A license plate holder I saw today on highway 101 had this to say:
Think recursively
Act iteratively
Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
Fertility clinics in the UK will soon begin pre-screening embryos before implantation for genes that predispose to breast or colon cancer as an adult. (I guess if you are going to cull out the unfit, this is as good a time to do it as any(?).)
“Leather said the decision deals with serious genetic conditions for which there is a single test. The HFEA would not consider genetic screening for mild conditions like asthma or eczema or schizophrenia where a number of genes have been identified.”
[idea would be to read 5 SEO books carefully, then review them for accuracy and advisability.]
Zawodny/Cutts/Scoble panel. Tabke says that for these large companies, blogging is like “running naked down Times Square”. Panelists look slightly taken aback.
Scoble: readership varies wildly based on what you’re talking about that day.
Cutts: SEOs should think about getting traffic from blogging.
Tabke: what’s it like day-to-day in corp environment, being this candid? Scoble: a lot easier than three years ago. People understand the role internally more. Zawodny: hardest thing is not letting the fact of a large readership change how you write. Cutts: saw a talk from Z about how many times he’d gotten a talking-to from mgmt – he hasn’t gotten a talking-to from G yet. It feels weird to post widely about a bug he’s been complaining about internally.
Cutts: can’t go back from blogging.
This has come up as a (joking) question among friends of mine. Also, some of the identities of the people in question seem to be … in flux lately. 
So just to clear things up, or possibly confuse things more:
Matt Cutts manages an anti-webspam group at Google. He’s also an A-list blogger, a speaker-to-webmasters/SEOs, and goes to a lot of conferences.
Jeremy Zawodny (Yahoo!) is an A-list blogger, a speaker-to-webmasters/SEOs, and goes to a lot of conferences.
I (Tim Converse) manage an anti-webspam group at Yahoo! Search.
There – now you have all the information you need to decide this difficult and important question for yourself.
Talking with J. the other day, about the vexing question of why anyone would _choose_ to be an engineering manager (like I am, and like she has recently become), and was reminded of the joke we used to make:
If you’re in a technical company of any size, you have only two options:
1) Work for a pinhead, or
2) *BE* the pinhead
A few years ago I decided to BE the pinhead, and never looked back.
I am not grumpY! (but I’m a huge fan of his work ).
People have wondered, because grumpY! is the handle of a Yahoo! employee who posts his grumpy pseudonymous comments to various Yahoo! blogs. I’m amazed that anyone could think we’re the same person – what are they keying off of? My inner grumpiness? And if so, how do they even know about my inner grumpiness, when the only clue they have is my outer grumpiness?
Anyway, just for the record, it looks like grumpY! is a long-time Y! employee who was there during the Bubble – me, I arrived in 2003 with the Inktomi acquisition. And I actually never post anonymously. The only thing I’m actually grumpy about is that I didn’t think of the grumpY! handle first. I’ve thought of adopting an alter ego as crankY!, but that would just feel so derivative at this point.
Kittenwar was not built in a day. An enormous amount of scientific and technological infrastructure had to be created first.
In the early ’60s, scientists and engineers began to build the first computer networks (necessary for one kitten’s picture to be viewed on an entirely different computer than the one it was uploaded to). The next crucial development was the “Internetwork” — a computer network that allowed different types of computer networks to connect to each other. This was indispensable, because otherwise the owners of two kittens might be on different, incompatible networks, making it impossible for the kittens to ever do battle on the same monitor. And if any two kittens could not compete, how could an overall winner ever be determined?
At the core of this internetworking technology is the counterintuitive idea of packet-switching. Instead of making a dedicated connection between your computer and kittenwar.com, the kittendata is actually broken up into lots of small pieces of data (packets), which might follow entirely different paths through the network to your computer. Think of hundreds of tiny kittens released at the start of a maze, each following different paths, but (hopefully) all reaching the same big bowl of tuna at the end.
The culmination of decades of architectural effort was the modern “seven-layer” OSI kittenwar architecture, where each successive layer builds on the abstraction of the previous one:
The physical layer
The datalink layer
The network layer
The transport layer
The session layer
The presentation layer
The kittenwar layer
This achievement is made even more remarkable when you realize that each layer must be built upon the last, and _only_ at the last layer do any cute kittens appear at all. Think of the determination and persistence it must have taken to build this from the bottom, ignoring the skeptical comments of naysayers along the way. (“Dude, like… where are the kittens? I thought there were supposed to be some kittens?”). The end product, though, silences those doubting voices. And as always happens with novel technologies, there are unexpected spinoffs — for example, the technology turns out to be applicable to cute puppies without much modification to lower layers of the architecture. And there are even glimpses of a generalized pet comparison architecture on the horizon. So think back kindly on those 1960’s taxpayers and those 1990’s venture capitalists who made it possible for you to comparatively judge extremely cute kittens drawn from all over the world, pair by pair, hour after hour, day after day, from the comfort of your own desk at work.
It’s very hard to have a completely new idea, even in your dreams.
Long ago I posted about the weird dream I had about a dog instrument (a keyboard connected to dog leashes, with dogs trained to bark at a particular pitch); compare this account of the cat piano from 1650 (via BoingBoing).
One important difference: no animals were harmed in any way in my dream.
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