Permanent Exposure

An essay on Operating Systems with a word on Emacs

2005-11-12T17:36:00.000+01:00

Just two quotesFrom In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson:

But ever since the Mac came out, our operating systems have been based on metaphors, and anything with metaphors in it is fair game as far as I'm concerned

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.
(...)
If you are a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

[Added later:]
[T]he richer tourists at Disney World wear t-shirts printed with the names of famous designers, because designs themselves can be bootlegged easily and with impunity. The only way to make clothing that cannot be legally bootlegged is to print copyrighted and trademarked words on it; once you have taken that step, the clothing itself doesn't really matter, and so a t-shirt is as good as anything else. T-shirts with expensive words on them are now the insignia of the upper class. T-shirts with cheap words, or no words at all, are for the commoners.

Quote from Edward Sapir

2005-10-03T15:50:00.000+02:00

Chapter 6. Types of Linguistic Structure. Edward Sapir. 1921. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech

Language in its fundamental forms is the symbolic expression of human intuitions.

Words are sometimes enough

2005-07-12T01:43:00.000+02:00

Just two quotes. One is and the second is by David Whyte, from The heart Aroused (included in ch. 3 of Cluetrain Manifesto).

We are not what we think, or what we say, or how we feel. We are what we do. Conversely, in judging other people we need to pay attention not to what they promise but how they behave. ... We are drowning in words, many of which turn out to be the lies we tell ourselves or others.

by Gordon Livingston, Too soon old, too late smart

The voice emerges literally from the body as a
representation of our inner world. It carries our
experience from the past, our hopes and fears for the
future, and the emotional resonance of the moment. If
it carries none of these, it must be a masked voice,
and having muted the voice, anyone listening knows
intuitively we are not all there.

by David Whyte, The Heart Aroused (included in ch. 3 of Cluetrain Manifesto).

Nothing Gold Can Stay (Blask złota zawsze zgaśnie)

2005-07-10T12:51:00.000+02:00

A poem by ~~David~~ Robert Frost.

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

[via: Maas, David. (2005). Tracking how we change: Joseph Conrad's Insights on "Dating"
Ourselves. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 62(3), 232-244]

Blog is a must-have

2005-06-24T23:39:00.000+02:00

A quote from Blogging for Business by Olga Kharif:

[A] blog is a must-have tool for every executive. "It'll be no more mandatory that they have blogs than that they have a phone and an e-mail account," says Jonathan Schwartz, the president and CEO of Sun Microsystems. "If they don't, they're going to look foolish."

The same quote appeared in an article by Marie E. Flatley.

The carrer of accounting graduates

2005-06-16T14:07:00.000+02:00

Hunton, Stone and Wier wrote an article in Accounting Horizons about the impact of higher education degree in Accounting and M. B. A. on future carrier prospects. Below is the abstract of the article.

We investigate the value of graduate business education in learning tacit knowledge and achieving professional accounting success. Archival (n = 5,932) and survey (n = 2,941) data from managerial accountants employed at 2,525 North American companies in three industries (publishing, paper, and chemical) indicate that job performance evaluations (JPEs) of those who hold either a Master's of Accountancy (M.Acc.) or M.B.A. degree are generally higher than non-master's (NM) degree accountants. We find some evidence that professionals with master's degrees, as compared to NM professionals, have higher levels of two forms of tacit managerial knowledge (TMK): self and others. The results also suggest that M.Acc. and M.B.A. degrees contribute to success differentially throughout the professionals' careers. Specifically, a M.Acc. degree provides greater benefit than a M.B.A. degree in the early and middle career years, while an M.B.A. degree provides greater benefit than a M.Acc. degree in later career years. The results indicate that M.Acc. and M.B.A. degrees contribute to success by increasing specific types of knowledge and enhancing ones' ability to learn.

How to Become an Early Riser

2005-05-24T23:49:00.000+02:00

How to Become an Early Riser by Steve Pavlina.

Banking industry: a Different Perspective

2005-05-22T14:12:00.000+02:00

Altough the article was written in the year 2000, it still gives meaningful insights. Comments which arose afterwards are here. Both texst are from the Cato Journal.

All Knowledge Library

2005-05-22T13:48:00.000+02:00

Brewster Kahle tells wonderful stories about his idea, namely archive.org.

(a program from itconversations)

Lisp and Artificial Intelligence

2005-05-15T17:34:00.000+02:00

Paul Graham apparently does not like Artificial Intelligence but likes hacking in Lisp instead.

BitTorrent and Podcasting screencast

2005-05-02T16:06:00.000+02:00

Oh, lots of fun! Here is the screencast.

A Vernal Wood

2005-04-25T23:50:00.000+02:00

I am impressed today by the verse below.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Then all the sages can.

The whole poem by William Wordsworth is here.

Linking behaviour patterns

2005-04-12T10:10:00.000+02:00

Here is a chart that gives a bit of information about the linking habits of bloggers.

Shirky at O'Reilly ETech

2005-04-07T21:53:00.000+02:00

A brilliant talk by Clay Shirky at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005.

Blogging and career prospects

2005-03-09T20:57:00.000+01:00

Tim Bray list ten reasons why blogging is good for your career.
Oh, let employers in this country notice the trend!

find job blogging again

2005-03-09T20:23:00.000+01:00

Steve Shu found that blogging has become a desired skill for some employers. (via CorporateBlogging.info)

Business transparency

2005-02-08T12:27:00.000+01:00

John Buckman gives a bit of information on Magnatune's sales.

Introductory level readings

2005-01-31T17:36:00.000+01:00

P. Richardson writes in an article:

It is clear, though, from this study that learning to read and write introductory-level Economics is more dificult than disciplinary insiders would ever imagine it to be.
[from: Richardson, Paul: Reading and writing from tekxtbooks in higher education...]

The same fact aplies to Introduction to Linguistics and this textbook

Blogging disease

2005-01-28T17:31:00.000+01:00

This might sound like blogging disease but there are some who got healed.

Brand Republic

2005-01-16T16:22:00.000+01:00

Really good collection of adjectives which collocate with blogs can be found on Brand Republic.

Smarter Conversations -- blogging guideline

2005-01-09T16:20:00.000+01:00

Excellent guideline to blogging can be found here:

Blogs are funny things. Say something smart, people pay attention. Say something dumb, you're ignored. We big media folk just can't seem to get our heads around that concept, for some reason. Regular blogging can help train you to better discern between smart and dumb. Makes it easier to extend this to the rest of one's business.

How to choose the door to close

2005-01-06T11:57:00.000+01:00

Here is the mp3 excerpt from Barry Schwartz's talk at Pop!Tech conference. I Can't tell that I don't fully agree.

The full version of this talk is available at ITconversations website.

Note: The link to the mp3 file above seems not to work with IE.

Get job blogging

2004-12-20T16:20:00.000+01:00

Michael Gartenberg writes:

But there's another side of this whole phenomena as well. Lots of folks will get hired as a result of their weblogs in 2005. It's not just about blog backlash but people who are using the power of the net and the amplification of their voices through their blogs to move their careers forward. (...) The more interesting ones are those that achieve positive results as a result of their efforts and who keep their amusing pictures of themselves off the net :)

And another story from Christopher Hawkins.

Voted as Top 10 Blogs in China

2004-11-16T10:25:00.000+01:00

Voted as Top 10 Blogs in China

Linguistic blogs

2004-11-14T15:26:00.000+01:00

Just started collecting links to linguistic blogs. Here are three of them:

Language Log
Language Hat
Semantics etc.
and a bonus:
Linguistics at del.icio.us

Enjoy!