What a great way to start off a St. Patrick’s Day. This is certainly worth 20 minutes of your life. As someone inclined to spend entirely too much of my time inside the left-hemisphere of my brain, I found this especially affecting.
Stroke of insight: Jill Bolte Taylor on TED.com
Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few [...]
Espen reminded me of the following passage from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It is a wonderfully succinct description of the scientific method and its power to protect us from the risks of wishful thinking when problems call for discipline. We used to use this passage as a piece of our basic training [...]
I finally got around to taking a peek at this video of Clay Shirky’s presentation at the Supernova 2007 conference in June. It’s relatively short and Shirky is a good speaker. Like Jimmy Guterman, I was particularly taken with Shirky’s observation on AT&T’s reaction to a particular proposal: “They didn’t care that they’d seen it [...]
There’s in interesting essay in the most recent issue of Smithsonian Magazine on the importance of understanding whether you are working on a puzzle or a mystery written by Gregory Treverton, who is the Director of RAND’s Center for Global Risk and Security.
There’s a reason millions of people try to solve crossword puzzles each [...]
While I wouldn't be so bold as to label it a “definitive collection,”
it is nonetheless very rich. The techniques I am familiar with are very
effective and effectively described, which gives me confidence that
those new to me are worth investigating as well.
The definitive collection of idea generation methods. Martin Leith gifts us with a page [...]
A nice reminder from Jack Vinson about an excellent resource on ways to
poke on complex systems that are more likely to be effective than our
typical efforts. I’ve pointed to this before in several incarnations (here and here).
We’ve certainly seen more than our share recently of ineffective ways
to intervene. Perhaps we can hope that some of [...]
Bob Frankston has had several recent posts illuminating the long-term
strategic blindness of competitors pursuing doomed approaches to
Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). The short and sweet version:
DRM vs the Bathroom.
For those who found my recent DRM post too complicated I’ll put it more
simply. There are those who believe that I must not zap commercials
while watching their content. [...]
An interesting reminder for the morning. It is curious that we
generally devote so little time to this in both our education and our
work practices. Think how often the organizational and educational
systems we are embedded in convey the implicit assumption that someone
else has already defined the problem correctly and that our only
responsibility is to produce the [...]
Always worth seeing what Kay has to say. The slashdot thread has its moments as well.
How Heraclitus would Design a Programming Language. CowboyRobot writes “Developer of Smalltalk Alan Kay has an interview on ACM Queue
where he describes the history of computing and his approach to
designing languages. Kay has an impressive resume (PARC, ARPAnet,
Atari, Apple, Alan [...]
I'm running a bit behind these days. That makes it a bit ironic that my
most recent column at Enterprise System Journal looks at the topic of
project management.
The column actually appeared last week and looks at project management
from a minimalist perspective. Jim Powell, my editor there, decided to
title it A Swiss Army Knife for Project [...]
