"How are you with a mop?"

"1. Repetition is the soul of the net. If I've told you this once, I've said it a thousand times. Every year, regular as clockwork, there is an audience for people reading about where to pick blueberries, how to get election returns, who makes the best paczki, what to do on your birthday or your kids birthday. You get a free pass to repeat your good content over and over again annually, do it."

It's still fun when I hear important people saying stuff I said years ago, and having people listen to them ad think it's so cool and insightful. Really.

"Tabletop gamers want different things, different kinds of fun, out of their games. However, it’s often tricky to discuss that, when a lot of the common terms add up to “munchkin” and “actor”, and other categories that oversimplify what people actually want out of their play. So, if your group wants to have a discussion without that clutter, and get a solid grip on what each person at the table wants from play, here are some less-simple, less-snarky terms."

"I am mainly interested in how scientific method could possibly lead us to true generalizations about Nature; generalizations that extend infinitely beyond our current, finite perspective. Standard philosophy of science sidesteps this question by asking, instead, about the meanings of "justification" and "rationality" a different matter entirely. I put the former question front and center, so that methodological normativity must be traced back to truth-finding efficacy, rather than to sociological generalizations about scientific practice. In this respect, my approach to epistemology closely parallels work in theoretical computer science and the foundations of mathematics, in which the central question is existence of a reliable procedure for finding the right answer to a question. The shift in emphasis results in a fresh, new perspective on a number of standard issues in epistemology and the philosophy of science, such as:…"

"The damage was foreseeable and, in fact, foreseen. In 1998, before Li had even invented his copula function, Paul Wilmott wrote that "the correlations between financial quantities are notoriously unstable." Wilmott, a quantitative-finance consultant and lecturer, argued that no theory should be built on such unpredictable parameters. And he wasn't alone. During the boom years, everybody could reel off reasons why the Gaussian copula function wasn't perfect. Li's approach made no allowance for unpredictability: It assumed that correlation was a constant rather than something mercurial. Investment banks would regularly phone Stanford's Duffie and ask him to come in and talk to them about exactly what Li's copula was. Every time, he would warn them that it was not suitable for use in risk management or valuation…"

"Some of the claims here are sketchy — Geocities as a precursor to blogging? Really? — and suffer from web-centrism. After all, the world wide web was one of the LEAST interesting or effective things on the internet to spend your time on in the mid-1990s; usenet and email, which was mostly done over PINE or ELM servers in terminal clients, were where it was at. (I had a proto-blog my freshman and sophomore years of college whose “subscribers” were people in my email address book — most of whom were friends-of-friends I didn’t know.) All the same, it’s worth reading and remembering a little of what it was all like."