April 2010
19 posts
Area 51 Vets Break Silence
mikehudack:
stevewyshywaniuk:
When the first jets were being tested at what Muroc Army Air Field, later renamed Edwards Air Force Base, a test pilot put on a gorilla mask and flew upside down beside a private pilot.
“Well, when this guy went back, telling reporters, ‘I saw a plane that didn’t have a propeller and being flown by a monkey,’ well, they laughed at this guy — and it got where the...
March 2010
86 posts
“By nature, we do not perceive ourselves or others accurately. We magnify the...”
– Barry Grosskopf, Hidden in Plain Sight (via psychotherapy)
Overnight Startup Successes Usually Take Years
This notion of overnight success is an urban legend, and very misleading. If you’re starting something new, expect a long and challenging journey. But that’s no excuse to move slowly. Many entrepreneurs think they are running, but find themselves falling farther and farther behind a rapidly moving target. Time passes quickly in this mode.
Marty Zwilling - via -...
James Cameron: Innovation trumps digital piracy →
infoneer-pulse:
He said the music industry made a critical mistake by trying to stop piracy instead of innovating to give consumers new experiences that the industry could use to generate more money.
“The music industry saw it coming, they tried to stop it, and they got rolled over,” he said. “Then they started suing everybody. And now it is what it is.”
Instead, Cameron said he has tried to...
“What is success? To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent...”
– RALPH WALDO EMERSON
10 PRINCIPLES OF UX
10. Great Experiences are Simple: Simplicity is much more than the trite “less is more” we so often hear. Simplicity is not about volume; it’s about clarity. If people can understand or use something with little difficulty, then you’ve made something simple. It may have been a Herculean effort to make it so, but simple is not always easy to design…it only appears that way.
via-52weeksofux.com
“Take the harder path. Politely speak your mind. Take a stand. Join the debate....”
– My Favorite @msuster post - Don’t be a Grin Fucker (via hiten)
Marketing is not a department
hiten:performableblog:superamit:
Marketing is not a department “Marketing is something everyone in your company is doing 24/7/365. Every time you …. answer the phone … send an e-mail… Every time someone uses your product… every word on your website, every error message … is marketing.”
There is no great mystery about what the federal... →
There is no great mystery about what the federal government needs to do. It must mount a frontal attack on unemployment proportional to the problem. At least another $300 billion in stimulus money is necessary. Some should go to the states and cities to restore cuts; some should be applied to the nation’s crumbling infrastructure; a portion should go to direct hiring (a new WPA).
This should...
The Top 5 Apps on Facebook for the...
Goodreads Books In the age of soundbites and 30 second YouTube clips, it can be difficult to find the time or the motivation to sit down with a good book and read. But with a Facebook app that keeps track of what you’re reading, the makers of Goodreads Books are hoping you’ll be reinvigorated. The premise of the app is simple: let your friends know what you’re reading, share some thoughts on your...
“We’re stunned that Republicans won’t let the Senate function after 2 p.m....”
– The Washington Monthly on what the Dems should be saying about the GOP invoking a “2pm rule” shuts down the senate whenever they don’t have a unanimous vote to continue. One of the meetings not allowed to happen? The Senate Armed Services Committee. via (via peterwknox) (via mikehudack)
“I get to think about how to build something valuable and real. How to take a...”
– On Starting a Company - melodymccloskey.com
(via noreaster)
Well said!
“Today, an initiative that would legalize personal marijuana possession and allow...”
– Stephen Gutwillig: CA Marijuana Legalization Initiative to Qualify for Ballot Today (via tedr)
“Marijuana was prohibited in 1937 before most Americans had ever heard of it....”
– Stephen Gutwillig: CA Marijuana Legalization Initiative to Qualify for Ballot Today (via tedr)
“A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are...”
– Princeton University - A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain
/via Travis Kalanik
(via tedr)
Chomsky: Health bill sustains the system’s core...
Despite its flaws, ‘I’d hold my nose and vote for’ reform, intellectual tells Raw Story
He’s a hero of many progressives, but his enthusiasm for the passage of health care reform legislation this weekend was fairly muted.
In an interview with Raw Story, world-renowned scholar and political critic Noam Chomsky reluctantly called the bill a mildly positive step, but cautioned...
“Obama’s legislation comes from an alternative idea, begun under the Eisenhower...”
– Robert Reich (via azspot) (via marco)
rahmin: The United States is locked in a new arms... →
The United States is locked in a new arms race for that most precious resource — the future entrepreneurs upon whom economic growth depends. Substantial research shows that immigrants play a key role in American job creation. For example, over 25% of the technology companies founded between…
“Farmville makes overt use of known psychological techniques to influence and...”
– DESIGNER NOTES » Blog Archive » “Fear and Loathing in Farmville” (via rafer)
“Why do we have an abortion rate 20% higher than France’s (and more than twice as...”
– Michael Moore (via azspot) (via mattlehrer) (via rafer)
“Can you imagine a better reform? Sure. … But an ideal plan isn’t on the table....”
– Paul Krugman (via marco)
“In this decade, I’ve become obsessed with a new simple question: “Why isn’t all...”
– The Facebook Imperative (via interestingsnippets)
“If you are a high-tech start-up, your value is in your intellectual property.”
– The Case for the Fat Start-Up | Ben Horowitz | Voices | AllThingsD
Rafer sez: Horsepuckey. The only startups that are in a “furious race against time” are the ones who choose to be. If you are clever enough to figure out how to jump on to a landgrab early, you are generally clever enough to find a...
The Problem with Priorities « Harvard Business →
zehnuhr:
Everyone knows the problems that arise when kids walk into a candy store: Everything looks so good they want it all, and they end up overdoing it. Unfortunately, practicing self-control doesn’t get any easier with age, which might explain why setting a limited number of priorities, and sticking to them, is one of the most difficult challenges facing managers today.
“Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing,” said Harold Abelson, the...”
– How Privacy Vanishes Online, a Bit at a Time - NYTimes.com (via sdi) (via infoneer-pulse)
“Many founders starting out worry too much about ___ startup they saw in...”
– To egg your competitors or not to egg, that is the question - garry’s posterous (via giantrobotlasers) (via iseffcom) (via mikehudack)
“We need to take a more customer centered approach to creating products that...”
– Andy Budd::Blogography: The best products sell them selves (via hiten)
Feel now, think later, for more flowing creativity... →
psychotherapy:
Creating can be an emotional process. But there’s good emotional—even when you’re sad or the work epitomizes sorrow—and there’s bad emotional. That’s when your inner critic attacks you, calls you mean names, and causes you not to feel like creating anymore.
One of the ways you may slip out of flow when you’re creating something is if you don’t feel that what you’re producing—your...
After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas... →
mikehudack:
ericmortensen:
tanya77:
britticisms:
I’m still trying to wrap my head around how they got away with these things:
Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just...
“Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of...”
– John Keats
“Failure is success if we learn from it.”
– Malcolm S. Forbes
"Failure" is a dirty word
but that’s because we don’t see it as a way station on the path to success.
- In his 2005 book, “Born Losers: A History of Failure in America,” the historian Scott Sandage offers an account of 19th-century economic hardships and the pitiable archetype they gave birth to: the dismal “plodder,” the man who was a “failure.” To make the loser feel even worse about himself, his glorious...
Watchhiten:
Slides from my talk at Steve Blank and Eric Ries’s Customer and Business Development MBA Class at Berkeley - Metrics for Startup Success and Failure
“Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though...”
– Henry Ford (via hiten)
The Psychology of the Taboo Tradeoff: Surprising... →
psychotherapy:
What truly distinguishes sacred values from secular ones is how people behave when asked to compromise them. When people are asked to trade their sacred values for values considered to be secular—what psychologist Philip Tetlock refers to as a “taboo tradeoff”—they exhibit moral outrage, express anger and disgust, become increasingly inflexible in negotiations, and display an...
Be Sad and Succeed →
psychotherapy:
Next time you find yourself in a bad mood, don’t try to put on a happy face—instead tackle a project that has been stymieing you. Melancholy might just help you hit peak performance, reports Joseph Forgas, a professor of psychology at the University of New South Wales, in the journal Australasian Science. Forgas reviewed several of his studies in which researchers induced either a...