Watched on Saturday January 28, 2012.
Bowling for Columbine, 2002 – ★★★★
Watched on Wednesday January 18, 2012.
If you’re a programmer or designer, then you’re not like most people. Just because you change your settings in apps you use doesn’t mean that your users will, unless they are also programmers and designers.
Do users change their settings? » UIE Brain Sparks
I change settings on everything I use, and one of my favourite things is getting a new program just so I can look through the settings. They’re right, I’m not like other people 🙂
Apple conditioned us to forget about terminals and command-line interaces. Apple conditioned us to forget about floppy disks. Apple conditioned us to forget about parallel ports and adopt USB. And now Apple is conditioning us to rethink the way we scroll our content, but also, the need for disc drives and physical media.
Before you set scrolling back to the “old” way, think about this.
BBC Worldwide have published their Annual Review for 2011 which highlights Doctor Who as one of the ‘most valuable’ brands, largely responsible for the corporations commercial success.
Doctor Who was also the number-three TV series purchased globally on iTunes in 2010/11.
Wow! Very good news for Doctor Who fans: looks like it will carry on for the foreseeable future!
Doctor Who Online – Doctor Who Boosts BBC profits in the 2011 Annual Review
My new order of importance for things to read when I’m on the web:
My new order of importance for things to read when I’m on the web:
Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Facebook, RSS reader, Reddit.
What’s yours?
Why Harry Potter Should Really Be All About Hermione Granger
Why Harry Potter Should Really Be All About Hermione Granger
And when Snape assigns homework, Harry is all, “Wah-Wah, there is sport tomorrow, fulfilling my responsibility will be so hard.” MEANWHILE Hermione is MOVING ****ING TIME so she can take more classes. Because girl knows SOMETHING is happening and she needs to STUDY THE EFF UP.
Focusing is about saying no. And when you say no, you piss people off. But the result is truly great products.
Steve Jobs, 1997
Jean-Luc wishes he could play WoW with us.
Happy birthday Jean-Luc!
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Douglas Adams, “The Salmon of Doubt”
Apple is now the largest mobile phone manufacturer by revenue
Apple is now the largest mobile phone manufacturer by revenue
Based on revenue, Apple is now the largest mobile phone provider in the world, surpassing even global leader Nokia.
Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
Laurens Van der Post
Overcoming Bias : Opinion Warning Signs
Overcoming Bias : Opinion Warning Signs
Signs that your opinions function more to signal loyalty and ability than to estimate truth.
Some great ones here, and they pretty much sum up conversations with religious people:
- You have little interest in getting clear on what exactly is the position being argued.
- You find it easy to conclude that those who disagree with you are insincere or stupid.
- You are reluctant to change your publicly stated positions in response to new info.
- You care more about consistency between your beliefs than about belief accuracy.
- Your opinion doesn’t much change after talking with smart folks who know more.
- You find it hard to list weak points and counter-arguments on your positions.
Shh! Sleeping.
Every person in this room has more access to information and scientific knowledge and what is now basic common sense than the authors of the Bible and the Koran. In fact, there’s not a person in this room who has ever met a person whose worldview is so narrow, just by the sheer time in which they appeared in history, as the worldviews of Abraham or Moses or Jesus or Mohammed.
Sam Harris
Something worth remembering. Jesus didn’t even know the germ theory of disease, and thought it was demons that causes all disease. This is someone people look up to as the son of God?
Words That Don’t Exist in the English Language
L’esprit de escalier: (French) The feeling you get after leaving a conversation, when you think of all the things you should have said. Translated it means “the spirit of the staircase.”
I often feel “The spirit of the staircase”!
Text and email are polite invitations to a conversation. They happen at the speed and leisure of both the sender and the receiver. In stark contrast, when you get a phone call, it’s almost always a convenient time for the caller and a bad time for the recipient, who I refer to as the “victim” because I insist on accuracy. My philosophy is that every phone conversation has a loser.
