twenty-nine things tagged “todo”

The Five Cognitive Distortions of People Who Get Stuff Done

By Michael Dearing. Couldn’t find any video and not sure if this is tongue-in-cheek (like the “48 Laws of Power”.) The distortions are:

  1. Personal Exceptionalism
    “I am special.”
  2. Dichotomous Thinking
    “X is sh*t. Y is genius.”
  3. Correct Overgeneralization
    “I see two dots and draw the right line.”
  4. Blank-Canvas Thinking
    “Painting by numbers isn’t art. And I want to make art.”
  5. Schumpeterianism
    “I am a creative destruction machine.”

TL;DR be a ruthless, inflexible, self-absorbed dick so you can identify, refine, and deliver Value™.

“Calling Bullshit” is a free online course that helps you “detect and defuse” Bullshit when you encounter it.

Our learning objectives are straightforward. After taking the course, you should be able to:

  • Remain vigilant for bullshit contaminating your information diet.
  • Recognize said bullshit whenever and wherever you encounter it.
  • Figure out for yourself precisely why a particular bit of bullshit is bullshit.
  • Provide a statistician or fellow scientist with a technical explanation of why a claim is bullshit.
  • Provide your crystals-and-homeopathy aunt or casually racist uncle with an accessible and persuasive explanation of why a claim is bullshit.

Further,

We will be astonished if these skills do not turn out to be among the most useful and most broadly applicable of those that you acquire during the course of your college education.

I don’t think there’s more critical a juncture than now for courses like these. Just wish more people took them.

How Big is Too Big for JSON?

From over 10 years ago (I’m sorting through my old bookmarks). A single object looks like this:

{
    "ACCTOUNT_NUMBER":"1234567890",
    "CUSTOMER_NAME":"ACME Products and Services, Inc.",
    "ADDRESS":"123 Main Street",
    "CITY":"Albuquerque",
    "STATE":"NM",
    "ZIP":"87101-1234"
}

He tested the usability of a given browser while it loaded between 1 and 1,000,000 such records.

From this test, I am considering the sweet spot to be around 10,000 records at (1.55MB). The maximum number of usable records I would push to a browser would be around 25,000 records (3.87MB). Keep in mind there are numerous factors to keep in mind when determining how many records you should return to your JavaScript application. The purpose of this test was to help identify a general maximum number for conversations around large record sets with JSON.

Would love to see an updated version of the tests.

Dorothy Counts

04 September, 1957

Dorothy Counts, the first and at the time only black student to enroll in the newly desegregated Harry Harding High School in Charlotte (NC), is mocked by protestors on her first day of school. Bystanders threw rocks and screamed at Dorothy to go back to where she came from.

The man walking beside her is probably Dr. Edwin Tompkins, a friend of the family and a professor at the black college Johnson C. Smith University. After a string of abuses, Dorothy’s family withdrew her from the school after only four days. Children had been enrolling for the new school year and tension was particularly high in the south for districts trying to comply with the US Supreme Court’s ruling that states should desegregate their schools with deliberate speed.

World Press Photo

I cannot imagine what she must have felt.

“There was unutterable pride, tension and anguish in that girl’s face as she approached the halls of learning, with history jeering at her back,” he later said. “It made me furious. It filled me with both hatred and pity. And it made me ashamed. Some one of us should have been there with her.”

Michael Graff, quoting James Baldwin, “This picture signaled an end to segregation. Why has so little changed?”, The Guardian

Photos by Douglas Martin.

Dorothy Counts by Douglas Martin
Dorothy Counts by Douglas Martin
Dorothy Counts by Douglas Martin
Dorothy Counts by Douglas Martin