Links

Jakob Nielsen’s top 10 web design mistakes of 2002. Fortunately, I was committing only one of them — fixed font sizes. Now rectified.

Determinism, Chaos and Quantum Mechanics [PDF]. Interesting 30-pager by Jean Bricmont. He begins by differentiating predictability from determinism, and proceeds to explain how chaos theory supports determinism by enhancing predictability.

As an interesting aside, Bricmont’s article points out that there are 2 kinds of probabilities. Objective probability is where I know that if I toss a fair coin enough times, it’ll turn up heads 50% of the time. Subjective probability is where I think there’s a 10% chance it’ll rain tomorrow, and I don’t care to repeat the event. The former is an informed statement about a system. The latter is our best guess about an event. The former number is a constant, if we’ve done the calculations right. The latter number can change as our knowledge of the event increases.

Interesting article on The Economist on the value of a cluttered desk.

… the assumption that filers can find stuff more quickly is wrong. Filers, they say, “are less likely to access a given piece of data, and more likely to acquire extraneous data…”

(There’s a “Clean your desk” initiative at BCG Mumbai going on right now.)

2002 in pictures — links on MetaFilter.

Reckoners: an e-book on the history of early electronic computers. via RobotWisdom

While I thought that every cell in the human body had identical genetic make-up, it turns out that brain cells could have gained or lost some chromosomes. Now, that’s a pretty big discovery. via missing matter

A Nike ID story. An e-mail correspondence between Jonah and Nike about creating a personalised ID called “sweatshop”.

Very interesting article on Google on Wired. One interesting point the article raises towards the end is this: “As a private company, Google has one master: users. As a public company, there are shareholders to worry about.” And the interests of these may not be aligned. Shareholders may want more ad revenues. Users do not want ads. Shareholders may want paid placements. Users do not. Once Google IPOs, I suspect its quality will fall.

Cool picture of a virtual keyboard. The article talks about a purely optical keyboard. You move your fingers, and the “keyboard” detects what you’re typing. Now, if optics are that advanced, they should be able to figure out what I’m writing and put that on the computer. So I won’t need a digital pad — I’ll just write on paper. Or even better, project the screen! Then I’ll just carry a little 1″ x 1″ x 1″ box that’ll project a virtual screen that I can draw / write on.

Darwin’s 10 rules for taming e-mail. I badly need this. I am not often in office, and don’t have a fast way of checking office mail through the Web either. Tips 5 and 10 on the list (“avoid e-mail multipliers” and “use the telephone”) are next on my agenda for drastic e-mail slashing.