one of 5 bookcases in our Vienna apartment There’s only one thing more powerful than a book, and that’s a real life expert mentor. But you can’t order a second-hand mentor with second-day shipping from Amazon for the cost of a grande mochachino. Mentors also don’t take kindly to dogearing. And if you devour a […]
Related posts:
Whoa. There must be something in the water. The Vignelli Canon Major “whoa” on this one. It oozes quality & love for the subject. Broken into two parts, The Intangibles (semantics, syntactics, pragmatics—philosophical design nerdy) and The Tangibles (paper sizes, grids, type sizes, texture, etc.), it totals a whopping 96 pages. It’s one to savor. […]
Overcoming Bias has a little post that, for the most part, quotes the findings of a study on how “interesting details” affect learning. The researchers found that “interesting details” decreased the student’s understanding (transfer), while not affecting the student’s memory (retention) of what they read/watched. Case 1 was video trying to teach about how a […]
Looks like it’s that time again! I’ve found another article that’s annoyingly devoid of green, leafy facts but full of sweet, specious seasoning. Reasoning. I mean reasoning. How’s this one start off? [Charles Petzold:] People are probably reading and writing more than ever, but a lot of this reading and writing is online. Consequently, book […]
Hey kids, it’s poetry explication time! Give me five double-spaced pages on Robert Frost’s “Nature’s First Green is Gold” by Friday or your grade is toast and your parents will disown you, you’ll never hold a good job, and you’ll die destitute and alone. Just kidding. I hated dissecting poetry in school, but loved the […]
Please. Will the talking heads just shut up? That dude who wrote that book slamming “amateurs,” which I will not name because like hell I’m gonna give him free press, has written something else equally stupid. This time it’s short, at least, and free, and therefore not nearly as offensive as the whole goddamn book. […]
A good in-depth article on information hoarding: Linder argues that as we become squeezed for consumption time, we’ll consume more expensive things over cheaper things when possible to make use of more goods on a total-cost basis. But when the cost of goods is zero, what happens then? As behavioral economists (most vociferously, Dan Ariely) […]
A couple weeks ago, at RailsConf, I tweeted that I was skipping Joel Spolsky’s keynote and why. Judging by the few responses I got, most people took this to be a joke. It’s not. I try very hard to watch what I put into my head. To a greater or lesser degree of success. All […]
I’m still on the quest to make this blog more like a blog—I think the articles are eventually going to be treated differently. I am a huge believer in the power of books. Books are the one thing I own “in excess;” my favorite charity is book-related and bookstores tend to create in me that […]
