From a column entitled “How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community“: Teresa invented a technique called disemvowelling — removing the vowels from some or all of a fiery message-board post. The advantage of this is that […]
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Quote of the Week: June 24 (updated)
From Paul Graham’s essay, Writing, Briefly: I think it’s far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss […]
Quote of the Week: June 17
Lawrence Lessig, speaking about the scorched-earth inefficiencies of modern copyright in Free Culture: The list could go on, but the obvious point is this: Physical property and the intangible property we call copyright are different. Jefferson pointed to one difference. […]
Quote of the Week: June 10
From the NYT: The world’s cleverest designers, said Dr. Polak, a former psychiatrist who now runs an organization helping poor farmers become entrepreneurs, cater to the globe’s richest 10 percent, creating items like wine labels, couture and Maseratis. And iPods. […]
A Treat
I’m almost done with a series of posts– they’re on the abstract side, but they were fun to write and should be a treat to read. Expect something big ‘soonish’.
Quote of the Week: June 3
Watching the political debate last night brought this quote to mind. It’s not meant to be snarky. But I do think it’s true. If you cannot be the master of your language, you must be its slave. If you cannot […]
Mahalo
Jason Calacanis, serial entrepreneur, just launched Mahalo, a search engine where users get hand-crafted portal-like results for common search queries. It’s based on the theory that many people are searching for the same things, that search engine spam is making […]
Quote of the Week: May 27
Via John Hawks, a paper entitled Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly. Here’s the abstract: Most texts on writing style encourage authors to avoid overly-complex words. However, a majority of undergraduates admit […]
Quote of the Week: May 13
At the University of Bristol in England, gene-chip analysis — the marriage of DNA chemistry and silicon electronics — shows that the same variety of wheat expresses its genes very differently depending on whether it’s grown in conventional or organic […]
Quote of the Week: May 6
I’m debating whether my blog should be a politics-free zone. I’m leaning toward “yes” right now, but if you have a preference feel free to say so in the comments. In the meantime, a little lighter quote of the week […]