January 2012
1 post
“The mere knowledge of a fact is pale; but when you come to realize your fact, it...”
– Mark Twain
October 2011
3 posts
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Why the PlayBook calculator has a great user...
Little was known about The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) until they were acquired by RIM last December. It is easy to recognize a TAT application when you see it. There is a certain je ne sais quoi about their design that’s a hallmark of their creative prowess. Take the native calculator app on the PlayBook for example. Displays Current Operation Most calculators don’t show you what...
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“The depths of winter longing are ice within my heart
The shards of broken...”
– Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
“Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable...”
– Germaine Greer
September 2011
1 post
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On a Mote of Dust, Suspended in a Sunbeam
Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer ...
August 2011
1 post
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“In bed above, we’re deep asleep,
While greater love, lies further deep....”
July 2011
4 posts
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February 2011
1 post
Fair Warning
Remember:
The things within our power are naturally at our disposal, free from any restraint or hindrance; but those things outside our power are weak, dependent, or determined by the whims and actions of others. Remember, too, that if you think that you have free reign over things that are naturally beyond your control, or if you attempt to adopt the affairs of others as your own, your pursuits...
January 2011
2 posts
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“Is the flow of time something real, or might our sense of time passing be just...”
– Lee Smolin
December 2010
2 posts
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Wisdom Machines
What is the Internet doing to our brains? How has it changed the way we think? Do you scour search engines or wait until you read blogs before you opine? When you’re disconnected do you go into withdrawal?
We live in an over-networked society where immediacy trumps connecting face-to-face, a landscape of distraction where every buzz is instantly tweeted. The signal-to-noise ratio is...
November 2010
10 posts
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“It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can...”
– Winston Churchill
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“Only a god can tell successes from failures without making a mistake.”
– Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
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“The worst thing that can happen with a new product is that it is a failure. The...”
– Bill Buxton, Sketching User Experiences
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What I've been reading
1. Sketching User Experiences, by Bill Buxton. I first learned about Buxton after I saw his MIX10 keynote (highest-rated). This book has thought-provoking examples about the importance of integrating design within the business model, and throughout the product life cycle.
2. The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman. A wonderful take on everyday things that also applies to software, this...
October 2010
2 posts
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Why Facebook is selling you out -- and won't stop
Different day, same story — privacy breach at Facebook — again. This time due to a known vulnerability that is decades old, intrinsic to the Internet application protocol layaer: the HTTP referrer header, described by Berners-Lee in the v1.1 spec.
The response from Facebook reads very much like a cop-out:
Recently, it has come to our attention that several applications built on...
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There's a Patent For That
Universal access to human knowledge is within our grasp. This is a positive result of technology but when I see a slew of frivolous software patent suits I cringe. Patent trolling always hinders innovation. Why patent? The main reason is for protection, profit (my idea, my money) and it follows that the patent holder gets the license to sue (revenue generation). The benign justification is that...
September 2010
6 posts
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No Religion, Know Religion: Atheists know more...
From a new Pew survey: Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new Pew Forum survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions. (The Pew Forum)
And this is why we need more Bible education, says Stephen...
In pictures: secrets of the Vatican archives →
The 85km of shelving in the Vatican’s Secret Archives holds manuscripts and publications accumulated over more than 800 years. On the day of his visit to the UK, take a look at some of the rarest treasures on the pope’s private bookshelves
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Let's dispense with the niceties
Posted via email from johannal’s posterous | Comment »
http://johannal.posterous.com →
I’m migrating my tumblr blog to posterous for two reasons:
For posterity. Backup, backup, backup!
Experimental. I’m keen to know which one wins my vote: an engineered product (Posterous) vs. a designed product (Tumblr). Will design win over technology?
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Desire: A Taxonomy
Sehnsucht In his speech on the theme of Sehnsucht (desire), Swiss Federal Councillor Christoph Blocher described sehnsucht as “tender longing [that] goes hand in hand with the painful knowledge that the thing longed for will never quite be attained. Indeed, you even get the feeling that the granting of an eagerly-awaited wish could immediately bring about the destruction of the desired...
August 2010
7 posts
3 tags
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense...
I’m a year older today. Born free of charge, so the story goes.
Another year marked by changes, yet another reminder of being completely constrained in my own body and its mortal concept of time, experiencing the outside world through slanted perceptions, wondering what the universe is really like.
I reflect. The only thing that’s made living worthwhile has been those few times when...
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“No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I...”
– Jorge Luis Borges, The Immortal
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"I Am" by John Clare →
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes; They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host, Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes: And yet I am, and live—like vapours toss’t
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise — Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys, ...
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What monstrosities would walk the streets were...
When I read a book I flip past the acknowledgments, ignore author’s notes and jump into the first chapter. On this rare occasion I paid special attention to Harlan Ellison’s introduction to Shatterday. I’m glad I did.
He writes about why he writes (for shock value) and shares a radio interview where he made the interviewer extremely uncomfortable by copping to thoughts of...
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Every time we buy something we deepen our...
“It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.” ~Bertrand Russell
Last Saturday I went to Goodwill and donated four bags of clothing and four boxes of shoes. Some of these items were purchased back in 1994 and barely used. Ridding myself of extraneous stuff was the first in my checklist of removing clutter (literal and...
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“He thought about himself, and the whole Earth,
Of Man the wonderful, and of the...”
– Byron, Don Juan, Canto 1, stanza 92
July 2010
10 posts
1 tag
“It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept...”
– Woody Allen
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The Boat That Rocked the Establishment
Pirate Radio has this scene where The Count (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is about to say the ‘f’ word on air:
Quentin: You can’t do this. The Count: Why not? It’s just a word! Quentin: Charming thought, but here’s the simple situation. The authorities already dislike us. If you do this they will hate us, and by hook or by crook they’ll find a way to close us down....
Anonymous asked: after reading your blog, i figured you'd appreciate this. life is like an outer join, you never know what to expect. - @rwang0
“Your home is a box. Your car is a box on wheels. You drive to work in it. You...”
– It’s quite depressing, if you think of it that way.
So don’t think of it that way.
Think of it as a temporary state of being.
Scott Adams on consciousness and free will
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/selfprogramming/
Two concepts that are exceptionally hard to define are consciousness and free will. Any attempt to define them becomes a murky soup of other words that are themselves hard to define. So I offer you a practical definition for both. Suppose we define a creature to have consciousness and free will if it demonstrates the ability to use the external world...
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Toy Story 3: Coping with Rejection
Pixar’s third installment to the anthropomorphic Toy Story series delivers a believable evocative plot that makes one forget these are merely toys. No longer a kid, Andy is off to college and the question of his toys’ fate hangs in the balance. One is glued to the screen as the story unfolds, anticipating how each character deals with the recurring theme of rejection.
Woody is not...
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I, Cthulhu →
or, What’s A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47° 9’ S, Longitude 126° 43’ W)? by Neil Gaiman
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