2014-09-05

Notes.

The nice thing about September: It's still summer, but everyone acts like it's not. Take advantage.

But I'm still racking up frequent flier miles, and there continues to be a lot of good stuff to read on the internet, and a lot of it has been good, so:

Pathing.

• The Map is not the Territory.
• The Ninety-Ninety rule: "The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time."
• The pitfalls of (software) engineering effort estimates, and advice on how to avoid them.
• A theory of how to organize engineering groups.
• The more you talk to strangers, the happier you tend to be.
• Sprezzatura: The art of "studied carelessness."
• If you skip college and instead invest your tuition money in an S&P index fund that earns 7.4%, your lifetime earnings will be ~$200K higher than if you had gone to college. <-- I'd take this option seriously.
• The many reasons that computers should be programmed to lie to us (like our elevators do with those placebo "close door" buttons).

Building.

• China's suburban sprawl is repeating many of the mistakes made in the US.
• Alibaba's profit TRIPLED in the last quarter, as its sales jumped 46% (just ahead of its *enormous* US IPO).
• Disney Research patented a drone+puppet combination, apparently to use in its theme parks.
• Subsea compressors for natural gas fields are *huge,* and (apparently) not yet commercially viable.
• It turns out that, partly as a result of its phytate content, brown rice isn't as nutritious as it might seem. <-- Surprising.
• Graphene 3D Lab Inc filed a provisional patent for 3D printed graphene batteries.
• Dyson is making a robot vacuum.

Logistics.

• Ecuador is planning to launch a digital currency, but it's *not* a cryptocurrency.
• The Swiss government is adding marker bacteria to its cheese to identify fakes.
• Amazon's new credit card reader as Trojan Horse into brick-and-mortar.
• Evidence that antibiotics kill microbes that prevent food allergies.
• The blue, short-wavelength light typically emitted by LEDs, fluorescents, and computer monitors seems to be destroying our melatonin.
• An analysis of the reasons that NYC restaurants fail health inspections.

Reflecting.

• If you need to criticize a company's culture and don't know the right term to use, try Wikipedia's page for Anti-pattern.
• Jonathan Lethem on intellectual property and the importance of reusing ideas.
• Animagraffs is an awesome collection of "how stuff works" gifs.
• BP was found "reckless" in its actions leading up to the Deepwater Horizon (aka Macondo) oil spill, and could face up to $18B in fines.
• John Siracusa on the value of criticism.
• A program to average photosets, producing blurry images that reveal something about how people see the world.
• The history of the B52 bomber, or "Big Ugly Fat Fellow."
• A harrowing profile of a guy who does directional drilling for the fracking industry.

Stuff that doesn't fit into my dumb/arbitrary categories.

• The Latinate abbreviation viz. is short for videlicet and means "that is," "namely," or "to wit."
• A story about getting personal references for a co-op.
• Randall Munroe on (among other things) numbers cited without appropriate context.
• A theory of why Amazon's only disclosures are about their logistics.
• Bre Pettis is leaving MakerBot for an undisclosed position at its parent company, Stratasys.

And.

The 12-million gallon, football field sized wave pool that the Navy uses
to test ships in ocean-like conditions.