From Brian Hayes’ “The Post-OOP Paradigm“:
Christopher Alexander [a bricks-and-steel architect] is known for the enigmatic thesis that well-designed buildings and towns must have “the quality without a name.” He explains: “The fact that this quality cannot be named does not mean that it is vague or imprecise. It is impossible to name because it is unerringly precise.”
Architecture & the quality without a name Read More »
From The Register’s “How ATM fraud nearly brought down British banking“:
And there wasn’t time for the banks to fix the problem if anyone went public with it. Their MTBU was too short. MTBU? That’s “Maximum Time to Belly Upâ€Â, as coined by the majestic Donn Parker of Stanford Research Institute. He found that businesses that relied on computers for the control of their cash flow fell into catastrophic collapse if those computers were unavailable or unusable for a period of time. How long? By the late 1980s it had fallen from a month to a few days. That’s not a good thing; it meant that a collapse of the computers that any UK clearing bank relied on would destroy it in less than a week.
MTBU: Maximum Time to Belly Up Read More »
From Garr Reynolds’ “Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic“:
A key tenet of the Zen aesthetic is kanso or simplicity. In the kanso concept beauty, grace, and visual elegance are achieved by elimination and omission. Says artist, designer and architect, Dr. Koichi Kawana, “Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means.” …
The aesthetic concept of naturalness or shizen “prohibits the use of elaborate designs and over refinement” according to Kawana. Restraint, then, is a beautiful thing. … Restraint is hard. Complication and elaboration are easy…and are common. …
The Zen aesthetic values include (but are not limited to):
- Simplicity
- Subtlety
- Elegance
- Suggestive rather than the descriptive or obvious
- Naturalness (i.e., nothing artificial or forced)
- Empty space (or negative space)
- Stillness, Tranquility
- Eliminating the non-essential
kanso and shizen and presentations Read More »
From Matt Asay’s “Words to live by“:
This was one of the few things I learned at Stanford Law School: you never want to have to enforce a contract, because the clear interpretation of a contract becomes much less clear the minute both sides stop agreeing on that interpretation.
Good advice re: contracts Read More »
From Bruce Schneier’s “Should Terrorism be Reported in the News?” in Crypto-Gram (15 May 2005):
One of the things I routinely tell people is that if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. By definition, “news” means that it hardly ever happens. If a risk is in the news, then it’s probably not worth worrying about. When something is no longer reported — automobile deaths, domestic violence — when it’s so common that it’s not news, then you should start worrying.
How to know if you should worry Read More »
From Ben Jones’ Benblog, in February 2003:
Ben on breaking up with a girl: “Archer said last night that getting over a girl is like getting over a cold. You just wake up one day, after the lingering affects are over, and vaguely remember that you were sick.”
Breaking up is like a cold Read More »
From Robert Hertzberg’s “The Coming Shakeout” in WebWeek (3 February 1997):
… the Internet [will] change things less in the near term than is generally assumed, but far more over the long term than anyone can imagine.
How much the Net will change things Read More »
From "The Habit of Democracy" by Adam Gopnik in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, a review of two books about Alexis de Tocqueville:
Newcomers, like newborns, have symbolic sight. They see faces first, and features later.
Responsibility: "I’ll do it."
Accountability: "I’ll pay a price if I don’t do it right."
Responsibility vs accountability Read More »