Found on Lambda the Ultimate: Some fascinating notes on a Neal Stephenson lecture about his approach to writing, with parallels to programming:
“A good writer (and a good programmer) does not work by distilling good ideas from a large pool of bad and good ones, but by producing few if any bad ideas in the first place. It is important to give ideas time to mature [in the subconsciousness] so only good ideas percolate to the conscious level.”
Question of the day: One of my three-and-a-half year old sons, Matthew, has a query for his parents that he has repeated on several occasions, and each time it has stumped me, so I am throwing his inquiry out on the Net waters to see what responses it might evoke.
Matthew’s question: “Why are we people?”
Slow blogging here as we gear up some new projects for the new year at Salon.
For a side project I have just re-read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” I used to read this once a year or more but have fallen out of the habit. Take ten minutes out of your week to read it if you haven’t lately. In the era of Iraq war cant it provides a good bucket of cold water to the face.
| If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin, where it belongs. |
Tim O’Reilly’s new essay on piracy offers much wisdom. “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.” “Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say “may” because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues.” Read the whole thing here.
Joel Spolsky has posted a new essay on programming: “Lord Palmerston on Programming.” Joel writes about how vast the pools of knowledge programmers need to master to become really expert in each of the many programming “worlds” that are popular today. Choice quote:
| People who only know one world get really smarmy, and every time they hear about the complications in the other world, it makes them think that their world doesn’t have complications. But they do. You’ve just moved beyond them because you are proficient in them. These worlds are just too big and complicated to compare any more. Lord Palmerston: “The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.” |
Britt Blaser offers this moving parable, from the author’s Air Force experience in Vietnam: Sometimes, the paranoia can be worse than the danger. Now that the immediate threat of sniper shootings is behind us, these words are worth attending to:
| Our brain — specifically the reticular formation (so-called “reptile brain”) — is set up to face threats first and only seek opportunities when not threatened. That bias for threat info sells stuff to us. To that end, the media has grabbed and holds our attention, robbing us of the chance to pay attention to something other than the media. |
I'm a writer, editor and Web site builder. I was co-founder of Salon, where I served as technology editor and later managing editor and VP/editorial operations for many years. I'm also author of the book Dreaming in Code. Right now I'm working on a new book about the story of blogging.
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