“Instant classic” is, of course, an oxymoron. A classic is something that has passed the test of time, and by definition that cannot happen instantly. But how long should the test of time last? In his book Love What Lasts, Joshua Gibbs argues that 100 years after the death of the artist is about the […]
Suppose project completion time follows a Pareto (power law) distribution with parameter α. That is, for t > 1, the probability that completion time is bigger than t is t-α. (We start out time at t = 1 because that makes the calculations a little simpler.) Now suppose we know that a project has lasted […]
When George Will began his career as a syndicated columnist, he asked his editor William Buckley how he could ever come up with two columns per week. Buckley replied that at least twice a week something would annoy him [Will], and he just needed to write about it. I don’t write about what I find […]
