joshuago’s Bookmarks

The regions of the brain that become active during mind wandering belong to two important networks: the executive control system and the default network. Regions in the executive control system exert a top-down influence on our conscious and unconscious thought, directing the brain’s activity toward important goals. The default network becomes active during certain kinds of self-referential thinking, such as reflecting on personal experiences or picturing yourself in the future.

Given the realities of America's debt situation and the trajectory of spending, a value-added tax (VAT) seems more and more likely as the only solution. Income taxes won't cover the shortfall.

This large collection of recently released icon sets is supposed to help designers improve their designs on their web-sites and in web-applications. All icon sets are free. 

Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools and, in particular, again, at liberal arts colleges than at the most prestigious universities. Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven.

Justice Louis D. Brandeis’s metaphor of the states as "laboratories" for policy experiments is perhaps the most familiar and clichéd image of federalism. Contrary to common belief, however, Brandeis’s famous dictum had almost nothing to do with federalism and everything to do with his commitment to scientific socialism. That substantive view proved even more influential, in political thought and constitutional jurisprudence, than the metaphor that flowed from it. To this day, it continues to inhibit a truly experimental, federalist politics.

The three sexy skills of data geeks are statistics (which requires study), data munging (which demands suffering), and visualization (which favors those with a knack for storytelling).

Marc Andreessen argues that market is the most important factor to a startup's success.