aka bird flu, scary variation of The Flu, spreading through animals 2020-2024.... (more)

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. (March 14, 1933 – November 3, 2024) was an American record producer, songwriter, composer, arranger, and producer.[1] His career spanned 70 years, with 28 Grammy Awards won out of 80 nominations,[2] and a Grammy Legend Award in 1992. Jones came to prominence in the 1950s as a jazz arranger and conductor before working on pop music and film scores. He moved easily between genres, producing pop hit records for Lesley Gore in the early 1960s (including "It's My Party") and serving as an arranger and conductor for several collaborations between the jazz artists Frank Sinatra and Count Basie. In 1968, Jones became the first African American to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song for "The Eyes of Love" from the film Banning. Jones was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score for his work on the 1967 film In Cold Blood, making him the first African American to be nominated twice in the same year. Jones produced three of the most successful albums by pop star Michael Jackson: Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), and Bad (1987). In 1985, Jones produced and conducted the charity song "We Are the World", which raised funds for victims of famine in Ethiopia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quincy_Jones (more)

a statistical distribution often confused for a power law

Ross Mayfield on Clay Shirky's piece on the BlogWeb ecosystem exhibiting Power Law characteristics. (more)

Twisting the rules of building software: Bending Spoons (the team behind Evernote). You may not be familiar with Bending Spoons, but I guarantee you’ve encountered some of their well-known products, like Evernote and Meetup. In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, we sit down with three key figures from the Italy-based startup: cofounder and CEO Luca Ferrari, CTO Francesco Mancone, and Evernote product lead Federico Simionato (more)

George W Bush defeated Al Gore (more)

aka Carbon Emissions (more)

Peter Naur: Programming as Theory Building (more)

book by Mark Joyner: The Irresistible Offer: How to Sell Your Product or Service in 3 Seconds or Less (2005) ISBN: 0471738948 (more)

an air-purifying respirator, in which respirable air is obtained by filtering a contaminated atmosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respirator (more)

Literate Programming is a phrase coined by Donald Knuth to describe the approach of developing (more)

Robert Horn's perspectives... (though his essays don't seem to follow his own guidelines...) This seems particular appropriate to Wiki and OutLining, plus other forms of HyperText. But note that his focus/Context is on relatively "stable" information, as opposed to the process of Writing/thinking collaboratively. (more)

(page was renamed from Why Keep A Notebook) (more)

Writing Dashboards | Documentation | Steampipe. A Steampipe dashboard uses a combination of HCL and SQL to visualize data in a variety of ways. This dashboards as code approach makes it easy to create and combine charts and tables, style them, and make them interactive. Use your favorite text editor, receive immediate feedback as you type, and manage your dashboards on GitHub with all your other code artifacts. (more)

category of writing artifact, typically about how to use a piece of software

problem-solving with multiple interrelated obstacles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_solving#Characteristics_of_complex_problems (or is that really "complicated" not necessarily "complex"? see Cynefin) (more)

messy but not complex? see Cynefin

The Cynefin framework (/kəˈnɛvɪn/ kuh-NEV-in)[1] is a conceptual framework used to aid decision-making.[2] Created in 1999 by Dave Snowden when he worked for IBM Global Services, it has been described as a "sense-making device".[3][4] Cynefin is a Welsh word for habitat.[5] Cynefin offers five decision-making contexts or "domains"—'clear' (known as 'simple' until 2014, then 'obvious' until being recently renamed),[6] 'complicated', 'complex', 'chaotic', and 'confusion'—that help managers to identify how they perceive situations and make sense of their own and other people's behaviour.[a] The framework draws on research into systems theory, complexity theory, network theory and learning theorys.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin (more)

Jorge Aranda notes A critique from Alistair Cockburn on how the Agile Software Development movement is under attack from Taylorism led me to an essay by Dave West on the philosophical incompatibilities between Lean Development and agile techniques, and this in turn led me to finally give a read to Peter Naur’s 1985 text, “Programming as Theory Building.” (Naur Programming as Theory Building) Naur’s programmer’s theories are essentially Mental Models in the sense I (and many others before me) present them, and both he and I claim that the overarching goal of a software development organization is to build those models (or theories) during the life of the project. I could actually restate my thesis contributions as extensions to Naur’s sketch in two ways: first, I explore what I think is the main challenge that software team members find today: to build consistent mental models (or in the terms of the thesis, to develop a shared understanding (Shared Language)) of the world, among potentially large groups of people, in the face of abundant, shifting, and tacit information, and unclear or exploratory goals. Second, I outline some attributes of team interaction (Team Work) that make such a challenge easier to overcome. (more)

A general manifesto (Agile Manifesto) for "just-enough-process" Software Development methods. (more)