Moore’s Law and the Origin of Life

Life predates the Earth!? If this is true....wow!..

MIT Technology Review

The Physics arXiv Blog 

April 15, 2013

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As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself.

Here’s an interesting idea. Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so. That has produced an exponential increase in the number of transistors on microchips and continues to do so.

But if an observer today was to measure this rate of increase, it would be straightforward to extrapolate backwards and work out when the number of transistors on a chip was zero. In other words, the date when microchips were first developed in the 1960s.

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The Uses Of Difficulty

The brain likes a challenge—and putting a few obstacles in its way may well boost its creativity.

Ian Leslie
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, November/December 2012

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Jack White, the former frontman of the White Stripes and an influential figure among fellow musicians, likes to make things difficult for himself. He uses cheap guitars that won’t stay in shape or in tune. When performing, he positions his instruments in a way that is deliberately inconvenient, so that switching from guitar to organ mid-song involves a mad dash across the stage. Why? Because he’s on the run from what he describes as a disease that preys on every artist: "ease of use". When making music gets too easy, says White, it becomes harder to make it sing.

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The Nine Circles of Hell: Front-End Development for Sharepoint

My condolences.

If you’re reading this book, it can logically be assumed that you’ve been tasked with completing a project that involves working with Sharepoint; in fact, it’s probably safe to make the assumption that you’re a front-end developer who stumbled upon this text after hysterically Googling “MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT SOME1 PLS HELP,” tears streaming down your pudgy cheeks, fat fists wildly bashing the keyboard of your MacBook Pro. 

a quick-start guide
by J. Ky Marsh
jkymarsh.com

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All is not lost, my friend. I found myself in exactly the same position some time ago; well, aside from the crying, anyway. What are you, some kind of wuss? Christ.

The fact of the matter is that up-to-date, clear-cut information on front-end development for Sharepoint is frighteningly difficult to find. Sharepoint itself is chock-full of bad practices and front-end code taboos that will leave you scratching your head (and potentially crying, since you’ve apparently shown a propensity for doing that, Nancy).

Furthermore, Sharepoint’s default front-end code (that is, the HTML, CSS, and JS that are used by default within a fresh install of Sharepoint) is so horrific that you’ll likely begin immediately assessing how to rewrite or overhaul the existing code in a desperate attempt to bring it in line with modern web development standards.

Don’t panic. I’m here to help.

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How to hire a product manager

It's been a while since I was hiring at a startup, and recruiting at a startup is very different from hiring at a big company

By Ken Norton

Group Product Manager, Google

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At Yahoo! Search, it seemed like we were constantly hiring. I did an average of 5-8 interviews a week. It was a never-ending drumbeat of resumes, interviews, and offer letters. Now, I wasn't always the hiring manager. I only hired a handful of product managers in my time there. But somebody was always hiring a product manager and I was usually on the interview team.

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How Beer Gave Us Civilization

HUMAN beings are social animals. But just as important, we are socially constrained as well.

By JEFFREY P. KAHN
Published: March 15, 2013    

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...lifesaving social instincts didn’t readily lend themselves to exploration, artistic expression, romance, inventiveness and experimentation — the other human drives that make for a vibrant civilization.

To free up those, we needed something that would suppress the rigid social codes that kept our clans safe and alive. We needed something that, on occasion, would let us break free from our biological herd imperative — or at least let us suppress our angst when we did.

We needed beer.

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Fools in the Hotzone: Saruman as the Bold but Incompetent Firefighter

Every year the Man sends me to Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response class. These HAZWOPER classes are almost always taught by firefighters because they routinely deal with emergency responses to hazardous materials.

Wednesday, November 28th, 2012 | Posted by Adrian Simmons

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Every year the Man sends me to Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response class. These HAZWOPER classes are almost always taught by firefighters because they routinely deal with emergency responses to hazardous materials.

...most of the examples of what not to do when knee-deep in an emergency dealing with hazardous materials comes from the hard lessons of other firefighters. More specifically, they come from the gung-ho firefighters who charge into a dangerous situation, make said situation worse, and other firefighters have to spend time and energy rescuing them instead of dealing with the main problem.

Because I’m a nerd, and I’ve taken this class a lot over the years and my mind wanders, I immediately saw a parallel to the wizards of JRR Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.

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Patent trolls want $1,000—for using scanners

I know that patent trolling happens, but this seems to be going a bit too far....

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by Joe Mullin - Jan 2 2013, 10:30pm MPST

When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture” patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.

If he'd paid up, the IT services provider that Vicinanza founded, BlueWave Computing, would have owed $130,000.

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