Timely Snow

My father died this morning. It was far from unexpected — he had been going through some kind of dementia process for more than 5 years, and his health had taken a major turn for the worse at the end of the summer. Still, there’s something unexpected about it actually happening.

Colour Assignment - By Joe Hallock — this was referred to on the radio show “Whad’ya know?” this morning. Blue has the most favorite color votes; Orange wins as the least favorite color (although Brown beats it if you just look at men). At least in terms of color preferences, the consensus seems to [...]

Microsoft Office PowerPoint : Welcome to PowerPoint 12! is a new weblog related to the development of the next version of Powerpoint.
Unfortunately, the first post shows how easy it is to produce a nice looking slide that does a worse job than in previous versions of communicating quantitative information. I think it’s clearly harder [...]

A Christmas present for the city with everything (some assembly required)

Hawthorne effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Hawthorne effect refers to improvements in productivity or
quality which result not so much because of intended changes to working
conditions, but mainly because the workers are aware of extra attention
being paid to them.
I was looking up a reference to this to send to a student who’d talked around this [...]

The war between Michigan and Ohio — catching up on the local history.

This article
has a nice discussion on this urban legend about Chinese.

In the Markof book (see below), he describes Engelbart’s life as having been changed by reading an essay by William James

I’ve been reading a fascinating book, What the Dormouse Said, by John Markoff. One of the protagonists is Douglas Englebart, who envisioned much of the computerized world we live in today.

This is an ad for the Madrid Metro, and is quite cool.