Venkat @vgr@refactorcamp.org

somebody at work is giving away Banana Republic coupons, and it just reminded me how utterly strange it is that there's a clothing store chain named Banana Republic. That's like naming your store "Failed State" or "Tinpot Dictatorship"

Novel is proceeding, mostly, according to plan. Next step? Publicly post the prologue. Before that, however, I’d like more people to read it and offer their gut feelings, or detailed commentary.

It’s 2k words + I’d like feeback before the end of the weekend. If you’re interested, DM or email me. It’ll come across as a Google doc.

Young sciences are so much more fun. Trying to identify a mushroom, I come across this:

"At the time of this writing (April, 2015) the genus "Polyporus" is headed for major changes; DNA studies (for example Sotome et al., 2008) have made it clear that the genus we thought we had a handle on is actually fairly incoherent, requiring a number of taxonomic changes."

Hey millennials: did you destroy an industry last week? Did you *try* to destroy an industry last week?

I still find it's weird that customs officers are like:

man: *sigh* anything to declare sir

me: yes, two liters of alcohol, and-

man: you can only bring one liter. remember that next time. *gives back passport* next!

not very thorough...

We need new vocabulary, intuitions, parables, idioms, and jokes to handle recursive complexity. The alternative is a human face, frowning at a css file, forever.

sometimes my wife will notice that I'm quietly staring off into space and she'll ask "What are you thinking about?"

Invariably, at the moment she asks my train of thought will be on something incredibly stupid, but I'll answer honestly: "I was thinking about Insane Clown Posse. You ever wonder how their fans got the name Juggalos?"

or, you know, whatever nonsense i was thinking about at that moment

Folks, no matter how hard you try, you cannot smack-talk an idea to death.

The only thing that can kill a bad idea is a better one.

Go build those.

To truly learn, one must seek contexts allowing for tight enough iteration cycles that the momentum from one attempt can carry into the next.

Made a list of things what I would or want to do in my free time. The list grew to 17 items.

On the bright side, I probably won't suffer retirement depression.

Realistically, this is grossly unsustainable. Simply looping through each item a day means each "hobby" gets done only twice a month.