Year: 2004

Paul Graham on What You Can't Say

Paul Graham: What You Can't Say. “The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. … Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head, anything is allowed. … But, as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders.” [Hack the Planet]

More provocative thinking from Paul Graham. Some bits and pieces that particularly caught my eye, although it's all worth reading and thinking about:

A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. This should be the m.o. of any scholar, but scientists seem much more willing to look under rocks. [10]

Why? It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics. Or it could be because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, and this makes scientists bolder. (Or it could be that, because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, you have to be smart to get jobs as a scientist, rather than just a good politician.)

Or this:

Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.

 

Power to the Edge

Power to the Edge:[A 9MB pdf] A new book by Dave Alberts and Richard Hayes – open sourced in its entirety by CCRP.

This book is truly a must-read for anyone interested in decentralization and the social and organizational relevance of shifting power to the edge, whether in a commercial or a defense context. As you read about the technology enablers of the edge, it’ll become clear why products such as Groove – as COTS enablers of the fully-networked collaborative environment – have such immediate relevance to the defense community.

A debt of gratitude goes to John Stenbit and Lin Wells for catalyzing the creation of this tremendously timely, useful and relevant piece of work. [Ray Ozzie’s Weblog]

Once again, it appears that the U.S. military is moving ahead on figuring out new ways to organize and manage work, while commercial organizations create pale imitations of concepts long since discarded as unworkable.

Amazon tidbit from Kevin Kelly

Amazon’s not-really-sekrit 800 number. In “Cool Tools,” Kevin Kelly writes:

On average I’ve ordered from Amazon once a week for the last four years or so. Not just books, but power tools, toys, kitchen stuff, the whole lot. Given the volume of my orders I think their customer service is super great; it sets the gold standard for other companies. No other merchant online or offline has provided the ease and accuracy of ordering as Amazon does. Still, in my experience there are occasionally glitches that their email-bots can’t deal with, usually entailing a minor billing snafu. In these rare cases you need Amazon.com’s almost-secret real-person customer service telephone number. You won’t find it on their website. I once got it by calling 800 directory assistance. In any case, they make it hard to find because a call costs Amazon more, so you should jot down this number for those special moments when only a human will do: 800-201-7575.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

Worth having someplace I know I can get to.

Let’s get p2p about RSS share your feeds.

Let’s get p2p about RSS — share your feeds.

Blog pioneer and gadfly Dave Winer has created “A commons for sharing outlines, feeds, taxonomy”. Sign up and share your RSS feeds with the world — and find out who subscribes to yours. For example: find out who subscribes to Smart Mobs

Thanks, Dave!

(Via boingboing)

[Smart Mobs]

“Dave” is innovating again and that always makes things interesting. If you’re curious, here’s some of the folks who subscribe to McGee’s Musings.

Crichton on Reason

Crichton on Willy.

The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.

Although only just now in the blogdex, Crichton’s 3-month-old scathing indictment of the pop-environmentalism movement in… [TeledyN]

I finally got around to this item in my aggregator over the Chrismas holiday. In a speech to the Commonwealth Club in September, Crichton makes an interesting argument that today’s environmental movement is best thought of as a secular religion that operates on the basis of faith instead of evidence.

How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There’s a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren’t true. It isn’t that these “facts” are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all—what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.

I think Crichton is making an even broader argument about the role of reason and evidence in coping with today’s world. Let’s hope he gets heard here as widely as he does with his fiction.

Technology Review weblog – now with RSS

Technology Review has a blog. Well, it’s 3 months old now, but I didn’t know that MIT’s Technology Review — featuring the brilliant Henry Jenkins and the equally brilliant Simson Garfinkel — had a daily weblog. I’ve just blogrolled it…. [JD’s New Media Musings]

It also now has an RSS feed, although a truncated one with what looks to be the title plus the first 50 characters or so. Better than nothing, but still trapped in the notion that I should somehow be forced to go to the site to extract the full value.

Craftsperson and tool

Rich Gold on PowerPoint. Christina points to UW’s David Farkas’ course readings in information design as a source of “fine reading”. His syllabus is also worth checking out to see how he’s chunked them into a semester’s worth of work. Since I’ve lately been very interested in the “controversy” related to PowerPoint, I wanted… [IDblog]

A good set of resources in general. Also, Beth points to a fascinating presentation by the late Rich Gold on Powerpoint as a Toy for Thought. As much of a Tufte fan as I am, I think the rhetorical device of blaming the tool, while fun and entertaining, gets in the way.

The relationship between tools, craft, and craftsperson is complex. My wife is a photographer. If you want to annoy her, admire one of her pictures and then ask her what kind of camera she uses. Yes, what the tools can and can’t do matters. But not as much as Tufte would have us believe. Gold widens the perspective to remind us in the hands of a craftsperson the constraints of a tool can be turned to advantage.