Google Music Thought.

Google has the option of selling music directly from its SERPs. They already show band related info with links to other vendors. If they get enough traffic there (something they can measure) and enough people clicking other sites to buy music (something they can measure, but not sure if they are), then they have data to make a good decision.

Note to self..

Stop thinking about marketing from the rational, logical, algorithmic midset/framework. Think from the "Chaos Theory" midset/framework. Think, rather "feel" about one unit, and then figure out if a lot of units will think or feel the same way.

More on this later as I explore Gladwell's Tipping Point.

Website Design Simulator

The idea is to create a software that simulates different user experiences, views of the site she's making. In 800x600 with bad color depth, with no java, with no flash, with low bandwidth and so on. In a snapshot see what's going on.

Yet another on..

Simplicity takes effort-- genius, even. The average programmer seems to produce UI designs that are almost willfully bad. I was trying to use the stove at my mother's house a couple weeks ago. It was a new one, and instead of physical knobs it had buttons and an LED display. I tried pressing some buttons I thought would cause it to get hot, and you know what it said? "Err." Not even "Error." "Err." You can't just say "Err" to the user of a stove. You should design the UI so that errors are impossible. And the boneheads who designed this stove even had an example of such a UI to work from: the old one. You turn one knob to set the temperature and another to set the timer. What was wrong with that? It just worked.

Another nugget..

One of the most useful mental habits I know I learned from Michael Rabin: that the best way to solve a problem is often to redefine it. A lot of people use this technique without being consciously aware of it, but Rabin was spectacularly explicit. You need a big prime number? Those are pretty expensive. How about if I give you a big number that only has a 10 to the minus 100 chance of not being prime? Would that do? Well, probably; I mean, that's probably smaller than the chance that I'm imagining all this anyway.

Nailed it.

Can't you just think of new ideas yourself? The empirical answer is: no. Even Einstein needed people to bounce ideas off. Ideas get developed in the process of explaining them to the right kind of person. You need that resistance, just as a carver needs the resistance of the wood.

Interesting

Text is most legible with at most 60-70 characters per line.

Are Software Patents Evil?

Are Software Patents Evil?

Towards a Theory of Emergent Functionality

http://cse.ucdavis.edu/~dynlearn/dynlearn/RoMADS/steels01/index.html

Important paper on emergence. Gotto print and read.

Irreducible (philosophy) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Irreducible (philosophy) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Very interesting.

Irreducibility, in philosophy, has the sense that a complete account of an entity will not be possible at lower levels of explanation. Another way to state this is that Ockham's razor requires the elimination of only those entities that are unnecessary, not as many entities as could conceivably be eliminated. Lev Vygotsky provides the following illustration of the idea, in his Thought and Language:

"Two essentially different modes of analysis are possible in the study of psychological structures. It seems to us that one of them is responsible for all the failures that have beset former investigators of the old problem, which we are about to tackle in our turn, and that the other is the only correct way to approach it.

The first method analyzes complex psychological wholes into "elements". It may be compared to the chemical analysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen, neither of which possesses the properties of the whole and each of which possesses properties not present in the whole. The student applying this method in looking for an explanation of some property of water — why it extinguishes fire, for example — will find to his surprise that hydrogen burns and oxygen sustains fire ....

In our opinion the right course to follow is to use the other type of analysis, which may be called "analysis into units". By "unit", we mean a product of analysis which, unlike elements, retains all the basic properties of the whole, and which cannot be further divided without losing them. Not the chemical composition of water, but its molecules and their behaviour, are the key to the understanding of the properties of water ..."

In other words: to conserve the properties under investigation, it is necessary to remain within a certain level of complexity. Irreducibility is most often deployed in defence of the reality of human subjectivity and/or free will, against those who treat such things as folk psychology, overdue for elimination from science, such as Paul and Patricia Churchland.

Funny comment on /.

Perhaps the eternally elusive missing link has been found...

Step 1. Anything
Step 2. Google
Step 3. Profit!