All that’s missing is the satisfying little metal “click.”
UPDATE: If you stare at this for a few minutes, you will start “hearing” the click.
Author Archives: Steve Mays
Content-rich Resume
Scott Adams: Idea People
“There are two types of people in the world. One type is people-oriented. When they make conversation, it is about people — what people are doing, what someone said, how someone feels. The other group is idea-oriented. When they make conversation, they talk about ideas and concepts and objects. Idea people are boring, even to other idea people.”
“When a person talks about people, it is personal to everyone who listens. You will automatically relate the story to yourself, thinking how you would react in that person’s situation, how your life has parallels.”
The Information, by James Gleick
Publishers Weekly review on Amazon:
“In 1948, Bell Laboratories announced the invention of the electronic semiconductor and its revolutionary ability to do anything a vacuum tube could do but more efficiently. While the revolution in communications was taking these steps, Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon helped to write a monograph for them, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, in which he coined the word bit to name a fundamental unit of computer information. As bestselling author Gleick (Chaos) astutely argues, Shannon’s neologism profoundly changed our view of the world; his brilliant work introduced us to the notion that a tiny piece of hardware could transmit messages that contained meaning and that a physical unit, a bit, could measure a quality as elusive as information. Shannon’s story is only one of many in this sprawling history of information. Gleick’s exceptional history of culture concludes that information is indeed the blood, the fuel, and the vital principle on which our world runs.”
The following got some highlighter during my read:
“In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.” pg 12
“With words we begin to leave traces behind us like breadcrumbs: memories in symbols for others to follow.” pg 31
“All known alphabets, used today or found buried on tablets and stone, descend from the same original ancestor.” pg 33
“The written word was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it.” pg 37
“The new normal”
“What’s actually happening is this: we’re realizing that the industrial revolution is fading. The 80 year long run that brought ever-increasing productivity (and along with it, well-paying jobs for an ever-expanding middle class) is ending. The promise that you can get paid really well to do precisely what your boss instructs you to do is now a dream, no longer a reality.”
From a post by Seth Godin.