THE PENDING DRAFT

WordCamp US – State of the Word 2015

December 7, 2015

Last weekend, the first WordCamp US – the biggest WordCamp ever – was held in Philadelphia and of course Matt Mullenweg gave the annual State of the Word Keynote. He talked about a bunch of things including the upcoming version 4.4 (which brings a lot of interesting stuff like term_meta and support for responsive images using srcset) or changes to how translations for plugins and themes in the repository work and he shared some thoughts about the development Calypso, Automattic’s react-based new interface for WordPress.com as well as self-hosted sites with Jetpack enabled. Also, he announced who the lead developers for versions 4.5 (Mike Schroder), 4.6 (Dominik Schilling) and 4.7 (Matt Mullenweg) will be as well as seven new core committers.

He made it very clear how important he thinks JavaScript is and will be in the future and that we all should take on that challenge and learn JavaScript, deeply.

Matt Mullenweg: State of the Word 2015

Future Visions

November 1, 2015

Future Visions

This sounds rather interesting.

Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Stories Inspired by Microsoft is an anthology of short stories written by some of today’s greatest science fiction authors. These visionary stories explore prediction science, quantum computing, real-time translation, machine learning, and much more. The contributing authors were inspired by inside access to leading-edge work, including in-person visits to Microsoft’s research labs, to craft new works that predict the near-future of technology and examine its complex relationship to our core humanity.

Looking forward to read it.

Future Visions

Web Design: The First 100 years

July 22, 2015

So the world of the near future is one of power constrained devices in a bandwidth-constrained environment. It’s very different from the recent past, where hardware performance went up like clockwork, with more storage and faster CPUs every year.

And as designers, you should be jumping up and down with relief, because hard constraints are the midwife to good design. The past couple of decades have left us with what I call an exponential hangover.

(Maciej Cegłowski)

Web Design: The First 100 Years

Seth Godin: Overcoming the extraction mindset

June 12, 2015

Thirty years ago, I asked the fabled rock promoter Bill Graham a question that I thought was brilliant, but he pwned me in his response. “Bill, given how fast a Bruce Springsteen concert sells out, why don’t you charge $100 a seat and keep all the upside?” (In those days, $100 was considered a ridiculous sum for a concert ticket).

“Well, I could do that, but the thing is, I’m here all year round, and my kids only have a limited budget to spend on concerts. If I charged that much for one concert, they wouldn’t be able to come to the other shows I book…”

Bill wasn’t just spreading the money out over time. He was investing in a community that could develop a habit of music going, a community that would define itself around what he was building.

(Seth Godin)

Another great post by Seth Godin about short-term decisions and what he calls the extraction mindset versus long-term thinking.

Seth Godin – Overcoming the extraction mindset

Isaac Asimov – On Creativity

May 27, 2015

If you read one thing today, make it this text by Isaac Asimov on Creativity. It’s a short essay about his thoughts on what we humans need to come up with creative ideas.

This quote i liked particularly because it resembles something i thought about a lot lately.

Probably more inhibiting than anything else is a feeling of responsibility. The great ideas of the ages have come from people who weren’t paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks or petty officials, or were not paid at all. The great ideas came as side issues.

To feel guilty because one has not earned one’s salary because one has not had a great idea is the surest way, it seems to me, of making it certain that no great idea will come in the next time either.

What would it be like if we all would have a basic income that is not coupled to any work at all? And the “work” we would still do was unpaid for? Would we really fail as a society because no one would want to work anymore, as some might think? Would no one ever clean a toilet again? Or would we be able to come up with much better and more creative ideas and solve problems in ways we would never even possibly imagine otherwise? I’m pretty certain the latter is more likely to be true.

But thats for another post. The text by Asimov has so many quotable parts, so better go ahead and read it in full.

Isaac Asimov – On Creativity

Tesla Energy

May 3, 2015

This is the most exciting Keynote i saw in a very long time. If you release something and feel the need to call your product “revolutionary“, “game changing” or any other superlatives (yes, Apple, i’m looking at you!), please go stand in the corner watch this keynote again and think about what you just said.

I just read that a professor at the ETH in Zurich calculated that for the first time in history, solar energy will be cheaper than electricity from the grid, thanks to those Tesla batteries.

Alcohol or Marijuana

April 11, 2015

Aaron E. Carroll asks “Alcohol or Marijuana?” and answers this question from a pediatricians standpoint. A very interesting post (found via Matt’s blog with some great comments). It’s one of the best articles on the topic i read in a long time and i like the fact that it’s on a high-profile site like the New York Times. He makes some very convincing – and maybe surprising for some – points about the comparison of alcohol to marijuana.

I also can’t ignore what I’ve seen as a pediatrician. I’ve seen young people brought to the emergency room because they’ve consumed too much alcohol and become poisoned. That happens thousands of times a year. Some even die.

And when my oldest child heads off to college in the not-too-distant future, this is what I will think of: Every year more than 1,800 college students die from alcohol-related accidents. About 600,000 are injured while under alcohol’s influence, almost 700,000 are assaulted, and almost 100,000 are sexually assaulted. About 400,000 have unprotected sex, and 100,000 are too drunk to know if they consented. The numbers for pot aren’t even in the same league.

I think the public opinion on drugs is completely distorted today. If you talk to people about drugs, it’s pretty common to refer to drugs when talking about so many substances (mostly the illegal ones) yet at the same time not even seeing alcohol as a drug. Which is bad because it’s not possible to have a real discussion and to compare things if you categorize them differently to begin with.

Fact is, humans liked to alter their minds ever since and some substances can help in that regard. Whether someone is smoking pot, drinking a beer or taking any other substance, it is on a fundamental level for the same reason: Alter your brain activity. If your use of a substance will lead you to abusing it later on has several complicated reasons beyond just which kind of drug we’re talking about.

Another fact is that prohibition created way more problems and harmed more people than it ever helped and it created a whole lot of criminality along the way. It never stopped anyone from taking something but instead created a market for dirty, unclean and dangerous substances of which many people died. Happened during the alcohol prohibition in the states as well as with any other drug prohibition i know of.

We really need to have this public discourse about drugs and we need to change the way we treat this topic. The legalization of marijuana – which is inevitable if you ask me – and the more differentiated public discussion that seems to come with it, is one first step in the right direction.

Alcohol or Marijuana? A Pediatrician Faces the Question