a more or less weekly digest of juicy stuff

• a tale of two bridges, highly recommended
• you should be amazed, if you're able to read this, you live in the most amazing time imaginable. and the funniest thing is, most of us never even notice
• "pyramiding": efficient identification of rare subjects, "pyramiding" is a search process based upon the view that people with a strong interest in a topic or field tend to know people more expert than themselves. we find that pyramiding in each case identifies the best solution within the search space using an average of only 30% of the effort required by mass screening (pdf)
• on being comfortable not knowing, i won't be able to answer all your questions. rather, i can show you how to be lost productively, and how to become comfortable not knowing things and teaching yourself
• really achieving your childhood dreams, by randy pausch
• value is created by doing, doing things is really hard-it's why, for example, you can generally tell people what you're working on without ndas, and most patents never matter. the value, and the difficulty, comes from execution
• why designers leave, every person who works in a creative field has an aspiration for her work, a yearning for that ideal plane which is the culmination of her taste. when an environment fails, over and over and over again, to provide her with a means to follow her internal compass, then she will leave
• code is not literature and we are not readers. rather, interesting pieces of code are specimens and we are naturalists. so instead of trying to pick out a piece of code and reading it and then discussing it like a bunch of comp lit. grad students, i think a better model is for one of us to play the role of a 19th century naturalist returning from a trip to some exotic island to present to the local scientific society a discussion of the crazy beetles they found
• the unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of "writer's block" (pdf)
• i love all caps and i am never going to stop using them
• a handyman's toolbox, i'm not against learning new technologies. but i only introduce them when i reach an impasse the simplest tool in my toolbox can't fix
• a conference call in real life, hilarious
• the smile man, short film by anton lanshakov