joshuago’s Bookmarks

God could make everything, but instead he says, "I bestow upon you the gift of free will so that you can participate in making this world. I could make everything, but I am going to give you some spark of my genius. Surprise me with something truly good and beautiful."

A stimulating discussion on Google's infrastructure for handling big data. One guy says it's hopelessly out of date. Others chime in and say it's easily 5-8 years ahead of open source alternatives.

The United States is a peculiar beast. It is an ideological polity. It is based on a creed; it is based on an idea, and it feels obliged to live up to that. But it is also a state like any other state: a state with interests, a state living in the real world of international relations.

Karl Rove reviews five books: The Federalist Papers, Democracy in America (Alexis de Tocqueville), The Conscience of a Conservative (Barry Goldwater), Capitalism and Freedom (Milton Friedman), and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Adam Smith).

Ignore them. Don't give them advice. Don't gossip about them.

Content creation is for suckers. The real money and power have always been in aggregation. The recent struggles of the previously unassailable giants can be attributed to diminished effectiveness of old methods of aggregation.

A great piece to read for anyone who is stuck in a blogging rut or making excuses not to start in the first place. Lots of great reminders on the many benefits of blogging.

Don't pollute the global namespace. Finish with undefined.

Stay focused and don't make it about you; pursue the tone of the text. But let it be informed and colored by the tone of the bigger picture. Written for Christian preachers, but principles are generally applicable.

The abundance of printed material replaced the natural, visceral human oral psychodynamics with those of literate and written ones. Twitter and Facebook bring us back to that unpolished conversational flow.