beansprouts – (pl. n.) tiny thoughts from the brain of a Tinabeans
I’m currently taking a class called Leadership and Ethics in Professional Practice. It’s one of the last classes I’ll take here in grad school, before they release me back into the World Wide World to wreak creative havoc on the profession. This week, we were asked to write our own obituaries. This exercise is intended to…
This semester so far been a nonstop race to the finish for my MFA Thesis, but I realized my thoughts were getting stale. What I needed was to clear my head and think about a different problem for a change. So, this weekend I took part in the GOOD Magazine Design Hackathon challenge. (Yes that’s…
Dabblers and Blowhards Maciej Ceglowski tears Paul Graham’s article Hackers and Painters to shreds, while managing to miss the entire point of the piece. Way to focus on the irrelevant details in order to show off how knowledgeable you are. Note to self: never write like this, no matter what my ego is telling me.
Hackers and Painters (Paul Graham)
Network effect (Wikipedia) Since the advent of Web 2.0, everyone seems to be obsessing about network effects. It’s the idea that the value of a product increases as its user base increases. Robert Metcalfe even proposes that the value increase is equal to the square of the number of users. However there are limits to…
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946 George Orwell gives fashionably decadent writing styles a stern beating. Entertaining, incisive, and chock full of smart advice for aspiring writers. A couple favorite quotes: A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying…
Technology Accelerating Food’s Transformation to Services Economy This article proposes reframing how we think of our food economy: not as a products-based economy, but a services-based one. Imagine a world where you’re not paying for tomatoes, but instead for someone to take care of a plot of land so as to coax tomatoes out of it. In…
Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, “Outliers”, and the 10,000 hour rule (Michael Nielsen) I stumbled into this article because I was wondering whether I would have enough hours in one lifetime to get good at all the things I wanted to get good at. Turns out, if I do it methodically enough, I can get to…
The Tipping of Jefferson Avenue (New York Magazine) I was curious about gentrification, specifically the consequences for original residents. This article manages to do some justice to what it’s like to get priced out of a neighborhood, while also giving some insight into how the character of neighborhoods change as new people move in. Here’s…
Design Criticism and the Creative Process (A List Apart) This is a very thorough and sensitive guide to making the most out of design criticism. I personally have had my good days and my bad when taking criticism. Sometimes I can actually pull off acting like a mature adult and do the author of this…