October 2009
3 posts
How to Get More Bicyclists on the Road →
Cyclists annoy me writ large, but it’s really fascinating to me that in America there is a large gender disparity in cyclists that doesn’t exist in Europe.
ON THINKING: FOXES OR HEDGEHOGS? →
Are there enough polymaths in our society?
The Ostrom Nobel →
Key paragraph:
“[This is] a vote in favor of detailed, working-from-the-ground-up, empirical work, which doesn’t rely on sharply contoured theoretical simplifications and flashy statistical techniques so much as the accumulation of good data, which reflects the messiness of the real social institutions from which it is gathered. “
September 2009
6 posts
Charter Cities: Create competition between... →
Paul Romer’s Charter Cities project posits a very interesting question — what if we view the evolution of social and political structures the same way we view the evolution of economic structures?
Can we create social progress through comptetition between small city-states of the Hong Kong/Singapore variety? It’s worth listening to Paul Romer’s talk from the Long Now...
How connected is your company to the internet?
It seems like kind of a silly question. Every internet startup is part of the internet tautologically — we’re long past the days where AOL and other private services ruled the roost.
Yet the question still has some merit, albeit in a less explicit way — nowadays, the more meaningful inquiry has become: “Do your users feel your site is part of the larger internet, or do...
*Total Recall* →
Personal-scale analytics, done insanely thoroughly. What if we all could access this sort of data? Some of it is there pretty easily — how do we analyze across corpuses?
Grocery Line Guessing →
Queueing theory, applied to grocery lines. Turns out you want to pick the short line with full carts over the express lines (given appropriate lengths).
Captive electricity →
Hiroshi sugimoto is undoubtedly my favorite photographer. His new exhibit looks amazing.
Availabilitybiasworld →
Nothing annoys me more than the general claim that things are getting worse based on a few anecdotal observations. Louis CK has a great bit about thisl
August 2009
6 posts
Fundamentals of Transportation online wikibook →
In another life I would’ve studied civil engineering.
New Yelp iPhone App has augmented reality view! →
Using augmented reality is the first time in a while I’ve felt like I’m living in the future.
Vacations and Neuroscience →
Turns out vacations work on rats, too. Witty pun about rat races goes here.
Combinatorial Innovation
“We’re in the middle of a period that I refer to as a period of “combinatorial innovation.” So if you look historically, you’ll find periods in history where there would be the availability of a different component parts that innovators could combine or recombine to create new inventions.”- Hal Varian, in the link I just posted.
My senior year of college, some of my fellow students...
Hal Varian is a smart guy →
Starting to tumble again
I’ve now been on leave from Google for one month, and need to start processing. I’ve been having a difficult time maintaining focus on one area, so hopefully posting publicly will serve as an accountability mechanism. The goal this week is to post twice daily to my Tumblr account (no, this one doesnt count) with semi-coherent posts. We’ll see how it goes.
December 2007
2 posts
endpaper.pdf (application/pdf Object) →
Clever idea, cute (but annoying) design
Craigslist Vengeance - New York Times →
November 2007
3 posts
something I've long believed: Experiences make... →
“There are various forms of the disease, the victim of which is unable to say...”
– Robert Benchley
“There are two kinds of people, those who like to sleep next to the wall, and...”
– Etgar Keret (by way of an Amazon review)