• How to Write about Africa
  In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.
• Michael Maren: The Might Interview, "A complete waste of money that succeeds primarily at keeping westerners employed"
  Excellent piece, the best concise summary of why Western aid is probably not only not helping, but hurting African countries. Guy works for the Peace Corps, as a "white teacher" he's used as a pawn by local governments, takes job at aid agencies, which play political games, frame issues for donors in too simple terms, but donors don't care anyway. Way too good to quote
• 5 most common dreams and what they mean - TODAY Health - TODAYshow.com
  Falling, being chased, teeth falling out, back at school, spouse cheating. Didn't know being chased was so popular, i don't really have the other ones
• HTML Color Picker
  Get darker/lighter shades of any color.
• What are the secrets to a good apology? - Barking up the wrong tree
  Results indicated that relationships recovered significantly when offending partners used behaviors labeled as explicit acknowledgment, nonverbal assurance, and compensation.
• Water Use in Southwest Heads for a Day of Reckoning - NYTimes.com
  or, you could simply charge for water at the market price: "For the first time, federal estimates issued in August indicate that Lake Mead, the heart of the lower Colorado basin’s water system — irrigating lettuce, onions and wheat in reclaimed corners of the Sonoran Desert, and lawns and golf courses from Las Vegas to Los Angeles — could drop below a crucial demarcation line of 1,075 feet. If it does, that will set in motion a temporary distribution plan approved in 2007 by the seven states with claims to the river and by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, and water deliveries to Arizona and Nevada would be reduced. This could mean more dry lawns, shorter showers and fallow fields in those states, although conservation efforts might help them adjust to the cutbacks. California, which has first call on the Colorado River flows in the lower basin, would not be affected."

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• Table of Condiments and when they go bad
  handy. Ketchup = 5 months
• I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Google’s Pound of Flesh - Cringely on technology
  Speculation that Google wants to use its $30b cash to enter payday loan business: "When I did a Google web search on the term “payday loans” for example, the search results placed the uniformly negative news items near the bottom of the results, below the fold as we used to say in the newspaper business. Similar web searches on the terms “mortgage loan” and “auto loan” put the news in each case near the top of the results, significantly above the fold where it was more likely to be seen. Why would Google do that? Payday loans are despised by consumer advocacy groups, governments, and my Mom, alike. Nobody likes payday loans, except of course the companies that make billions providing and servicing them."
• A user’s guide to websites, part 1: If it wasn’t broken why fix it? « Rev Dan Catt's Blog
  Social media is really hard to scale. Features that work for 500 users break easily once you start adding more... the workarounds are imperfect at best
  (tags: startup)
• Who knows more about religion, atheists or believers?
  Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.
• Advanced Statistics: What Would Auerbach Do? « HoopSpeak.com
  50 years later, stat geeks are trying to measure things that Red Auerbach knew instinctively. He took three Hall of Famers in one draft
• Artist builds statue of middle finger, placed in front of stock exchange
  Maurizio Cattelan’s latest art piece is a monument of a middle finger in front of the Italian Stock Exchange.
• How Tucker Max Got Rejected by Publishing and Still Hit #1 New York Times
  rapport: "Tim: How did I go from Tucker's "Who the fuck are you?" to drinking with him an hour later and having lunch with him the following day? Out of 40 people lined up, why did I make the cut? Simple: I made an educated guess and used language to reflect it. I noticed Tucker had a big neck when he walked up to the panel seats. I therefore guessed he either 1) had trained in jiu-jitsu or wrestling, or 2) was a former football player who at least watched UFC. In response to "Who the fuck are you?" I answered "My name is Tim Ferriss. I'm writing my first book for Random House and used to compete as a fighter." That was the lure. Tucker responded: "What, MMA?" Bingo. "I competed mostly in wrestling and kickboxing, but I train at AKA in San Jose with Dave Camarillo. Swick, John Fitch, and a bunch of the UFC pros train there." A few minutes later, Tucker grabbed me to go drinking. Once again, it pays to know your audience, and being different is often more effective than being better."
• Incredibly Depressing Mega Millions Lottery Simulator!
  simulate 1000 plays of the mega millions, see how much you win. to send to people who play the lottery
• video of guy doing donuts around guy riding a segway
  skip to 3:15
• Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Cal Newport and Ben: IM Conversation
  "whether college students interested in journalism and politics, in order to stand out, must prematurely coalesce around a political party or established ideology, and hold certain to those beliefs, in order to get the appropriate internships at those publications." Cal:I received a recent e-mail from a Dartmouth student who... was worried that he had no specialized enough to be a computer science of physics major. In other words, to him, it was not just fixing on something right away at college, he had the impression that this decision had to be made much earlier… It’s a challenging question. To do what I do — professional research — certainly requires specialization. I think the same probably holds for politics — intern over your summers! — or journalism — start working up the ranks at the school paper! And I often encourage students to focus, focus, focus…
• Peter Thiel Has New Initiative To Pay Kids To “Stop Out Of School”
  Thiel is starting a new initiative that will offer grants of up to $100,000 for kids to drop out of school. Yes, you read that right. Though that’s not how Thiel puts it. Instead, he calls it “stopping out of school.” The basic gist is that he will fund up to 20 kids under the age of 20 who apply for this grant. His hope, obviously, isn’t to ruin their lives, but instead to find the best minds thinking about big things early in life. This is where true disruption comes from, Thiel believes.
• Coding Horror: Understanding Model-View-Controller (the design pattern)
  Skinnability cuts to the very heart of the MVC pattern. If your app isn't "skinnable", that means you've probably gotten your model's chocolate in your view's peanut butter, quite by accident. You should refactor your code so that only the controller is responsible for poking the model data through the relatively static templates represented by the view.
• What Happens At Y Combinator
  "If the question of what the company should do is settled, the most urgent question tends to be what to build first. Usually we advise startups to launch fast and iterate. This doesn't apply to all startups (Clustrix, for example), but it works for most. The reason we advise startups to launch fast is that till you launch you're designing for hypothetical or at best tame users, instead of actual ones. Once you launch you begin the conversation with real users, whose often surprising reactions to your product teach you what you should have been building."
• Freemium is working well for Mailchimp
  Lower cost of customer acquisition main driver
• Hacker News | Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook
• Xmarks Blog » End of the Road for Xmarks
  bookmarks synchronizer can't make any money: "Sit people in front of a search box and ask them to test it, and their first query is their own name. #FAIL. It turns out that with the exception of people doing market research, consumers using search are not typically looking for an authoritative list of sites within a category; they’re looking for an answer to a specific question. Undaunted, we tested some variants of the basic search idea, including a version where we inserted our results into the Google search results page. The verdict from users: too complicated."
• Wage Laws Squeeze South Africa’s Poor - NYTimes.com
  news from a land where the minimum wage really hurts: The sheriff arrived at the factory here to shut it down, part of a national enforcement drive against clothing manufacturers who violate the minimum wage. But women working on the factory floor — the supposed beneficiaries of the crackdown — clambered atop cutting tables and ironing boards to raise anguished cries against it. Thoko Zwane, 43, who has worked in factories since she was 15, lost her job in Newcastle when a Chinese-run factory closed in 2004. More than a third of South Africans are jobless. “Why? Why?” shouted Nokuthula Masango, 25, after the authorities carted away bolts of gaily colored fabric. She made just $36 a week, $21 less than the minimum wage, but needed the meager pay to help support a large extended family that includes her five unemployed siblings and their children.
• Predicting Aid Mistakes | Good Intentions Are Not Enough Predicting Aid Mistakes | An honest conversation about the impact of aid
  Bono fails to start textile market in Africa, group arrested for trying to 'rescue' orphans (children with parents) from Haiti, sexual predators using charities to access vulnerable children, volunteers arrested for practicing medicine without a license
• David Leibow: The Number One Cause of College Unhappiness
  Based on a 2009 survey conducted by the American College Health Association-National College Health Assessment, 39 percent of college students will feel hopeless during the school year, 25 percent will feel so depressed they'll find it hard to function, 47 percent will experience overwhelming anxiety and 84 percent will feel overwhelmed by all they have to do. Academics is #1 stressor, also finances and relationships
• Innocent and spent 29 years in solitary confinement | Robert King | Life and style | The Guardian

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• How to Pitch A Tech Blogger
  really useful Competitive or Political Drama - aka “company X releases product Y to kill company Z” Gossip - “CEO of company X gets tangled up in Y” Insight - “trend X will change the world because of A, B, and C” Evolution & Confluence - “service Y is like X for Z, capitalizing on the recent developments of A and B” Success - “company X has created super impressive technology Y, is growing fast, or has made lots of money” Failure - “company X is dying or has messed something up”
• Caring for Your Introvert - Magazine - The Atlantic
  The worst of it is that extroverts have no idea of the torment they put us through. Sometimes, as we gasp for air amid the fog of their 98-percent-content-free talk, we wonder if extroverts even bother to listen to themselves. Still, we endure stoically, because the etiquette books—written, no doubt, by extroverts—regard declining to banter as rude and gaps in conversation as awkward. We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts' Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say "I'm an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush."
• Hacker News | Is being an introvert okay?
• How Universities Work, or: What I Wish I’d Known Freshman Year: A Guide to American University Life for the Uninitiated « The Story's Story
  great overview of college, liked this bit: One reason professors don’t think much of student excuses is because many students have different priorities than professors. As undergraduates, most professors were part of the “academic culture” on campus; in contrast, many undergraduates are part of the collegiate (interested in the Greek system, parties, and football games) or vocational (interested in job training) cultures. The academic culture, “[has a] minimal understanding of, and sympathy for, the majority of their undergraduate students” at big public schools. The principle is accurate: if you aren’t in school to learn and develop your intellect—and most students in most schools aren’t, as Murray Sperber shows—you probably won’t understand your professors and their motivations. But they will understand yours. Academics are a disproportionately small percentage of the student population at most schools but an extraordinary large proportion of grad students and professors.
• Hacker koan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• Rands In Repose: The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster
  how to hold 1 on 1 meetings as a manager
• 9/26 is Petrov Day - Less Wrong
  On September 26th, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was the officer on duty when the warning system reported a US missile launch.  Petrov kept calm, suspecting a computer error. Then the system reported another US missile launch. And another, and another, and another. What had actually happened, investigators later determined, was sunlight on high-altitude clouds aligning with the satellite view on a US missile base. The Soviet Union's land radar could not detect missiles over the horizon, and waiting for positive identification would limit the response time to minutes.  Petrov's report would be relayed to his military superiors, who would decide whether to start a nuclear war. Petrov decided that, all else being equal, he would prefer not to destroy the world.  He sent messages declaring the launch detection a false alarm, based solely on his personal belief that the US did not seem likely to start an attack using only five missiles.
• Wildlife filmmaker Chris Palmer shows that animals are often set up to succeed
  The lemmings that plunge to their deaths in the 1958 Disney documentary "White Wilderness" were hurled ingloriously to their doom by members of the crew, as a Canadian documentary revealed. Palmer writes that Marlin Perkins, host of television's "Wild Kingdom," was known to bait animals into combat and to film captive beasts deposited into the wild, and that the avian stars of the 2001 film "Winged Migration" were trained to fly around cameras. Palmer asserts that manipulation pervades his field. Game farms, he writes, have built a cottage industry around supplying nature programs with exotic animals. Much of the sound in wildlife films is manufactured in the studio. Interactions between predator and prey are routinely staged. "And if you see a bear feeding on a deer carcass in a film," Palmer writes, "it is almost certainly a tame bear searching for hidden jellybeans in the entrails of the deer's stomach."
• Marginal Revolution: The value of a liberal arts education
  A liberal arts education helps us think with greater subtlety, even if it does not improve our performance on subsequent standardized tests.  I see an impact here even on the lesser students in state universities.  It also helps explain how the U.S. so suddenly leaps from having so-so high schools to outstanding graduate schools; how many other countries emphasize liberal arts education in between? Liberal arts education forces us to decode systems of symbols.  We learn how complex systems of symbols can be and what is required to decode them and why that can be a pleasurable process.  That skill will come in handy for a large number of future career paths.  It will even help you enjoy TV shows more. For related reasons, I believe that people who learn a second language as adults are especially good at understanding how other people might see things differently.
• How to Keep Feces Out of Your Bloodstream (or Lose 10 Pounds in 14 Days)
  Ferriss says don't eat anything with gluten in it. I should try this for a week or so

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• The Case Against College Athletic Recruiting - Newsweek - Education
• The Reluctant Father
  guy's feelings on being a father don't match up with what society expects. photo essay, good
• John Graham-Cumming: On being a nerd
  I can't help smiling at this because it illustrates the great difficulty persons of great computational ability (which I shall refer to as nerds) have in overlooking small matters of inaccuracy. It's not uncommon to see computer folk arguing over fine points of semantics or mathematics, or deliberately playing with words and puns, or laughing about the minutiae of some program, machine or situation. This comes about because nerds spend all their time worrying about details. Computers are exceedingly finnicky things. They do precisely what they are told (with heavy emphasis on precisely). Thus anyone who works with them (and by that I mean anyone who actually deals with computers rather than mere users) ends up training themselves to spot minute details that are incorrect or out of place.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• Keyboard Layout Analyzer - QWERTY vs Dvorak vs Colemak
  the best for me for both programming and essay writing was colemak. must I switch keyboard layouts again?
• Simplenote. An easy way to keep notes, lists, ideas, and more.
• prog21: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers
  Here's my advice to people who make these queries: Stop and think about all of your personal interests and solve a simple problem related to one of them. For example, I practice guitar by playing along to a drum machine, but I wish I could have human elements added to drum loops, like auto-fills and occasional variations and so on. What would it take to do that? I could start by writing a simple drum sequencing program--one without a GUI--and see how it went. I also take a lot of photographs, and I could use a tagging scheme that isn't tied to a do-everything program like Adobe Lightroom. That's simple enough that I could create a minimal solution in an afternoon. The two keys: (1) keep it simple, (2) make it something you'd actually use.
• Ten Steps To Ten Thousand Sign Ups Before We Even Launch Our Startup - Sachin Agarwal's blog
  make users ask for invites publicly, turn on invites for only a few hours at a time
• Dickens in Lagos - Lapham’s Quarterly
  "Then [Somerset] moved on to Charles Dickens. His identification with the works of these long-dead British writers was total. “All of those characters are me,” Somerset explained. “Neither a British nor American young man living in the twenty-first century can understand a Dickens as well as I can. I am living in a Dickens atmosphere. Our country is at least one or two centuries behind the Western world. My neighborhood—bleak, poor, with small domestic industries, children playing on the street, the parents are fighting with each other, some are with great debt, everyone is dirty. That is Dickens. In that Dickens atmosphere I grew up."
• Andy Borowitz: The Good Enough Baby : The New Yorker
  hilarious. During the past few decades, early-development “experts” have stressed the importance of so-called “enrichment activities”: reading to babies, singing to them, even talking to them. We are now finding that these activities, in addition to being excruciating for the parent, may actually be harmful to the baby, lengthening her attention span to the point where she will be unable to enjoy most popular entertainment. Fortunately, there’s a simple way to reverse this damage, using a system I call FIT (Facebook, iPhone, TV). By exposing your baby to these three things for as many hours as possible, you’ll insure that she’ll be well equipped for a lifetime of pointless multitasking. Quick test: Put your hands in front of your eyes and play peekaboo with your baby. If she ignores you and picks up your phone, reward her with her favorite app.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• WMT Annual Income Statement - Wal-Mart Stores Inc Annual Financials
  (tags: design thesis)
• WMT Balance Sheet | Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Common St Stock - Yahoo! Finance
  (tags: design thesis)
• "My Lie": Why I falsely accused my father - Memoirs - Salon.com
  Interview with a woman who falsely accused her father of molesting her, withdrew the accusation, wrote a book
• The Fed, Translated Into English : Planet Money : NPR
  really cool tool, a Fed press release translated into phrases like, "Nobody's hiring. The construction business still sucks"
• really, really bad english
  as thebrowser says, is this real? I'll have the nose broth with ass entries, and a side of jumping clitoris.
• How the planned execution of Teresa Lewis challenges our views on gender and capital punishment. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine
  Victor Streib, a professor of law at Ohio Northern University and an expert on gender bias, noted in 1996 that while women comprise 13 percent of arrests for murder, they receive only 2 percent of the death sentences. "It's like there's something more valuable about women's lives," he has said. "Women are also treated differently when they're victims."
• Snipshot: Edit pictures online
  online photo editor, almost offers as many features as iphoto, pretty cool
• Jeff Bezos lives to minimize regret
  So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.” I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision. And, I think that’s very good. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. That’s the kind of thing that in the short-term can confuse you, but if you think about the long-term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• Story of the Internet's beginnings, Wired Magazine
  When Steadman encountered HotWired’s infamous “Login or Join” home page, he wondered how someone like Rossetto could so misunderstand one of the fundamental aspects of the web. “Because it was necessary to register to read anything on the site, it was impossible to link from anywhere else on the web to HotWired. It was my great concern that, as a leader in the space, HotWired could precipitate many more ‘premium’ content sites that prevented linking content.” He was enough of a pragmatist to know that the only way to affect change at HotWired, to make sure that linking on the web worked, was from within HotWired. He sent a resume by email.
• Soccer: Is European football eating itself - ESPN
  good summary of the problems that european teams are in. the essential problem is that winning is linked with spending money, as long as it's zero sum they'll always spend into bankruptcy "UEFA, European soccer's governing body, will implement its Financial Fair Play scheme by the 2012-13 season. It will ban teams that spend more than they earn from continental competitions. Clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City would be in danger of missing out on the tournament, the Champions League, that they spend so heavily to gain access to."
• 25 Classic Fonts That Will Last a Whole Design Career
  for when i get tired of helvetica everything
• Report: More Colleges Offering Dick-Around Abroad Programs | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
  "Taking time to go fuck around abroad has become essential to a well-rounded education," said New York University dean of student affairs Christina White. "We urge all our students to pick a program that's right for them, whether it's six weeks dicking around in the Spanish countryside, or six months sticking your thumb as far up your ass as you possibly can in Japan or South Korea."

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• Facts About Text Messaging | Walyou
  10% of texters under 25 think texting while having sex is acceptable. not sure where the data is from. why do so many people think texting while using the bathroom is unacceptable?
• advanced form validation example
  inline value checking, hints while typing, pretty cool, a list apart demo
• Mysterious force holds back Nasa probe in deep space - Telegraph
  Researchers say Pioneer 10, which took the first close-up pictures of Jupiter before leaving our solar system in 1983, is being pulled back to the sun by an unknown force. The effect shows no sign of getting weaker as the spacecraft travels deeper into space, and scientists are considering the possibility that the probe has revealed a new force of nature.
• table for one
  pictures of people eating alone, mesmerizing
• Coming Home to Vim / Steve Losh
• world subways at scale
  drawings of subway routes, cool

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

• Corner Office - C.E.O. of FindTheBest.com on Job Interviews - Interview - NYTimes.com
  So, people are black boxes. You can ask them a question, and they’ll tell you whatever they think you want to hear. So, you’ve got to throw an impulse function at them. I try to keep them off balance. I try to give them a question that feels like a two-by-four between the eyes. Q. Like? A. I’ll start off with, “How smart are you?” People get really uncomfortable. They don’t know what to do, and they don’t know how to answer it. They know it’s kind of a trick, and it flusters them. Or I’ll take a look at something that they did, and I’ll tell them it’s a big mistake and then just see how they react. Do they start crying? Do they get in a terrible rage and argue with you, or do they come back and systematically tell you why you’re wrong, or perhaps agree with you on certain areas? So, I’m looking for that.
• “You just need to get started” is bad advice | I Will Teach You To Be Rich
  A progress-centric person who has an interesting idea for a book jumps right into writing it, while an idea-centric person runs the idea through a wringer — talking to agents and writers, looking for similar works that have sold recently, etc. — before deciding to invest the years required to write and market it. A progress-centric person quits his job to start his on blog-based online business, assuming he’ll figure out the details as he goes along, while an idea-centric person invests the months — maybe years — of hard work necessary to find a business idea with a real chance of supporting him, understanding that the right answer might be for him to build a valuable skill before going freelance.
• the Data Liberation Front
  The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products.  We do this because we believe that you should be able to export any data that you create in (or import into) a product.  We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to "liberate" their products.  This is our mission statement: Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google's products.  Our team's goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.
• Adaptive Traffic Lights Could Achieve ‘The Green Wave’ | Wired Science | Wired.com
  The researchers ran a simulation of their approach in the city center of Dresden. The area has 13 traffic light–controlled intersections, 68 pedestrian crossings, a train station that serves more than 13,000 passengers on an average day and seven bus and tram lines that cross the network every 10 minutes in opposite directions. The flexible self-control approach reduced time stuck waiting in traffic by 56 percent for trams and buses, 9 percent for cars and trucks, and 36 percent for pedestrians crossing intersections. Dresden is now close to implementing the new system, says Helbing, and Zurich is also considering the approach.
• Openbook - List of public facebook statuses where people mention "Cheated on my wife"
  Whoops!
• US college blocks Facebook and Twitter in social experiment | Media | The Guardian
  Others have been less enthusiastic. Several of the college's computer geeks have rerouted internet access through Canada or Norway or used proxy websites to break through the firewall. Some students have nipped to the nearby Hilton hotel to use its wireless access. Giovanni Acosta, 21, knows how to overcome the blackout but decided against it, as he wanted to see the outcome of the experiment. At first he said he was twitchy. "I had to log on to Facebook even though I knew it was blocked, and I did that every 10 minutes or so, again and again," he said. "But now the itch has gone. I've learnt how much I was being distracted."

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.