You can say it any way you want…
In 1987, when Steve White invented the Graphics Interchange Format, he named it after the “JIF” peanut butter that was popular then. He pronounced it the same way. It was an inside joke for techies; he frequently said that “Choosy developers choose ‘GIF’,” referencing a television commercial circulating at the time. People who knew what…
We are all men
Language is interesting. I just learned, uncited on Quora, but I choose to believe it because I want to… The modern word female is not derived from the modern word male. In fact, female derives from the latin word “femina,” from which we retain the idea of feminine; male derives from the latin word “masculus,”…
A moment of Star Wars geekdom
This happened: airport evacuated, shrapnel filled bomb defused.
Race is a social construct
So what does that mean, “a social construct?” I think of it as something that a group tacitly agrees to think, do, or believe which is exists solely because of that agreement. You can sometimes tell if something is a social construct by evaluating if it varies significantly between different groups. For example, the concept…
If you think everybody likes/hates Trump, think again
This is a fascinating glimpse into how polarized our country has become. Gallup asked Americans to rate Trump from 0-100. Among Democrats, the average score is 16; a majority of Democrats give Trump a score of 3 or lower, and 75% rate him below a 20. In contrast, the average score among Republicans is 77,…
14,000 year old village in Canada
This story is amazing for two reasons. It changes our understanding of how North America was settled, in that it supports the idea that there was land that wasn’t covered by ice during the ice ages along which people migrated. For me, it’s even more intriguing that the story of this settlement was passed along…
Dunbar’s number: number of people with whom you can have a “stable social relationship”
Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. Informally, this is “the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a…
I have a little bit of a crush on a man I’ve never met
This was brilliant. Payload: Not all ideas are the same, and not all conversations about ideas even have basic legitimacy. If you feel isolated by this, that your views are basically unwelcome in tech and can’t be spoken about… well, that’s a fair point. These views are fundamentally corrosive to any organization they show up…