Take something we walk by everyday without thinking about its effects or inner details. Totally revolutionize it.

That’s real innovation.

Just two days ago, an article written in The New York Times wondered if “dropouts will save america”:

I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook — invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.

There is something fundamentally wrong with that block of text. Conclusions by examples are never an effective way of proving a theory. For every Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg, how many unsuccessful dropouts are there? How many dropouts utterly failed and were forced to return to college?

Moreover, it seems that a common pattern is that these “dropouts” still attend some amount – however small – of college. This leads me to believe, rightly so, that dropping out for most of these characters was never actually planned. Zuckerburg and Moskovitz started Facebook in their dorm room at Harvard, moving out to California during the summer and only when it was clear they were working on something popular. As for Apple, clearly Steve Wozniak, Jobs’ engineering counterpart, found something very compelling in a college education…eventually going back and completing his degree.

Even in my limited experience, the situation was remarkably similar. I started working on my startup while still taking classes and with no goal of leaving. Even after receiving a grant from the State and generating significant interest, I simply took care of my time more carefully to maintain both school and work. I slept less, but I kept both going. It wasn’t until my quarter ended and Kout got into AngelPad that I thought of leaving. At that point, I had proved that strong potential existed, a claim further solidified by a generous investment by six ex-Googlers and two top Silicon Valley vc firms.

As a recent college-dropout, it was never really about dropping out. Dropping out isn’t an accomplishment, any more than money is a sign of achievement. Sometimes, but not always, it’s simply a symptom of success.

I’ll remember where I was when I first heard the news. I’ll remember that Apple home page. I’ll remember the black bar on top of HackerNews and the top 30 stories being about just one man.

I feel deflated. The World feels different. Our century’s Edison has left.

Ali goes through a sample calculation to arrive at the chance, which is obviously quite large, but leads to the following great conclusion.

A miracle is an event so unlikely as to be almost impossible. By that definition, I’ve just proven that you are a miracle.

Now go forth and feel and act like the miracle that you are.

Development

TextMate: A great Mac OS text editor. Blackboard theme.
Terminal: Comes with every install, but for quick edits and work. (Vim not emacs).
Cyberduck: Many choose Terminal, but I really prefer Cyberduck’s minimalism.
Tower: Fantastic Git client, useful as I’ve been doing a lot with Git this summer.
XAMPP: Localhost.

Adobe Photoshop CS 5: I’m no designer…but Photoshop is the best for quick edits.

Browsers

Google Chrome: Main browser. Simple. Powerful. Sandboxes.
Apple Safari: Chrome used to be my primary browser but it’s notoriously horrible in Lion and I’ve been using Safari more and more.
Mozilla Firefox: This is for Firebug. Firebug, firebug, firebug.

Music

iTunes
Spotify: iTunes isn’t being used that much anymore minus syncing my iPhone.

Social

Skype
Adium: Best IM client for Mac OS.
Twitter for Mac

Productivity

Sparrow: Gorgeous and simple email application. Better than Apple’s Mail application – especially the new Lion update – by leaps and bounds.
Pages & Keynote: Keynote surpasses PowerPoint in every way; Pages is all I need for word processing, as I don’t do a lot of complicated tasks.

Reading

NetNewsWire: My RSS reader. Thinking of trying Reeder soon.
Kindle for Mac: Lets me read my books on my laptop.

Other

Guidance: Really nice Prayer Times app, available from the App Store for free. Used to have Prayer Times Pro, but Guidance is more elegant and packs more feature. It’s a win-win.

Reminds me of CitySourced.

The Association of British Drivers rejected the proposal to ban cars as economically disastrous and as a “crazy” restriction on mobility.

“I suggest that he goes and finds himself a space in the local mental asylum,” said Hugh Bladon, a spokesman for the BDA.

Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius:

You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!

These “hits”, these flashes of insight, pay attention to them because they can illuminate a bigger picture and be the beacons on your way to genius.

Entrepreneurship and private enterprise creation will need to finally be given free reign. As measured by the World Bank, Egypt ranks near the global bottom in enterprise creation: for every 1000 persons of working age, 0.13 enterprises come into existence yearly. Bureaucracy and registration expenses remain much higher than the world average, to which one should add the cost of corruption and bribes. Many of the business-oriented reforms promised by the past few governments have only seen the light in the form of legal texts and remain to be implemented. A more concerted approach, involving the government, private and citizen sectors, could allow young entrepreneurs to create their own enterprises and build their own economic future–in the true spirit of the Egyptian revolution.

Yes.

Not surprisingly, when autocratic regimes in the region have tried to change their economies they’ve done so primarily with an eye toward maintaining power. A recent study by the political scientist Oliver Schlumberger shows, reform did not, for the most part, aim at introducing genuine free-market competition, the most important feature of a healthy capitalist system. Instead, it strengthened what he calls “patrimonial capitalism”—a system in which the key determinant of success is how close you are to those in power.

Amr Moussa represents the past. He’s appealing because he’s a known quantity at an uncertain time. And he’s argument number one for why you need alternatives to get their names and faces known, because right now, the only person known to most Egyptians and seen as presidentiable is Moussa. And that’s a scary fact.

For a lot of students, college is a vacation, and it is a bunch of bullshit if we pretend otherwise. If we want to have a subsidized four year holiday in the prime of our lives, then I’m seriously all for it, but let’s call it what it is.

…and…

It didn’t teach me any skills relevant to anything I’m doing now. I learned nothing about programming, web development, design, product management, project management, general management, basic accounting, corporate strategy, business communication, or really anything useful. I was a Physics and Philosophy major, but from conversations with other friends (science majors who went on to med school, or econ majors who went to hedge funds, etc) no one seemed to learn anything useful in their later careers. Most of the foundation in communication, writing, and quantitative reasoning I developed in middle school and high school, and not in college.

If you want to be a world-class programmer, you can program every day for ten years, or you can program every day for two years and take an algorithms class.

Franco has been described as having “an unusually high metabolism for productivity…a superhuman ability to focus”. Dissatisfied with his career’s direction, Franco reenrolled at UCLA in the fall of 2006 as an English major with a creative writing concentration. Having received permission to take as many as 62 course credits per quarter compared to the normal limit of 19 while continuing to act, he received his undergraduate degree in June 2008 with a GPA over 3.5. For his degree, Franco prepared his departmental honors thesis as a novel under the supervision of Mona Simpson. He moved to New York to simultaneously attend graduate school at Columbia University’s MFA writing program, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for filmmaking, and Brooklyn College for fiction writing, while occasionally commuting to North Carolina’s Warren Wilson College for poetry. He received his MFA from Columbia in 2010. Franco is a Ph.D. student in English at Yale University and will also attend the Rhode Island School of Design.

Talk about productivity. (Thanks @SPytlik)

The world’s first recorded cure for stammering was the “pebble method”: go down to the seashore, fill your mouth with pebbles, and force your words to overcome the impediment. This was the self-help cure that, in the 4th century BC, cured the stuttering orator Demosthenes, and launched his career as the greatest public speaker of the ancient Greek world.

Turns out we can trick our brains quite effectively into thinking that we have more than two arms. Simulated attack on a fake arm will cause measurable fear. Requires nothing more complex than a fake rubber arm and a soft brush.