2013-12-26

"If you're going to make a mailing list, at least make it a self-aware one."

— Me, like a month ago, when I first set this mailing list up.

Starting.

The purpose of this list is: To be useful. To tell you about things that matter.

So.

Pathing.

• Wikipedia: "Hedonic Treadmill." Basically, humans aren't very good at getting happier.
• Wikipedia: "The Planning Fallacy." People are also terrible at planning, even when they're primed to be aware of that fact.

Developing.

• Seth Brown/Dr. Bunsen: "Building a Weather Station." A great rundown of a smart guy's process in building a remotely accessible weather station at his home.
• Bloomberg News: "UPS Crunches Data to Make Routes More Efficient, Save Gas." UPS's navigation systems are fascinating.
• Adrien Lucas Ecoffet/Quora: "Answer to Is it true that when translating from/to any language other than English, Google Translate translates to English (in the backend software) before translating to the language I've chosen?" Interesting both for linguistics and also for the method he uses to solve the problem.
• Horace Dediu/Asymco: "Bundling and Pricing Innovation." Dediu argues that cell carriers will never unbundle their services, which makes me a bit sad.
• Seth Brown/Dr. Bunsen: "On the Future of Statistical Languages." I know next to nothing on the topic, but Brown's argument is interesting and accessible.
• Kyle Vanhemert/Wired: "How Apple's Lightning-Plug Guru Reinvented Square's Card Reader." A great piece on embedded systems design & physical product development.
• Terry Wohlers/Wohlers Associates: "3D Printing Metal Parts in Space." This kind of thing could be really cool.

Evaluating.

• Elon Musk/Tesla: "The Mission of Tesla." Musk is a pretty crazy dude. This mission statement is a strong defense against the seemingly crazy claims that Teslas are particularly susceptible to fire.
• Michael Hochster/Quora: "Answer to What is an intuitive explanation of Bayes' Rule?" Bayesian probability is *everywhere* these days, and really interesting.
• Benjamin Morris/Skeptical Sports: "The Case for Dennis Rodman." I'm not done with this whole series, but I like it.
• Khoi Vinh/Medium: "What Streaming Music Can Be." I'm old fashioned - I own my own music files. But I like this take on streaming, which is obviously the future.

Reflecting.

• Juliet Waters/NYTimes: "The Code of Life." A journalist learns a little programming, and discovers that it's not all bad.
• FastCo: "Digital Cameras are Messing With Your Memory." This is great, but you really need to read to the end - I suspect that the way that many of us deal with digital photography avoids some of the pitfalls.
• John Dickerson/Slate: "Note to Selfie." Dickerson gives an excellent, and heartfealt, defense of mobile technology and its place in our everyday lives.

And.