas are always parts of processes and discourses, never finished products. The web is the only medium that can represent/provide this adequately.

(Related: Scientific journals. I can really only sum that whole clusterfuck up in three letters: WTF?!)

Also, still badly needed: Much, much better online discussion software. Let's please work on that?

"There are too many cool things to be done and I'm not enough people to do the..."

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 04:35:16 GMT

"There are too many cool things to be done and I'm not enough people to do them all."

–bre

"As with music and painting, we use language to express what we are not able t..."

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:46:04 GMT

"As with music and painting, we use language to express what we are not able to say."

–Michèle Cooke

Richard Feynman on beauty in science & not being frightened by not having all...

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:57:42 GMT

Richard Feynman on beauty in science & not being frightened by not having all the answers

"As a programmer you must have a series of wins, every single day. It is the D..."

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:10:46 GMT

"As a programmer you must have a series of wins, every single day. It is the Deus Ex Machina of hacker success. It is what makes you eager for the next feature, and the next after that. And a large team is poison to small wins. The nature of large teams is such that even when you do have wins, they come after long, tiresome and disproportionately many hurdles. And this takes all the wind out of them."

–Rethrick Construction

""done right all A/B testing will eventually lead to porn" via @aweissman"

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:59:44 GMT

""done right all A/B testing will eventually lead to porn" via @aweissman"

–pawell

"Yes, things are a little screwy all over the place, but you can do ANYTHING y..."

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:45:56 GMT

"Yes, things are a little screwy all over the place, but you can do ANYTHING you want now. NONE of the perfect software has been written. It's all waiting for improvement. You can do anything you want and profit from it."

–Wccrawford countering the previous post on Hacker News

"Computers have vastly underserved their users. ... It’s a beautiful shrine bu..."

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:41:08 GMT

"Computers have vastly underserved their users. ... It’s a beautiful shrine built on a foundation of tinker toys. ...
Today’s computing can’t take us into the future. ... Computer science has utterly failed to tackle the real world problems, things like automating jobs so people don’t have to work, or working hand in hand with humans to explore solutions we have trouble seeing ourselves. We are so far from a Star Trek-style future utopia that it breaks my heart. ...

You should literally be able to tell [the computer] what you want it to do and it would do its darnedest to do a good job for you. Computers today are the opposite of that. They own you and bend you to their will. And I don’t think people fully realize how trapped we are within this aging infrastructure. ...

The majority of users are algorithmically illiterate. That’s a travesty in 2011. ... Programming, at least the fundamentals, should be taught in elementary school just like any other language ..."

–The Real Zack Morris | The State of the Art is Terrible

Oh, what a lovely all-over-the-place rant.

"I performed at colleges and scanned the room for what I could take. Even a bo..."

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:26:22 GMT

"I performed at colleges and scanned the room for what I could take. Even a box of chalk slipped into my pocket reassured me that I still had my freedom—the freedom to steal, to self-destruct, to ruin everything."

–Miranda July: Shoplifting to Stay Free (The New Yorker)

"The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures whic..."

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:28:58 GMT

"The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."

–Randall Munroe

Reconstructing visual experiences from brain activity evoked by natural movie...

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 01:00:21 GMT

Reconstructing visual experiences from brain activity evoked by natural movies

The left clip is a segment of the movie that the subject viewed while in the magnet. The right clip shows the reconstruction of this movie from brain activity measured using fMRI. The reconstruction was obtained using only each subject's brain activity and a library of 18 million seconds of random YouTube video. (In brief, the algorithm processes each of the 18 million clips through the brain model, and identifies the clips that would have produced brain activity as similar to the measured brain activity as possible. The clips used to fit the model, those used to test the model and those used to reconstruct the stimulus were entirely separate.)

Waaaaaait, what? Hooooly crap! Brain spinning. O_O

"Es ist Talk Like A Pirate Day! Ich fang an: "Nur ein mündiger und aufgeklärte..."

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 05:43:35 GMT

"Es ist Talk Like A Pirate Day! Ich fang an: "Nur ein mündiger und aufgeklärter Mensch ist frei.""

–Afelia

"If you sent me to an alternate universe where politicians were honest, bureau..."

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 18:59:38 GMT

"If you sent me to an alternate universe where politicians were honest, bureaucrats cared, and voters weren’t so irrational—a world where good-idea policy initiatives tended to actually accomplish their stated goals without unexpected negative side effects—a world where the clear and visible end result of getting governments to do more and more was that economies grew faster and faster and people became happier and happier—then, in that world, I wouldn’t be a libertarian."

–Eliezer Yudkowsky | Cato Unbound

"We all have many sensitive spots, but one of the most universal is the fear o..."

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 15:01:49 GMT

"We all have many sensitive spots, but one of the most universal is the fear of not being everything to your partner — the fear, in other words, that (s)he might find somebody worthier. It is the fear of being alone."

–Dan Savage on the Virtues of Infidelity - NYTimes.com

But with a growth mindset, these are fears you need to overcome, not satisfy.

Super: Die Plakatkampagne der Berliner Piraten. Das nenn ich mal ein wählbare...

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 07:29:22 GMT

Super: Die Plakatkampagne der Berliner Piraten. Das nenn ich mal ein wählbares Programm! (Ich hab mal jenes Plakat weggelassen, das der Standard als einziges wahrgenommen hat.)

Auch super: Der Soup-Link oben rechts im Eck auf der Website des Designers ♥

"I am nothing, and so I am finally free to be myself. ... When I have no image..."

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 01:06:04 GMT

"I am nothing, and so I am finally free to be myself. ... When I have no image or identity or ego to protect, I can begin to see and accept things as they really are. That is the beginning of positive change."

–Paul Buchheit: I am nothing

"Life expectancy increases slightly every year as treatment strategies and tec..."

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 17:54:52 GMT

"Life expectancy increases slightly every year as treatment strategies and technologies improve. At present, more than one year of research is required for each additional year of expected life. Actuarial escape velocity occurs when this ratio reverses, so that life expectancy increases faster than one year per year of research."

–Indefinite lifespan - Wikipedia

"Most countercultures operate with the exact same kind of snobbery and social ..."

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 07:56:38 GMT

"Most countercultures operate with the exact same kind of snobbery and social hierarchies as a high school cafeteria."

–Tales Of Mere Existence‬‏: Times I Tried To Be A Hipster

"If you do something you enjoy long enough, eventually someone will come along..."

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 17:07:34 GMT

"If you do something you enjoy long enough, eventually someone will come along and offer you money to stop enjoying it."

–Dallas Clayton

"Es gibt kein Real Life, nur ein Nahleben, das sich auf den Umkreis des Körper..."

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 19:00:41 GMT

"Es gibt kein Real Life, nur ein Nahleben, das sich auf den Umkreis des Körpers beschränkt, und ein Fernleben, das den Geist entgrenzt."

–haekelschwein

[Reposted from cheatha via lisa]

"My job, on any given day, is doing something which makes me happy – for a com..."

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 10:30:21 GMT

"My job, on any given day, is doing something which makes me happy – for a complex definition of “happy”, which includes things not strictly related to me, such as “Is the world better for this having been done?” and “Are the people who matter to me well taken care of if I do this?” "

–Kalzumeus Software: How Running A Business Changes The Way You Think

"I distinctly remember the first time I quoted someone over email. I typed a ..."

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 10:25:49 GMT

"I distinctly remember the first time I quoted someone over email. I typed a number, agonized over it for ten minutes, then typed a number 50% higher, then curled up in the fetal position for a few minutes, then impulsively hit Send and started hyperventilating. Ten minutes later I got an email back and, to my enduring surprise, they did not hate my guts."

–Kalzumeus Software: How Running A Business Changes The Way You Think

"In a[n early stage] startup there are no job descriptions. There's triage."

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 18:58:46 GMT

"In a[n early stage] startup there are no job descriptions. There's triage."

–Christopher Kahler, Qriously

"I am only the current location of these thoughts."

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 01:22:19 GMT

"I am only the current location of these thoughts."

–Jason Overby

"The more captchas you solve, the more human you become."

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 16:04:55 GMT

"The more captchas you solve, the more human you become."

–TomK32

Bufalino– The One Person Camper Let's tear down all apartment buildings ...

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 18:07:56 GMT

Bufalino– The One Person Camper

Let's tear down all apartment buildings and each get one of these instead. Remaining challenge: Make them modular so you can dock several together for a while to create temporary larger communal living spaces.

[Reposted from japande via n0g]

"In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour..."

Tue, 31 May 2011 23:55:18 GMT

In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour, a pay rise– fully realising the answer may be no.

In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid "putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes… A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

When an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results.

–This column will change your life: The Guardian

Lawrence Lessig: e-G8 KeynoteI don't actually like the presentation that much...

Tue, 31 May 2011 23:49:41 GMT

Lawrence Lessig: e-G8 Keynote

I don't actually like the presentation that much. But here's the important message:

Government is vulnerable to exploitation by incumbent interests. The internet, on the other hand, encourages outsider innovation. Therefore we need to insist on minimalism when it comes to government regulation.