Shorts
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The Ph.D. Problem: Are We Giving Out Too Many Degrees?~
A year ago, I thought I was sure about my career path of becoming an academic. But the closer I get to it, the more I realise that stepping into a Ph.D. program right after graduation isn’t the right way to go because my goal is to learn and understand. The degree is just a certification that I’ve understood what I set out to explore.
Learning about something specific without having understood the bigger picture sounds dangerous.
Related
Hacker News Thread about this article.
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The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything~
Let’s say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That’s quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let’s say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you’re 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you’re 80. That’s 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.
… you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory … I hope you weren’t planning to go out very much.
—Linda Holmes.
The more one learns, the more he realises that there is so much more to learn.
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Born out of an idea for a wallpaper I was working on, something about this puts my eyes at peace even though it feels incomplete and a little pretentious.
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Instagram—Week 16, ‘11.
I’m hoping to make a permanent feature out of putting up on weekeneds all the pictures I take from the previous week. It’s my way of motivating myself to take more pictures, which in turn motivates me to do other things—like get out of my room.
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Cranking~
Weeks and months from now when I’m scrolling through my posts like I habitually do, and I see this, I will stop to read it after reading this little introduction. And after reading it, if I have forgotten or have been slacking, I will be reminded of the things that are truly important. Otherwise I will be reassured that my priorities are in place.
If there is one thing you read today, it should be this.
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Strathgordon Dam, Mark Mullee.
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Inspiration comes from experiences. Anybody who tries to say otherwise is pretentious or giving himself more credit than he is worth. “Experiences” is a big word though, so it shouldn’t be taken lightly. It encompasses everything that you observe using the five sense organs everyday, plus how your mind puts them together to remind you of something from the past, or envision something in the future. Or it might skip both of them and create a hypothetical “this could’ve happened” scenario. Any one of those things can inspire you to do something, whether it be good or bad.
The trick is to have as many experiences as you can.
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House-keeping
Just a little log of web-related stuff I’ve done in the past fortnight. I don’t do much of it these days, so anything small is worth a self pat-on-the-back.
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I finally got around to adding paragraph level linking to Shorts. That means you (or I) can now link to individual paragraphs when quoting, instead of linking to the post and hoping readers can find the source. They show up as a tilde (~) at the end of the paragraph when you hover over it.
There is a subtle three second animation for the target paragraph, but I think it’s enough to draw attention towards it. I might play around with the implementation, but there isn’t much scope here since I don’t have access to Tumblr’s Markdown implementation.
A Small Note About Browser Behaviour When Using In-page-links: The trouble with browsers is that they tend to scroll the target to the absolute top of its viewport. I feel that’s not how it should be, since people don’t start reading a page top-to-bottom. They sort of skim the page looking for hints of words, sentences or images that will lead them towards what they came to that page for—and the best place to start skimming is from the middle of the page (or in this case, the viewport). Correct behaviour would be if the target is scrolled to the vertical-centre of the viewport1. I’m going to look into any previous discussions about this, and if there are none, suggest it as a feature to Webkit.
II
I changed the layout style of the way I credit things when I post them here. This quote-post is a good example. I picked it up from Jasmin Wong’s blog—I knew it was something I wanted the moment I saw it. I don’t know why it looks classier to credit using the title of the piece followed by the author, instead of just the author. It just does.
III
I finally got around to fixing my Twitter-to-Delicious bookmarking script that I run as a cron on my server. For some reason, the script continued to work beyond the August ‘10 cut-off for BasicAuth authentication that Twitter had announced, up till December. After that it stopped working, and I began to lose out catching up on the whatever little non-curated links that were coming my way.
I used one of the OAuth libraries Twitter suggested, and with very little change to my script, got it working. Although I appreciate the speed at which I got it fixed (having just a basic idea of how OAuth really works), it did feel odd—using something I didn’t write. I guess this is a form of the “Not Invented Here” syndrome we were taught in software evaluation lectures. I felt like I was giving up on, rather than speeding up, a certain aspect of development. It didn’t feel particularly nice. But the time I saved went in to preparing for my exams in a week and a half, so there was some respite there.
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I guess the best implementation would be one where we can specify how an in-page-link scroll should be handled via some attribute where one value would scroll it to the top and the other would scroll it’s first line to the middle.
I doubt it’ll ever happen, though. ↩
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I had this on repeat the whole weekend.
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“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”
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Letter Cult’s 2009 Person of the Year, Jessica Hische.
~ Via thebrooksreview
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Minimal Movie Posters~
Tasty.
~ Via xabhishek
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Adobe throws in towel, adopts HTTP Live Streaming for iOS~
In other words, instead of trying in vain to persuade Apple to build Flash into iOS, or losing potential Flash Media Server customers to some other iOS-compatible solution, Adobe seems to be implicitly acknowledging that content publishers need Flash-free video streaming.
Why am I not surprised?
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Adapt.js~
Adapt.js is a lightweight (947 bytes minified) JavaScript file that determines which CSS file to load before the browser renders a page. It is worth noting this is a proposed, not prescribed, approach to a problem with multiple solutions.
Included is a way to make the whole thing dynamic, which loads up new CSS files when the window is resized. Very nice, especially the way you define the CSS files to be used for specific width-ranges.
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“I was lucky enough to have a hard time with it at an age early enough so that there was something left of my life when it was over.”
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Interview with Charlie Rose, David Foster Wallace.
He had a beautiful way to look at life. I said pretty much the same thing in my piece a week back, but David was just orders of magnitude more eloquent.
