I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).
*“One of my teachers at Columbia was Joseph Brodsky…and he said ‘look,’ he said, ‘you Americans, you are so naïve. You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn’t come like that. Look at the language. It begins in the language.'” –* Marie Howe
thenerdreich.com in ‘Unhumans’: J.D. Vance and the Language of Genocide
Cool thing about pendulums: The time it takes for one to swing forward and backward—the period—won’t change, no matter how wide it swings. If it’s got a lot of energy, it’ll swing farther and faster, but the period will still be the same. This is what mechanical clocks take advantage of to keep time. That period ends up being driven by two things, and two things only: the length of the pendulum and gravity.
Andy Weir in Project Hail Mary
(Sabra comes from the Hebrew for prickly pear cactus, a desert plant with needles on the surface and sweet fruit within.)
Chris Whipple in The Gatekeepers
Legacy code is often defined as “code that makes more design decisions than the team working on it”. Could we define a legacy process as “one that makes more decisions on how a team functions than the team itself”?
Ángel Siendones Sillero in Legacy code
Lyndon Johnson (who had allied with white supremacists earlier in his career, before embracing civil rights) recalled this divide-and-conquer tactic: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Fareed Zakaria in Age of Revolutions
In 1966, the economist Raymond Vernon outlined the five stages of any important product’s life cycle: introduction, growth, maturity, saturation, and decline. During the first three stages, production is clustered near where the product was invented. By the time a product enters the latter two stages, it is almost always produced elsewhere or supplanted by technological change.
Fareed Zakaria in Age of Revolutions