Links

All teachers of programming find that their results display a ‘double hump’. It is as if there are two populations: those who can [program], and those who cannot [program], each with its own independent bell curve.

The man who robbed a robber.

The 7 habits of highly effective designers. Number one being:

Work quickly, produce a lot

5 different stories about how Google was named Google. This is mentioned as the probably correct version:

“Lucas Pereira: ‘You idiots, you spelled [Googol] wrong!’ But this was good, because google.com was available and googol.com was not. Now most people spell ‘Googol’ ‘Google’, so it worked out OK in the end.”

Philipp Lenssen analysis different kinds of events in the post Different types of Google trends. He graphs (using Google Trends) the search popularity of different types of keywords over time, and observes how known events have a steady rise and sharp drop (e.g. Christmas) while unknown events have a sharp rise and steady drop (e.g. tsunami). And so forth.

See how fast you can type. I averaged 100 words per minute.

How to safely land a plane – by blowing one of its wings off.

Strangely, that’s what Superman does in Superman Returns. (see video of Superman saving a plane).

In his article on The Power of the Marginal, Paul Graham suggests (among other things) a way of picking courses at college.

One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there’s almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It’s this end that gives rise to phrases like “those who can’t do, teach.”

Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study in college. When I was in college the rule seemed to be that you should study whatever you were most interested in. But in retrospect you’re probably better off studying something moderately interesting with someone who’s good at it than something very interesting with someone who isn’t. You often hear people say that you shouldn’t major in business in college, but this is actually an instance of a more general rule: don’t learn things from teachers who are bad at them.

In the long run, people tend to regret having missed out on opportunities for pleasure — and they wish they hadn’t been so diligent about working. Based on research at Columbia University. Clive has a nice article about it titled In the long run, we regret virtue more than vice.

Are video games going the TV show route? Will we have game mega serials? Is this the next wave?

Personally it would be a welcome relief. I don’t often have the time to complete a full session of Age of Kings these days. Chunks of half-hour scenarios would be great.