As someone who has definitely expended too much of my life on the watching of Gilligan’s Island, this is heartening news. Shirky argues that there has been a cognitive surplus in the developed world and for the past 50 years we have been soaking up that surplus with situation comedies and that now we are [...]

From New York Times via Matt.
Our desire to believe in an orderly universe leads us to interpret the uncertainty we feel about the future as nothing but a consequence of our current state of ignorance, to be dispelled by greater knowledge or better analysis. But even a modest amount of randomness can play havoc with [...]

Why does open source work?
Hed Gulley knows one way.
Mathworks runs a biannual programming contest in Matlab. Most programming contests pit solo contestants or teams in head to head competition, each contestant working alone and submitting their entries at the end, but this one works a little differently. Entries are entered in the open. Everyone [...]

There are many excellent features of Ruby on Rails. The technology has significant advantages for rapid development and deployment and I don’t think that I could undertake the work that I am doing to develop factscollector without it. I can prototype rapidly, and deploy the simplest thing that could possibly work. My plan is that [...]