The Pool Room - Facebook runs on a very stiff, crude model of what...: Facebook runs on a very stiff, crude model of what people are like. It herds everybody — friends, co-workers, romantic partners, that guy who lived on your block but moved away after fifth grade — into the same big room. It smooshes together your work self and your home self, your past self and your present self, into a single generic extruded product. It suspends the natural process by which old friends fall away over time, allowing them to build up endlessly, producing the social equivalent of liver failure. On Facebook, there is one kind of relationship: friendship, and you have it with everybody. You’re friends with your spouse, and you’re friends with your plumber.
The Cooper Journal: Explaining pair design (metaphorically): At Cooper, we’re quite fond of pair design as a way to get to the highest quality design quickly. ... Over the years, two specific roles have evolved out of this paired practice. ...generator and synthesizer.
Stop Lying About What You Do | booktwo.org: Shmuel, a Flickr user and copywriter, put together this excellent bingo card of lies publishers tell themselves, willfully or not. The Ur-comment is at bottom right: “Evidence that doesn’t fit my beliefs is wrong.” What is extraordinary is that this continues even when we ourselves are generating the evidence, when we are our own exceptions.
We prejudge endlessly. Because we have not experienced the emotions that new technologies trigger we assume that they will be less powerful than the emotions we already know. Just because we haven’t had these feelings yet.
The Quicksilver Mess - TIME: two Arkansas teenagers [found some 40 lbs. of pure mercury] in an abandoned factory where it had been used to make neon lights. They and their friends dipped their hands and arms into it. They poured it on their bedroom floors to see it wobble and flow. They showed it off at school and handed it out in jars and vials. One youth dipped a cigarette in it and smoked it. And then he and his buddies began to fall very ill. These kids, growing up in the age of digital thermometers, didn't know that they were playing with a poison.
Interesting point about starting a movement... Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy | Derek Sivers: A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. ... The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire.
