Jorn Barger on what Twitter is useful for

For someone who (like me) has never used Twitter, this summary of what it's useful for seems pretty insightful.

Idea: defining functions within functions

Are there any programming languages where you can define functions within other functions? I think it'd be useful - in situations like this:

function X is used, and only used, within function A. X is really just a part of A that has been broken away to better structure the code.

function A() 
{
    function X() 
    {
        blah blah
    }

    blah blah
    X()
    blah blah
}

If you defined X within A -- like at the start or end of it -- this would make the structure of the code more explicit. When you came across X you'd know straight away, and for certain, that A was the only place it was used.

The motivation for this is pretty similar to that of defining functions within objects or within modules.

On having lots of choices

A post on Signal vs Noise quotes Eknath Easwaran's Take Your Time—Finding Balance in a Hurried World (chapter 5):

People are subject to trifling likes and dislikes every day. There seems to be no end to the division and subdivision of taste. In India, in those days, if I wanted ice cream after a meal, I simply ordered ice cream. At most there might have been two or three flavors; often there was only one. Today I have one hundred and forty-seven varieties to choose from, and it’s not enough to want chocolate; I have to decide between possibilities like Dutch, Bittersweet, Super Fudge Wonder, and Chewy White Chocolate Macadamia. (Often I just tell the clerk, “Give me the one you like best.”) And for coffee I have to specify French Roast, Colombian, Kona, or one of a dozen other varieties. I know people whose whole day is affected when they can’t get the coffee they like, made just the way they like it. As our preferences get fractioned finer and finer like this, the range of what we can tolerate narrows to a slit—in everything, because this is a habit of the mind.

To which I added a comment

I think that’s a bit muddled.

It makes the reasonable point that you don’t always want to be presented with a bazillion choices, especially where there’s only small differences between them.

But it comes across a complaint about choice, as if it was all bad. Lots of choices is, itself, not a problem. It’s when you’re forced to deal with them at once.

Would you prefer to live in a city where there’s only three different meals you can ever have for dinner, or would you prefer to live in a city where there’s a large variety of different ethnic cuisines available?

The quote also suggests that having fine-grained preferences - wanting White Chocolate Macadamia - means inflexibility: only being satisfied by that. “As our preferences get fractioned finer and finer like this, the range of what we can tolerate narrows to a slit”.

But that’s not necessarily so. At particular times, at particular places, in particular moods, I might feel like that flavor, and at other times and places, I might want something else. We get bored and want to try new things.

And if you’ve only got a few options available, isn’t it easy to develop prejudices? We probably all know people who grew up eating one type of food and won’t dare touch food of an unfamiliar cuisine.

If you’re beyond a certain age, you’ve probably gone from growing up in a world with fewer choices to a world with many more choices. Perhaps this means we didn’t develop very good skills for handling choice. Perhaps the kids of today will manage much better? I don’t know, but this possibility seems to get overlooked.

The Immobolised Pefectionist and the Persistent Perfectionist

Perfectionists are often portrayed as overly finicky people who can't produce anything if it isn't perfect, who thus can't get started and never get anywhere. We can call these people immobilised perfectionists.

But I think there's another meaning for 'perfectionist' that tends to get overlooked. This is the persistent perfectionist, who has really high standards - and is persistent in trying to meet them.

They appreciate that perfection is not immediate and that they won't be particularly good initially. They appreciate that it'll take a lot of practise to get really good. Because they're persistent, they won't stop trying trying to improve until they’ve met their really high standards.

Here's an example of an (otherwise good) post that treats 'perfectionism' as if it could only mean immobilised perfectionism.

Another e.g. of seeing software only in functional terms: the claim that choice of impl language doesn't matter

I've written that IT people have a tendency to look at software only in functional terms: 1, 2 and 3.

Recently I came across a post about this (but not described in these terms) The "Any Competent Programmer" BS

In it, the author comments on the claim that "A professional team can develop quality software whatever the chosen implementation language and toolset."

He says

The claim, though, begs the question of how much it costs, in time and money, to develop that quality software using a chosen language and toolset. And whether a different choice could lead to quality software being developed faster and more cheaply, thereby encouraging the creation of even more quality software.

And he also points out that that claim is analogous to the "Any competent programmer can write good code in any language" trope.

Anand Agarawala's BumpTop desktop user-interface (video)

I think this has promise

Here's what it looks like:




And here's a 4 1/2 min video demonstration:

TED page for this demonstration

"closer view of the piedra" (pic)

from here via reddit.

Time management and balancing energy levels

Time management is a big issue for many of us. I've spent a fair bit of time trying to get better at it.

I read Covey and Merrill's First Things First, which I thought was pretty solid, if perhaps a bit abstract and heavyweight. Probably it's main point is that you have to focus on what counts rather than what is urgent.

(I've also heard quite good things about David Allen's Getting Things Done, though I haven't read it.)

I'd say I'm not bad at it now, but I realised that I'm lacking a good understanding of something that is crucial to time management - balancing your energy levels. You can easily get worn out and not be very productive. So you need to take time out to refresh and recuperate.

That's pretty obvious. But isn't so obvious how to, in practice, actually do it effectively. So yes, if you rush through things that can drain your energy, but then if you're totally relaxed and take as much time as you want, you won't be so productive - so the question is, where is the sweet spot?

Or take exercise as an example. They say that exercise gives you more energy. But how much exercise should you do? (And are some types of exercise more effective in this regard than others?) What is the sweet spot, so you end up having the most amount of productive time for getting things done?

The key point is that you really need to have a good understanding of the factors that effect your energy levels, and how they do so, and how much they do so, so that you can effectively manage them.

Of course, the details would vary from person to person but I suspect there's enough common ground there to at least weed out common, and ineffective, misconceptions about balancing energy levels. If there's not a book on this already -- and I haven't seen one -- there's an opportunity for one to be written. Ditto for personal consultants on this -- like a type of personal trainer for managing your energy levels.

Ideas for 'weather forecasts 2.0'

Sometimes I’ll go to check the weather, and end up at sites like these.

One gives me info for each day of the current week for the city I live near. For example, it tells me that Friday has a forecast of ‘Isolated Thunderstorms. Mostly Cloudy. Warm. Humid.’ Wind ‘16 km/h NNE’, Rain ‘3mm (42%)’, humidity of ‘69%’ and a min and max temp of ’20 and 30’.

On the other I can see a radar image of any storms moving in – which is useful if you’re leaving work and wondering whether you’ll beat the storm home.



Here's a quick sketch of some ideas for extending such services.

• Make them more finely-grained
  • Instead of just the forcast for today, what is the forecast for the evening, or for 10pm?
    
  • What is the forecast for 10pm for the specific place I live (rather than just the general city area). Is it likely, from the cloud coverage and movements, that it'll be raining at my place then?
    
• Longer-term predictions
  What is our best possible estimate of the general conditions two months from now? Which weekend, around two months from now, is the safest bet (of avoiding rain) for that outdoor barbeque I've been wanting to organise?
  • I'm presuming there's a lot of modelling and historical data that could be used to make better-than-chance estimates.
    
• Visualisation of weather trends.
  
• Integration with calendars.
  
• Customisable email/RSS alerts
  
• Photos of what things look like -- from different places, in different directions -- so you could actually see what an approaching storm looks like, for example.

These are just some quick thoughts - it's not really a topic I have a strong interest in, and I don't know whether there's presently (or in the works) anything out there that does any of these. Here's a place you could start.

Wikipedia's list of common misconceptions

Wikipedia's long list of common misconceptions (along with details of the truth of the matter in each case). Misconceptions such as that

• Napoleon Bonaparte was especially short.
  
• searing meat "seals in the juices"
  
• seasons are caused by the Earth being closer to the sun in summer than in winter.
  
• shaving causes hair to grow back thicker or coarser.
  
• earthworms become two worms when cut in half.
  
• Inuits have a large number of words for snow.

...and many many more (though the list is far from complete).

.

 
"That perfume, my dear, is delightful. It has the most wonderful nose flavour"

---

i thought that term sounded funny.

Magic/Replace - an interesting 'show by example' way to clean up data

Magic/Replace looks pretty good – going by their screencast demo (2 mins). It allows you to simply and intuitively clean up spreadsheet data.

Once you've pasted (or uploaded) your data into their webform, you can make changes to a cell, and the system will intelligently apply the same kind of change to all the other cells in the same column.

For example, if you changed a cell containing the phone number 0987123532 by putting in some spaces so it became 0987 123 532, the system will put the same spaces into all of the other phone numbers.

It can handle quite complicated changes, like combining three separate fields ‘firstname’, ‘middlename’, ‘surname’ into a single name field with the format ‘surname, firstname middle-initial’. See the screencast for some other examples.

It looks like the system is available to use for free - you can try it out now. I haven't played with it much, so I don't know how well it works in general, but I think that at the very least they’re onto something with the way the system works – the principle behind it.

It’s great that the user doesn’t have to explicitly describe the changes they want to make – like by writing some sort of code. They can just do it; and the system can work out the analogous changes for the other instances of that field. I say ‘analogous changes’ because the other instances of the field will contain different data, so the system has to look deeper than just the superficial details of the changes the user made.

(Douglas Hofstadter argues that the ability to make analogies is a central aspect of intelligence. He’s got a book on this Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. I haven’t read it, but the idea that ability to analogise is important sounds sensible to me).

.

Discussion of the tool on Hacker News here.

'Chemicals' per se, are entirely natural

In marketing and advertising, 'chemicals' equate to 'harmful' and 'dangerous'. Companies like to parade the lack of 'chemicals' in their products. Can things be 100% chemical free? The public seems to think so.

But the Royal Society of Chemistry is offering a £1 million prize to the first member of the public who can provide a sample of any material whatsoever that is 100% chemical free.

The truth, as any right-minded person will say, is that everything we eat, drink, drive, play with and live in is made of chemicals - both natural and synthetic chemicals are essential for life as we know it.
[...]
"Should anyone [be able to claim the prize], we will see thousands of years' worth of knowledge evaporate before our eyes. We would have to tear up the textbooks, burn the degree certificates and retrain the teachers."
[...]
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) recently defended an advert which perpetuated the myth that natural compounds are free of chemicals. [...] The manufacturers of a popular "organic" fertiliser recently [claimed] in promotional materials the product contained no chemicals whatsoever.

Of course there are harmful chemicals, but the reason they're harmful isn't because they're chemicals. When most people use the term 'chemicals' they're really referring to something else - but what exactly that category is isn't something I'll try to get into here.

Google Maps Street View as a historical record

I heard today that the street view in Google Maps has been upgraded (the improvements are pretty good too).

I was checking it out and looking at a place that I know is going to be demolished (not the place that link is to), and it made me think that the street view data could, in the future, be used as a (pretty comprehensive) historical record of what a place looked like at a particular point in time.

A lot of the places I've lived in have changed quite a lot over the years, and I always think it's a shame that there's probably no comprehensive record of what they used to look like (even though there's probably scattered coverage from people's private photo collections).

It's a shame from the standpoint that your memories are linked to what the place was like then, and once the place has changed, part of your past is gone. A visual record can help you connect back to it.

How to save SMSs from a Sony-Ericsson w7000i phone to your computer

Just as you might want to save letters or emails you send and receive, I like to save my SMSs to my computer.

But that didn't seem possible with my Sony-Ericsson w7000i phone. You can't with the software the comes with it, and I seem to remember talking to a phone guy a few years ago who said you couldn't do it.

But I discovered today that you can use the My Phone Explorer software (Softpedia, Wikipedia). Works great. It's freely downloadable.

(found via this page, via this forum discussion page, via this google search).

Using Wikipedia as a source of canonical tagnames

Say you want to tag a blogpost as being about ten pin bowling. What name do you give the tag? Here's some possibilities:

tenpinbowling
bowling
ten_pin_bowling

As a convention, you could try to find a Wikipedia article for that subject, and use the name used in the article's URL.

In this case it's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten-pin_bowling

so you'd use the tagname

Ten-pin_bowling

a potential bonus is that you could have it create an automatic link to the Wikipedia article.

The idea of this Wikipedia tagname convention is to have a canonical source for tagnames. (and I suppose it would also help make the Wikipedia article the canonical source of basic information about a topic).

Having fewer different names for referring to the same thing ought to be useful, and make it easier to find all the different bits of information talking about the same thing.

By the way, you could also have tools that automatically suggest these tagnames. E.g. you could select the text in your blogpost that mentions ten pin bowling, and the tool could automatically search wikipedia, get the URLs of the articles matching, and present you with a list of potential tagnames.

Alien-looking ants nest - filled with concrete then excavated (video)

Want to see what an ants nest looks like? First, fill it with concrete, then excavate.

Unfortunately the video only shows what it looked like when they were part of the way through the excavation, and doesn't give a really good sense of its overall shape.

Vid-caps

'Technique' by Amon Tobin

Since June, Amon Tobin has been releasing a new track on his website at the start of each month (for a US $1.99 download). I think the latest one 'Technique' is pretty awesome.

You can hear a sample of it here. Under the picture it says '$1.99', and just below that there's an arrow pointing at a short green line - click that arrow.

(My next favourite one -- which took a while to grow on me -- is 'Shut Down').

Images from Burning Man

Funtasticus has a bunch of images from Burning Man. These are my favourites:

US election result videos, etc

Obama's acceptance speech is pretty impressive. McCain's concession speech is quite good too. I've embedded youtube versions of them below.

Another thing about today’s historic events is that from now on, little boys and girls all over the world will know that being a ‘white man’ is not an absolute necessity for attaining even the most powerful position in the world. It makes me wonder what greatness that knowledge will help unlock.


Obama's acceptance speech

Part 1



Part 2


Part 3




McCain's concession speech



I am quite curious to know the opinions of people around the world on these election results, especially people in places like the Middle East. Surely this must change the "person in the street"'s opion of America? But how much and in what ways?

I don't know. I thought it might be interesting to have a look at how some international news sources were reporting it, but it seems too hard (unless perhaps you had a lot of time to spare) to really get much of a sense.

I also found it interesting to see how much those sites (or at least the English versions of them...) used the Reuters or AP stories about the electon rather than ones of their own. (and I should say that I have no idea how representative any of these papers are of the media in their respective countries).

If you're curious, here are some of the sites I looked at: Al Jazeera, The Star (Malaysia), Times of India, Xinhua (China).