I just want to pick up on a couple of ideas that I raised over the past week. The first was that of scheduling time so that you can pursue innovative activities, and the second talked about intersections between science fiction writing and economics. I thought of both of these things again when I ran […]
Now that preseason pro gridiron games have started up again, I’ve been thinking about whether or not I want to play in the game-picking pool I’ve participated in over the past few seasons. I’ve had some interesting results in the pool – I’ve done extremely well in the regular season, but horribly during the playoffs. […]
Chris Anderson from Wired is pretty much always worth reading. His article in the July issue on managing using concepts of abundance rather than scarcity is one of his more interesting recent pieces. He lays out a bit of the argument behind his latest book, Free (and you can download an audio version of the […]
Paul Krugman and Charlie Stross had a chat at the Worldcon in Montreal last week, and it’s fascinating from start to finish. The link to Charlie’s blog lets you either download audio of the talk, or it also leads to a transcript. There’s something to be said to just getting a couple of really smart, […]
Garr Reynolds has a nice post today on his Presentation Zen blog called 10 Tips on How to Think Like a Designer. He includes a bunch of good ideas to incorporate into making good presentations. The one that resonates the most with me is the first one on the list: Embrace constraints. Constraints and limitations […]
Paul Graham wrote an insightful post recently talking about the differences between a Manager’s schedule and a Maker’s schedule. The basic idea is that managers divide their days into one hour blocks. So meetings can be fit into available one hour blocks. So can administration. If managers are lucky, when they have a bigger job […]
Amber made a very thoughtful comment on a post a couple of days ago, which I thought deserved more attention than it would get buried in the comments. So I’m posting it here, and also trying to answer a couple of her questions. She said: Tim, since your post on Crocs and their sudden obsolescence […]
Alex Steffan has a really interesting idea over on worldchanging.com – that maybe we should have Special Innovation Zones to encourage major social innovations. His main point is that many green innovations are stymied by zoning regulations, resistance from established interests like power companies, or other systemic reasons. His proposal is that we should take […]
thereifixedit.com has many examples of bad ideas, which, probably, won’t spread… When I talked about Voodoo Histories by Aaronovitch the other day, I maybe stretched things a bit when I talked about Crocs as a bad idea that spread. In fact, several parts of that post weren’t very clear. I think a better description of […]
