Picking up a Chromebook for home schooling during the pandemic.
Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
Stopping by just to wash the car windows. I really should try driving more.
Techne
If you are reading this, I have a new personal site. My previous site was down for a very long time: initially, the server had gone down because log files had grown too large and I hadn’t set up a proper log rotation system that discarded the old log files.
Then I tried to upgrade the serve...
A nice take on the problem. We all want less overhead and maintenance.
Complete reference and source book of edible plants of the world, invaluable to gardeners, cooks, economic botanists, those in the specialty and gourmet foods business. Includes 3,000 species and 7,000 varieties of food plants. More than 1300 catalog sources for seeds, plants and food products are listed. Revised, updated and expanded edition.
Amplenote and Roam are more different than they are similar, but there are still many common touchpoints. Below, we'll outline how the two compare as of mid-2020. If you would like to import your Roam JSON file to see how it compares in Amplenote, you can start a free trial and then try out our Roam Research Importer here. Paid annually, Amplenote pricing ranges from about $5/month to $25/month.
Looks like yet another silo version of a note taking application. I think I’d prefer something more IndieWeb.
Imagine you're in a game with one objective: a bestselling product or service. The rules? No marketing budget, no PR stunts, and it must be sustainably successful. No short-term fads.
This is not a game of chance. It is a game of skill and strategy.
And it begins with a single question: given competing products of equal pricing, promotion, and perceived quality, why does one outsell the others?
The answer doesn't live in the sustainably successful products or services. The answer lives in those who use them.
Our goal is to craft a strategy for creating successful users. And that strategy is full of surprising, counter-intuitive, and astonishingly simple techniques that don't depend on a massive marketing or development budget. Techniques typically overlooked by even the most well-funded, well-staffed product teams.
Every role is a key player in this game. Product development, engineering, marketing, user experience, support--everyone on the team. Even if that team is a start-up of one. Armed with a surprisingly overlooked science and a unique POV, we can can reduce the role of luck. We can build sustainably successful products and services that rely not on unethical persuasive marketing tricks but on helping our users have deeper, richer experiences. Not just in the moments while they're using our product but, more importantly, in the moments when they aren't.
Reply to What Is the Small Web?
You seem to be under the impression that IndieWeb is a formalized organization where the people operating under its banner are being paid by said organization.
In reality it's a set of shared goals, which a lot of the people disagree on facets of implementation and the like, and a collection of generally-agreed-to protocols that people can choose to support as part of interoperability with other websites.
I am fairly active in IndieWeb spaces and I disagree with others in these spaces all the time. I've also certainly never accepted any Google money (or any other sponsor) for my contributions, not that it's even been offered. This is the first I'm hearing of "us" being sponsored by Google.
I've seen plenty of material support from Mozilla (because there are several Mozillians involved in the projects) and Okta (for the same reason). But those aren't in any way signs that those companies are steering the decisions being made -- they're just offering things like hosting rooms and providing food at our mini-conferences and providing t-shirts and whatever (and those t-shirts, as far as I know, never have any sponsor logos on them).
Also, we take a more user-centric view of things; while we'd all like people to be on their own self-hosted websites and free of the big social networks and so on, we understand that it's not realistic to just ask everyone to jump ship all at once, and running your own web presence is not what most people want to do. It's much better to build bridges so that people can connect in whatever way works for them, and that's why there are services like brid.gy and so on which people run out of the kindness of their hearts, and paid services like micro.blog that try to make it easier for people to dive in without having to Do All The Things, and people who work on IndieWeb integrations for Wordpress and so on.
And I'm very grateful for things like brid.gy; most of the comments/responses I get on my website come in through that, via people on Twitter and Mastodon and occasionally Reddit. Sometimes I get webmentions from other IndieWeb users, but they're the vast minority. And same goes for private-post logins; most people log in via Twitter or Mastodon, and a bunch use my email-based login mechanism as well, and very few actually log in via IndieAuth. If I were to restrict my interactions to pure IndieWeb I'd have a very lonely presence.
Just ate: Lemon dainty with mango coulis
Her husband George Conway, a conservative lawyer and outspoken critic of the president, is also stepping back from his role on the Lincoln Project, an outside group of Republicans devoted to defeating Trump in November.
Apparently both she and her husband are “disappearing”. Makes one wonder what is going on? Is there real family trouble, or is she simply jumping a sinking ship and he’s helping to provide the cover?
Stocking up for the week.
Lecture 8: Ambiguity—The Unknown Unknowns
In behavioral economics, “ambiguity” refers to conditions in decision making in which we do not know and cannot estimate the probabilities of potential outcomes. Here, investigate three circumstances in decision making that produce ambiguity: “hidden information,” “asymmetrical knowledge,” and “unfamiliar contexts.” Then, learn a two-step approach for dealing effectively with ambiguity.
Finished lecture 8 on ambiguity
Interesting applications to insurance here and some good reasons why the market and capitalism won’t help fix some problems.
Interesting applications to insurance here and some good reasons why the market and capitalism won’t help fix some problems.
Directed by Rachel Lears. With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Joe Crowley, Paula Jean Swearengin. A look at the people involved with various political campaigns during the 2018 U.S. congressional election.
Rating: ★★★½
Sonia’s choice tonight. Interesting to see documentary footage of some of these races and how people perceived them at the time.
Hagoromo chalk has developed a cult following among mathematicians. When the company went out of business, chaos ensued.
I’ve read this same sort of article in other venues in the past, but closer to the revival of the company. This seems to have cropped up again because the original owner of the Japanese company has passed away in the last month.