This book explains the philosophy behind Leanpub, from its origin in "a book is a startup" to the present form. Lean Publishing is the act of publishing an in-progress book using lightweight tools and many iterations to get reader feedback, pivot until you have the right book and build traction once you do.
Leanpub is the self-publishing platform I use for my book Space Apps for Android. It provides a toolchain and workflow for publishing works in-progress, something similar to releasing new versions of a software package. Publishing a new version of a book in-progress is a good opportunity for posting...
Vincent Ritter (vincentritter.com)Vincent Ritter (vincentritter.com)As part of my ongoing effort to supplant the two major political parties… Did you know George Washington was not a member of a political party? In fact, he found them dangerous, and warned about them. The first President of the United States got it right. In his farewell address, George Washingto...
Humans are good at a lot of things, but putting time in perspective is not one of them. It's not our fault - the span of time in human history, and even more so in natural history, are so vast compared to the span of our life and recent history that it's almost impossible to get a handle on it.
Aaron Davis (Read Write Respond)Many argue that something is not right with social media as it currently stands. This post explores what it might mean to make Twitter great again? Responding to Jack Dorsey’s call for suggestions on how to improve Twitter, Dave Winer put forward two suggestions: preventing trolling and making cha...
One of the greatest actors in all of film history, Al Pacino established himself during one of cinema's most vibrant decades, the 1970s, and has ...
Alan Alda wanted to get off the island quickly. Steven Strogatz explains how an 18th century British clergyman could have helped. In this short bonus episode, Steven helps Alan understand something that he’s wondered about for years.
There’s a reasonable basic discussion of Bayesian statistics here.
Stephen Fry loves words. But he does more than love them. He puts them together in ways that so delight readers, that a blog or a tweet by him can get hundreds of thousands of people hanging on his every keystroke. As an actor, he’s brought to life every kind of theatrical writing from sketch comedy to classics. He’s performed in everything from game shows to the British audiobook version of Harry Potter. And always with a rich intelligence and searching eye. In this conversation with Alan Alda, Stephen explores how myths — sometimes very ancient ones — help us understand and, even guide, our modern selves.
University libraries around the world are seeing precipitous declines in the use of the books on their shelves.
GitHub has launched a new Sponsors tool that allows open source developer to receive financial support. The program is rolling out slowly and currently has a waitlist for open source contributors o…
Scroll the comment section on virtually any site on the web and you’re bound to encounter at least a few toxic comments. Maybe more than a few, depending on the site you’re looking at and the topic of the post people are commenting on.
The lie or myth or mistaken belief (depending on intentions, I suppose) that the fetus tries to “escape” or “move away” during an abortion is common. It was in the recent fo…
Today W3C and the WHATWG signed an agreement to collaborate on the development of a single version of the HTML and DOM specifications. The Memorandum of Understanding jointly published as the WHATWG/W3C Joint Working Mode gives the specifics of this collaboration. This is the...
