Posts from October 2011

  • "Cities cannot 'come to the end of their patience' because they’re not people. Mayors and local officials can come to the end of their patience. So can cops. But cities?" Analyzing and comparing the coverage of Occupy Oakland violence with Kent State coverage. [via bluishorange]
  • It's not a great idea, but if you want to write a regular expression to define a numeric range, this tool makes it easier than doing it by hand.
  • "And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners.  But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more." Linked everywhere for good reason--this is an excellent take on the occupy wall street movement.
  • Chart: the top 1 percent has been doing ok for themselves for the past few years.
  • Hollywood should not control DNS. I can't believe I even had to write that sentence.
  • Great interview with Tom Waits at the Washoe House. He laments digitization: "They have removed the struggle to find anything. And therefore there is no genuine sense of discovery. Struggle is the first thing we know getting along the birth canal, out in the world. It's pretty basic. Book store owners and record store owners used to be oracles, in that way; you'd go in this dusty old place and they might point you toward something that would change your life. All that's gone."

Steve Jobs Quote

Just to add to the flood of appreciation for Steve Jobs that's pouring out online, this quote of his has always stuck with me:
"Expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you are doing." — Steve Jobs
It's a simple statement but it says a lot about learning from others, looking outside your immediate domain, and even looking back in time. Coming from Jobs it's a nice mashup of technology and liberal arts that has always appealed to me. I can see shades of this quote in many things he built, and I think it was this sort of sample/remix approach that helped Jobs add new, best things to emulate.