October 2010
1 post
“Talent is not when your friends tell you they love your work, but when people...”
– James Danziger (via kottke)
August 2010
1 post
“I mean, seriously. I’ve stood in several general areas on more than one...”
– Merlin Mann - Communities Erect: Thoughts on the Intrinsic Value of Saying When You’re Standing Near Something
June 2010
1 post
“In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties,...”
– Nick Paumgarten: Up and Then Down.
May 2010
2 posts
“Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a...”
– Eric Hoffer
“What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the...”
– Douglas Adams
April 2010
3 posts
A taxonomy for books
All books can be classified as
those that can be used as makeshift steps
having moved a reader to tears
in need of colour photographs
miscellaneous
those whose author has exhibited extreme political opinions
on the meaning of life
biography
having been hurled
written partly in an invented language
of interest chiefly to its own author
having a misleading title
coming to no conclusion
...
“Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in...”
– Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex
“I love when I post something on Twitter and a bunch of people unfollow me. It...”
– Merlin Mann interviewed by Colin Marshall
March 2010
3 posts
Intelligence is like a knife →
Max Klein explains why being intelligent is not enough
“…everybody wants to belong to the current club. There’s safety in...”
– Helmut Krone
“I like it when competitors copy me because it means they aren’t about to...”
– Wil Shipley (via David Chartier) (via marco)
February 2010
7 posts
Dunning–Kruger effect
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than in actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities,...
The one who got away →
Moving photo and story showcase from Pictory.
One strange side effect of being raised as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses is that I only vaguely remember the date of birth of any member of my family.
“When FUN is lost, lose what you’re doing.”
– Lacy Phillips at 5406 Lexington
From time to time, I notice that I’m making a mistake and that I’ve been making the same mistake regularly for a while and it’s a mistake I’ve thought about before, and corrected, and yet I’ve slipped back into making it. And I reckon this is just life smacking me on the head until I get it right.
Noted director Werner Herzog pledged that he would eat the shoe he was wearing if Morris’ film on this improbable subject was completed and shown in a public theater. When the film was released Herzog lived up to his wager and the consumption of his footwear was made into the short film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.
From the Wikipedia entry for Gates of Heaven
January 2010
5 posts
“Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money.”
– Danny DeVito as Bergman in David Mamet’s Heist.
You don’t always need links when you’ve got good search engines. In a way, search engines subvert the linked nature of the web.
“I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make...”
– David Lynch
June 2009
1 post
“Bing? Interesting. I’ll have to Google that when I get home.”
– The Onion
May 2009
4 posts
“Always funny and gentle, Mike confided one day that he was doing quite a bit of...”
– Matthew B. Crawford - Shop Class as Soulcraft
“Around the time of Caesar, there was a European tribe that, when the assembly...”
– Charlie Munger - The Psychology of Human Misjudgment
When websites match things to other things they use similarity. You date people who have the same interests as you. You read books by the same author. You listen to music in the same genre. In analogue life, there are other factors: hearing a song by accident, your best friend loaning you his favourite book, a film that includes a location you once visited, a person who reminds you of your...
“the plural of anecdote is not data”
– Unknown
April 2009
1 post
“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”
– Samuel Beckett