The scientific community assumes the same rules of communication are always applicable and rational, that people are attentive, open minded, persuaded by facts and believe that those who are presenting information are people of goodwill, and not deliberately trying to manipulate them. But none of those things are true ( Read more... )

Activists often quote Margaret Mead saying "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." One aspect of this is certainly true: large groups of committed citizens tend to get caught up in either bureaucracy or ideological infighting.

Talk about what you know. Demonstrate who you are.

Inspired by a recent comment at work, I propose the optimal length of a blog post (or email or most any writing):

As short as possible and as long as necessary.

Twitter is so great because it makes you practice the former.

More gems from 1986's Programmers At Work, this one from Butler Lampson: That’s why I think the idea of computer literacy is such a rotten one. By computer literacy I mean learning to use the current generation of BASIC and word-processing programs. That has nothing to do with reality. It’s true that a lot of jobs now require BASIC programming, but ( Read more... )

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"It's as if your auto insurance agent came over to your house, got liquored up, borrowed your keys, totaled your car, and said 'Well that'll make your rates go up.'"

That's from today's Planet Money episode on NPR and in the New York Times. It's one of the best "How does the global financial crisis become local?" bits they've done.

From the Quote of the Day iGoogle plugin: You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
-- Albert Einstein
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/usr/games/fortune gives us this gem, presented without comment: I shall come to you in the night and we shall see who is stronger -- a little girl who won't eat her dinner or a great big man with cocaine in his veins.
-- Sigmund Freud, in a letter to his fiancee

Forum2000 may be long gone, but the wisdom of The Cube is available in handy image form. I have the image URL http://www.enweirdenment.org/cgi-bin/cube-notrans.gif on my start page so that I get a different quote each time I start a web browser. This morning's quote was:I want a second career in prostitution. I'll call myself Microsoft and ( Read more... )