Programming SucksAlso, the bridge was designed as a suspension bridge, but nobody actually knew how to build a suspension bridge, so they got halfway through it and then just added extra support columns to keep the thing standing, but they left the suspension cables because they’re still sort of holding up parts of the bridge. Nobody knows which parts, but everybody’s pretty sure they’re important parts. **** This is what it is to learn programming. You get to know your useful tools, then you look around, and there are some handy new tools nearby and those tools show you the bottomless horror that was always right next to your bed. **** Remember that stuff about crazy people and bad code? The internet is that except it’s literally a billion times worse. Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses. There’s a team at a Google office that hasn’t slept in three days. Somewhere there’s a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she’s dead. […]

The “Jennifer Aniston neuron” is the foundation of compelling new memory research — Quartz “We have a relatively limited memory capacity and that much of our perception of our memory is in fact an illusion.” ” Looking for the areas of the brain that cause epileptic seizures, Quiroga discovered that one subject had a neuron that steadily fired whenever she was shown a photo of Jennifer Aniston. It didn’t fire for other celebrities, but seemed linked to the concept of Jennifer Aniston. Another subject had a Halle Berry neuron, and another had one that fired in response to Bill Clinton.” The Suit That Couldn’t Be Copied – The New Yorker Among the interesting things about Savile Row is that the people who work there have complete confidence that what they do is genuinely different and better than what other people can do. They appear to invite scrutiny, arguing that when their work is examined, it will be found admirable. Not only did Taub say yes; he also offered to give me a garment, so that it could be taken apart and so that the tailor who was trying to reproduce it would have the best possible information. His reasoning was that something made by Gieves & Hawkes could be taken apart but not put back together again in as lovely […]

Why School Reform Is Impossible “…before the computer could change School, School changed the computer.” just getting the original quote Tilt.js – A tiny parallax tilt effect for jQuery The high-tech war on science fraud | Science | The Guardian The comparison is apt. The exposure of fraud directly threatens the special claim science has on truth, which relies on the belief that its methods are purely rational and objective. As the congressmen warned scientists during the hearings, “each and every case of fraud serves to undermine the public’s trust in the research enterprise of our nation”. OU Create Thus Far (2016) – Adam Croom This post, a sort of end-of-the-year wrap up, is a step towards trying to pull together a better aggregated story as to what has and is happening with OU Create–though it’s really only a start. Yes, it still leans on metrics, but please don’t get distracted by those too much. They are merely a tool that serves as an anchor. Below the numbers I’ve linked to relevant blog posts, which I’m personally more interested in. I’d rather build towards stories and relationships than numbers. But numbers do make it easy to build an infographic… So one of those is at the bottom too. List: Tips for Staying Calm and Relaxed in 2017 – McSweeney’s Internet Tendency Put a […]