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 […]
Monthly archives: February 2016
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 […]