Creativity Removing barriers to creating amazing things Tech The best and worst tech of the decade Visualizing browser market share over time Math The rise and rise of Python in computational science Why exponential growth is big (cartoon) Math teachers…
Monthly Archives: December 2009
Doing good work with bad tools
Charlie Parker was one of the greatest jazz musicians. But unlike most artists, he had a cavalier attitude toward his equipment. He would pawn his saxophone for drug money and show up for a concert without an instrument. He assumed…
Did the MS Office ribbon work?
One of the major design goals for Microsoft Office 2007 was making features easier to discover. A study had shown that about 90% of the feature requests for Microsoft Office were for features already in the product. People just didn’t…
Managing biological data
Jon Udell’s latest Interviews with Innovators podcast features Randall Julian of Indigo BioSystems. I found this episode particularly interesting because it deals with issues I have some experience with. The problems in managing biological data begin with how to store…
Same color illusion
Are squares A and B are the same color? I found this illusion on John Baez’s site. It was created by Edward Adelson in 1995 and is the subject of a Wikipedia article. Related post: Optical illusion, mathematical illusion
Weekend miscellany
Hilarious performance of The Twelve Days of Christmas: The math of parallel parking Stopping the growth of the Sahara using bacteria to make a concrete wall Overview of BUGS (Bayesian software) from Andrew Gelman New ways of projecting the globe…
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Less isn't more. Just enough is more.
From Ten Things I Have Learned by Milton Glaser: Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense … If you look…
Using the Windows file explorer without a mouse
The Windows File Explorer has a number of keyboard shortcuts that do not apply to Windows programs in general. First of all, you can type Windows key-E to open the File Explorer. You can close it by typing Alt-F4.
If you have a great idea, don't tell it to a standards body
Another quote from Douglas Crockford’s talk The State and Future of JavaScript: If you have a great idea, don’t tell it to a standards body. They are the last people in the world who should hear about it. What you…
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The virtual machine of the Internet
From Douglas Crockford’s talk The State and Future of JavaScript: There’s pressure to make it a better compilation target. Now, this is a big surprise. Everybody thought that the Java VM was going to be the VM of the internet,…
Twelve Days of Christmas and tetrahedral numbers
How many gifts are there in the song Twelve Days of Christmas? Day 1: 1 gift Day 2: 1 + 2 = 3 gifts Day 3: 1 + 2 + 3 = 6 gifts … Day 12: 1 + 2…
Word frequencies in human and computer languages
This is one of my favorite quotes from Starbucks’ coffee cups: When I was young I was mislead by flash cards into believing that xylophones and zebras were much more common. Alphabet books treat every letter as equally important even…
Breast cancer stem cells identified
From the article Proverbial new “Twist” in Breast Cancer Detection: … scientists at Johns Hopkins … have shown that a protein made by a gene called “Twist” may be the proverbial red flag that can accurately distinguish stem cells that…
Weekend miscellany
Learning faster than many think possible There is no speed limit Beating the system Advice for developing software and for life To go fast, do less Harvard study critical of the value of hospital IT projects Not worth the money…
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Creativity and faith
From Eugene Peterson: Creativity is difficult. When you are being creative, you’re living by faith. You don’t know what’s next because the created, by definition, is what’s never been before. So you’re living at the edge of something in which…
