garry's posthaven

Once upon a time, there was a traveler who came upon three individuals working with stone. Curious as to what the workers were doing with the stones, the traveler approached the first worker and asked, “What are you doing with these stones?” Grumpily and without hesitation the worker quickly responded, “I am a stonecutter and I am cutting stones.”

Not satisfied with this answer, the traveler approached the second worker and asked, “What are you doing with these stones?” The second worker paused for a moment, sighed, but smiled a little and then explained, “I am a stonecutter and I am trying to make enough money to support my family.”

Having two different answers to the same question, the traveler made his way to the third worker and asked, “What are you doing with these stones?” The third worker stopped what he was doing, bringing his chisel to his side. He looked at the traveler with a beaming smile on his face and declared, “I am a stonecutter and I am building a cathedral.”

There are big changes coming in software development — and Jobs, of all people, is trying to lead the way. This time the Holy Grail is object-oriented programming; some have compared the effect it will have on the production of software to the effect the industrial revolution had on manufactured goods. "In my 20 years in this industry, I have never seen a revolution as profound as this," says Jobs, with characteristic understatement. "You can build software literally five to 10 times faster, and that software is much more reliable, much easier to maintain and much more powerful."

Of course, this being Silicon Valley, there is always a new revolution to hype. And to hear it coming from Jobs — Mr. Revolution himself — is bound to raise some eyebrows. "Steve is a little like the boy who cried wolf," says Robert Cringely, a columnist at Info World, a PC industry newsweekly. "He has cried revolution one too many times. People still listen to him, but now they're more skeptical." And even if object-oriented software does take off, Jobs may very well end up a minor figure rather than the flag-waving leader of the pack he clearly sees himself as.

Realtime in 2009, or Object Oriented in 1994, whatever it was -- it was hot. And the tech press needed its talking points.

Luckily Jobs kept going, pushing through whatever the prevailing fad of the day. He kept building and pushing on technology. To create the bicycle for the mind.

To read a blast from 15 years ago makes you realize that over even a decade you can get branded a messiah, a genius, and a has-been all in the blink of an eye. But to make it out on the other side, redeem yourself, and to hit a home run even bigger than your first, you'll need to believe in yourself when nobody else does.

As an aside, my favorite quote here is: "People say sometimes, 'You work in the fastest-moving industry in the world.' I don't feel that way. I think I work in one of the slowest. It seems to take forever to get anything done."

Man, is that ever true, even a decade and a half and an Internet revolution later.

Not only did having a higher blood sugar level make study participants less likely to act impulsively, but taking a diet drink made people more likely to act on impulse and take the immediate, smaller reward, Wang said.

via @jensmccabe

Fascinating -- yet another you can brainhack yourself by what you eat or drink.

So I was thinking of buying a netbook, just so I could more easily debug and test JS and CSS problems in Internet Explorer.

Then I saw this display ad on Amazon... and ... well... wow. Just wow. Really? Is this really an official Windows approved branding? Because... well... holy crap, did they use MS Paint, or what?

Different fonts, different sizes, no punctuation. This is just disgusting.

Can people get smarter? Are some racial or social groups smarter than others? Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, many people believe that intelligence is fixed, and, moreover, that some racial and social groups are inherently smarter than others. Merely evoking these stereotypes about the intellectual inferiority of these groups (such as women and Blacks) is enough to harm the academic perfomance of members of these groups. Social psychologist Claude Steele and his collaborators (2002) have called this phenomenon "stereotype threat."

Yet social psychologists Aronson, Fried, and Good (2001) have developed a possible antidote to stereotype threat. They taught African American and European American college students to think of intelligence as changeable, rather than fixed - a lesson that many psychological studies suggests is true. Students in a control group did not receive this message. Those students who learned about IQ's malleability improved their grades more than did students who did not receive this message, and also saw academics as more important than did students in the control group. Even more exciting was the finding that Black students benefited more from learning about the malleable nature of intelligence than did White students, showing that this intervention may successfully counteract stereotype threat.

Some fascinating findings by the American Psychological Association... this concrete study is yet another example of how our worldview can profoundly shape our destinies.

OK, so Facebook-flavor drink. Check. There's already a drink in honor of the gaming segment: Mt. Dew. So what comes next? Posterous-flavored Powerade? A brew for Twitter, perhaps we'll call it "Sweet Tweet malt liquor"?

Somebody. Make. It. Stop.

Advertising Age noticed a Facebook-flavored drink and speculates what's next... I cannot confirm or deny the existence of a Posterous-flavored Powerade.

Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great: our university system, our receptiveness to immigration, our culture of innovation. In most significant ways, the U.S. remains the envy of the world. But here’s the alarming problem: our governing system is old and broken and dysfunctional. Fixing it—without resorting to a constitutional convention or a coup—is the key to securing the nation’s future.

This was absolutely well worth a read by any civic-minded American. Yes, things are screwed up here... it's not as bad as people say, but then again there are plenty of things wrong.

And our government sucks, and it doesn't look like there's a decent way to fix it. Some effort in the article is spent decrying that our Senate is massively out of whack -- that the Gang of Six of health-care-reform-fame represented a mere 3% of the American Population. That our government, often like our military, is horribly driven day-to-day by short term tactics and completely blind to long term strategy as a result.

Some amazing points here -- with hope for the future as well. We've been talking about the fall of America for well over 200 years... with any luck, we'll be talking about the impending fall for hundreds of years to come.