Wrote
- Drop database (2020-03-10).
- Now reading: The Brothers Karamazov (2020-03-11).
- This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be (2020-03-12).
Read
- David Craddock, Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego?, The Video Game History Foundation (2020-03-08). Research entailed more than making up clues. Lock tackled Government, which meant that if a case led students to Bismarck, the state capitol, she was in charge of devising reasons for the pranksters to be there. Other trivia could be so obscure—such as “gandy dancer,” slang for railroad workers and a term very likely to be unheard of to the game’s target audience—that accompanying history texts, assembled by the committee for inclusion with the game, were practically mandatory. Landsleedle and other teachers had accumulated a wealth of information on North Dakota, but had made most of it themselves. North Dakota was such a small state that even book publishers steered clear of it, certain that publications on the region would lose money.
- Sophie Gilbert, Marc Maron’s End-of-the-World Anxiety, The Atlantic (2020-03-12). As Maron cycles through snake-oil salesmen and the Fox News bubble and the discomfiting “dovetailing of late-stage capitalism and Christian end-times prophecy,” he seems to touch on a timely insight. The most natural instinct of humankind is to want something to believe in. Whether that’s the second coming of Christ, the affirmation of asanas, or even just the momentary self-definition that comes with posting a picture on Instagram, the desire is the same: to feel like more than an aberration, more than a squishable bug on a giant shoe. Maron knows this better than most. He’s the rare star who found real fame in his 50s, after an early career defined by bit parts and failed auditions and canceled radio shows.
- Tyler Cowen, Don’t Worry. America’s Response to the Coronavirus Will Improve., Bloomberg (2020-03-09). To be clear, Americans cannot count on any of these responses to be automatic. And it is still essential for the president and other leaders to send the right signals. Nonetheless, it is too early to write off the U.S. response as pathetic; being a laggard is an old and dangerous American tradition. It is past time, however, to flip the switch and get moving.
- Sergio Pistoi, DNA Is Not a Blueprint, Scientific American (2020-02-06). DNA is not a blueprint: it’s a recipe coding for thousands of different proteins that interact with each other and with the environment, just like the ingredients of a cake in an oven. Whereas a blueprint is an exact, drawn-to-scale copy of the final product, a recipe is just a loose plot that leaves much more room to uncertainty. Open a packet of cookies: each one was made from the same recipe and baked in the same conditions, but there are no two that are identical.
- Ben Swire, How a Kid's Perspective Improves Design Research, Ideo Blog (2020-01-16). Our project teams grab Quinn for their brainstorms because she listens to the problem and tries to solve it. She doesn’t think about financial viability or the laws of physics—she just thinks. Eventually, it's our job to add those things back in, but in the divergent phase of a project, she's a superstar. Although she's prone to insert dinosaurs and robots into her concepts, she cuts to the core of an issue and simplifies the needs behind it in a way that can inspire us to develop a dinosaur-free solution.
Listened
- Eric Nam - Love Die Young, Song Exploder (2020-03-11).
- S 6 E 11 Don't Go: On Meetings, Akimbo (2020-03-11).
Watched
Chef Wang teaches you from scratch: fundamentals techniques of "Wok Tossing". Let's learn!
Photo
Upcoming
- TBD: Nothing, at the moment, but I bet we're all in the market for a good webinar, eh?
There might be additional links that didn't make the cut at notes.kirkkittell.com