Ablog

Besides, our Histories of six thousand Moons make no mention of any other Regions, than the two great Empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Which two mighty Powers have, as I was going to tell you, been engaged in a most obstinate War for six and thirty Moons past. It began upon the following Occasion. It is allowed on all Hands, that the primitive way of breaking Eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger End: But his present Majesty’s Grand-father, while he was a Boy, going to eat an Egg, and breaking it according   (more...)

Tim O’Reilly has started posting his quarterly analysis of the computer book market, as always, it is very much worth reading. Still, as I will be posting my analysis of what I call the “professional computer book market” starting in a few days, I wanted to explain (see the Wikipedia or even better by a copy of the “Cartoon Guide to Statistics, my favorite basic stat book -I-kid-you-not– for details.)   (more...)

Newsweek has a nice article on this issue. The best line? Immelt of GE saying:

More people will graduate in the United States in 2006 with sports-exercise degrees than electrical-engineering degrees,” says Immelt. “So, if we want to be the massage capital of the world, we’re well on our way.”

I couldn’t resist posting the following comment to Tim O’Reilly’s interesting post on the flap so am cross posting it here.

A friendly suggestion from the folks at Apress: simply make the trademark and thus re-title the conference as “The O’Reilly Web 2.0 Conference” disclaiming the use of the (now descriptive) term Web 2.0. Not only would this be good for your brand, this would be a very   (more...)

I won’t step deply into it (far too many people have stepped awfully deep into it that’s fur sur!) so I will simply say that I was pleased to notice that Apress’s IP lawyer Karen Frank (along with another noted IP lawyer, lonn Levy) were both quoted in Red Herring article today as essentially saying that anyone who thinks this is a valid “service mark” in May of 2006 when there are > 70,000,000   (more...)

With so many adults being so proud of their limited knowledge of science and mathematics why is anyone surprised to read in today’s Wall Street journal:

Despite efforts in many states to bolster science education, a key national test shows no improvement among middle and high school students in their grasp of the subject.

The results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, are likely to heighten concern about the future competitiveness of American workers in science and technology…(more...)

Perhaps just a wee bit ironically for a great company like Manning run by a brilliant guy with a PhD in physics, Ron Tomich, Manning’s marketing manager writes with what seems to me like a bit of pride: “I’ve only a B.A. in Modern Chinese History in my bag, and I likely skipped that statistics class Gary wished for me in favor of refining my ultimate Frisbee skill..” It always makes me sad when I learn that someone who is clearly very intelligent and very well read defends his not having mastered what is   (more...)

It is kind of amusing: Tim O’Reilly in his comments on my original post (perhaps unconsciously) confirms exactly what I am trying to get across not only in this but also in all my previous posts on this topic: using single numbers to describe complex data is going to be misleading.

For those who don’t want to read the long post and the many comments, here’s the executive summary:   (more...)

At the root of my ongoing controversy with Tim O’Reilly on the state of the computer book business and how to understand Apress rapid rise within the IT professional market is the fact that using a single number to describe complex situations is almost always a bad idea. For example, Steven Jay Gould’s wonderful book “The Mismeasure of Man” showed how that seemingly wonderful single number –Terman’s “g” — that came from a statistical analysis that extracted a single number   (more...)

Tim posted a response on the O’Reilly site to my comments made there on his post. They may be found here. My response which I posted there (scroll down to the bottom), I am cross-posting it here.

No Tim you are the one who isn’t “getting it.” Using simple averages in this context is statistically bogus, period. Nothing you have said (or can say) can escape this statistical fact. But here’s   (more...)

I just posted the following response to Tim O’Reilly responses to my post (see below) on OReilly.com and am cross-posting it here:

Since Tim was kind enough to post his response to my comments on his post that I made at my blog, I thought I should return the favor. First off, while it’s interesting to see Tim trying to respond to my criticisms by simply asserting again that his statistics are useful, he continues to miss the point: using simple   (more...)

I was recently turned on to Guy Kawasaki’s blog and noticed these list: the top 10 lies of VC’s, software engineers, marketers, and entrepreneurs. Kawasaki writes well, is insightful and has been around the block. (He coined the term evangelist when he was at Apple in the early days of the Mac.) I recommend these blog entries highly:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/04/the_top_ten_lie.html
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/the_top_ten_lie_1.html
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/the_top_ten_lie.html(more...)

STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS By Daniel Gilbert. 277 pp. Illustrated. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

According to the NY Times it apparently contains the following gem:

“When we have an experience . . . on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time,” he writes. “Psychologists calls this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.”

I’m planning a European trip so I couldn’t resist taking the test:

You Belong in Paris


You enjoy all that life has to offer, and you can appreciate the fine tastes and sites of Paris.
You’re the perfect person to wander the streets of Paris aimlessly, enjoying architecture and a crepe.
What European City Do You Belong In?

Tim O’Reilly recently posted a series of blog entries on the state of the computer book industry that may be found
here. I certainly was flattered to read the following in one of his posts:

Apress is getting a good rep among our “alpha geek” audience. One long-time friend wrote to me: “The Apress books are starting to appear on programmer bookshelves in droves (including mine), and Apress is getting   (more...)

The NY Times (free registration required) has a wonderful article on Sudoku which among other things points out that they actually first appeared starting in 1979 in a monthly called “Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games.” and were almost certainly invented by an architect named Howard Garns from Indianapolis who died in 1989. They only made their way to Japan in 1984 where they were (and are) called by an English word “Number Place”.(more...)

The NY Times (free registration requires) has a very nice article on the advantages of using two monitors. At Apress we have long known this to be true, everybody at Apress has two monitors. It boggles my mind that every company on the planet hasn’t adopted two monitors for the vast majority of its employees. Here’s a sample quote to whet your appetite:

I should not have been   (more...)

Joel Spolsky would have a field day with this one: the Task Manager in Windows has a hidden UI “feature.” If you inadvertently double-click the empty space in the border around the tabs, Task Manager switches to a “Tiny Footprint” mode. In this absurd “mode,” no title/menu bar is visible. My first instinct is to right click and see if there is option to get me my frigging title bar back, nope that doesn’t help. What helps?
As you might expect a Google search. Thanks to Google   (more...)

Today’s NY Times reports:

BEIJING, April 12 — Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, whose company has been sharply criticized for complying with Chinese censorship, said on Wednesday that the company had not lobbied to change the censorship laws and, for now, had no plans to do so.

“I think it’s arrogant for us to walk into a country where we are just beginning operations and tell that country how to run itself,” Mr. Schmidt told reporters from foreign news organizations.

I   (more...)

David Pogue in the New York Times gets it right. Unlike much of the mainstream press, in particular unlike his rival Mossberg over at the Wall Street Journal, he points out that (a)Bootcamp is actually basically useless because, for example “Using Boot Camp, you’d restart the computer in Windows, look up the number — but then what? Without the ability to copy and paste, what would you do with the phone number once you found it? Write it on an envelope?” and then he points out that Paral   (more...)