Monthly archives: February 2016

Twitter, Listening to Users, and Murder

I saw this car­toon gain a few thou­sand retweets on Twit­ter. In it, a Twit­ter exec­u­tive asks three col­leagues how they should grow the ser­vice. One col­league says “Algo­rithms”; anoth­er, “Moments”; a third says “Lis­ten to users”. This third response angers the exec­u­tive, to the point that he throws the man who sug­gest­ed it out of a win­dow (it’s […]

The Victorian computer pioneers ahead of their time.

I’m read­ing Syd­ney Padua’s The Thrilling Adven­tures of Lovelace and Bab­bage. It’s a fun alter­nate his­to­ry, told in comics, of the work of Charles Bab­bage and Ada, Count­ess of Lovelace—between them, the pre­cur­sors of (respec­tive­ly) auto­mat­ed com­put­ing and com­put­er pro­gram­ming (for the unfa­mil­iar, Steven Wolfram’s Untan­gling the Tale of Ada Lovelace puts their work and rela­tion­ship […]

Conversation, Sport and Reductionism

Tim Rogers’ arti­cle, “the eleven most bor­ing con­ver­sa­tions i can’t stop over­hear­ing”, begins inno­cent­ly enough as a minor rant about tedious dis­cus­sions of hot sauce, but grad­u­al­ly becomes an impas­sioned dis­course about tol­er­ance and under­stand­ing, through the lens of every­day con­ver­sa­tion. It’s real­ly good. His final item cov­ers peo­ple who make a very pub­lic point of say­ing they […]