December 2010
8 posts
Best of 2010
Here are the most popular posts of 2010. Thanks for reading!
Editing Google Docs in Emacs
Coding blind
Google Apps Script + Spreadsheets = Mashup Hub
Engineering is all about failure
Taylorism in the modern tech industry
Some posts that I thought were good but didn’t get as popular:
Gabriel vs Brooks
Collecting Needles
There is an interesting comment thread on reddit about my recent post about “and/or”. My favorite:
TL;DR: applying Boolean logic to linguistics is an exercise in futility.
Another commenter points out something I had missed:
Also, “/” does not just mean logical AND. Two counterexamples: “his/her”, “male/female”. In these cases, as with...
Minimalism is not a viable intellectual strategy
There is a wave sweeping through the Internet cognoscenti – minimalism. The juggernaut of technology has brought us to a place where our minds are forced to march to the un-human rhythms of the global machine, our brains sizzling with pellets and factoids, with nary a clean break for a clear thought.
The answer to this, the minimalist pundits claim, is to retreat. Retreat from technology, and...
Parsing "and/or"
I’m flummoxed when I see come across the phrase “and/or”. What exactly does it mean when someone says “you can have lunch and/or dinner”? According to the Wikipedia entry, that would mean that you can choose among three possibilities: only lunch, only dinner, or both. It’s that last choice which makes it different from saying “you can have lunch or...
“…in chess, as in so many things, what computers are good at is where...”
– Garry Kasparov, The Chess Master and the Computer, New York Review of Books, Feb 2010
Use Accessibility Technologies Before You Have To
All you touch typists out there, spending 10 hours a day at your keyboard — listen up. Repetitive stress injuries will catch up with you sooner or later, it’s just a question of when. You’re probably already feeling slight tinges of pain at the end of the workday, and ignoring it, because it always goes away the next morning. Don’t do that! Start thinking right now about...
“Paper [is] a technology — one of the olddest and most successful in human...”
– The Editors, Codex in Crisis