confused of calcutta

“Whatever you do, don’t tell me the result, I don’t want to know”.
Thus goes the refrain.
The refrain of people with a new problem, a problem that was nascent for maybe thirty years, but one that’s been maturing for nearly a decade, and is full-blown now.
A problem caused by time-shifting.
More and more people record things for [...]

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Nearly 40 years ago, we were asked this question at school:
Imagine a string tied around the middle of an orange, in effect forming a circumference. Now imagine another string, this time tied around the middle of the earth, at the equator.Okay? Now increase the length of each of these strings by a foot. Imagine each [...]

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I’ve just got to Shanghai for the first time, and despite working through what passed for night in China and in the UK, I found myself bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and full of beans. Having been ensconced in design strategy papers for a good few days, I think I’m looking at everything through “design” eyes, and trying [...]

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Ever since Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood announced StackOverflow, almost counterintuitively, I’ve spent more time reading their individual blogs.
I really enjoyed Jeff’s latest, Crash Responsibly. [Even though it is not the headline I want to see just before boarding a transatlantic flight.]
I love the four “rules” Jeff puts forward, particularly the first one: “It is [...]

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As I grow older, I find that what I need is less “something for the weekend” and more “something to help me with the week ahead”. So I’m always looking for things that will make me smile, laugh, guffaw:
LOLManuscripts. Definitely in the guffaw class. Here are a couple of examples:

What a wonderful idea. Now [...]

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We want people who are interested in books. They’ll find us.
So say Lloyd and Lenore Dickman, booksellers extraordinaire, Wisconsin, standing like Ruth amid the alien corn. Except for a couple of small details. Lloyd Dickman wouldn’t consider the corn to be alien, it is his love and his livelihood. And Lenore Dickman wouldn’t have a [...]

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Publius Valerius Publicola, otherwise known as Poplicola, Roman counsel, ‘friend of the people’, had his name pseudonymously used to author the Federalist Papers,  a collection of essays written over two hundred years ago (primarily by Hamilton, Madison and Jay) to strengthen and ratify the US constitution.
Those must have been heady and challenging days, as a [...]

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A recent article in the Economist highlighted the remarkable growth of Class 705 patents since they were made possible (see chart below, taken from that article):

While I am personally not a fan of such patents, I can understand why people would find them attractive, and why the number of patents sought in that class would [...]

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A little while ago I saw this somewhat unusual list of words:

It appeared on the xkcd blag, and Randall shared very little about it: It was in his handwriting, it looked faintly familiar, and he had no idea what it was about. You can see the whole story here.
I whiled away some time just thinking [...]

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…it’s worth checking out stackoverflow, and its associated blog.
A collaboration between Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, both of whom I’ve followed for a while. I’ve listened to the podcasts, followed the blog posts, and so far I haven’t been disappointed. Worth the while. In fact I even like the logo.

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