You thought you smelled smoke, so you went to investigate. The kitchen was hot. It was flickering, too. Kitchens shouldn’t flicker. But yours was. You called to your wife, and the two of you ran out the front door. You fumbled for your phone to dial 911. As you passed the threshold, you thought, briefly, […]
Check out this map of Target locations in the area around San Jose. There’s a roughly uniform density of Targets. Nobody is more than 3 miles or so from a Target. This map is roughly 9 miles on a side. Screenshotted from Google Maps. We Care About Travel Time, not Distance Target consumers don’t care how geographically […]
I spent a few months in Ukraine, working with an outsourcing team there. Before the trip, I downloaded an app to help me learn some Ukrainian. After eating in a restaurant with a friend, I told the waitress “Дякую,” (Dya-kyoo), which is Ukrainian for “Thank you.” My friend told me, No no, don’t say that. […]
Here’s what happened: Most people were excited to talk about the future of the internet. I showed them a machine from my pocket more powerful than machines costing them thousands of dollars. They loved it! Then we got to talking about politics. 1996 was an election year, too. Bob Dole had just put up a […]
The following fairy tales have been adapted from their original format, to fit your modern perspective. The Boy who Cried Wolf Sheep image from pixabay. There once was a young shepherd boy whose job was to watch the sheep and make sure they didn’t run off. He cared about his job, and he loved the sheep. The […]
How are traffic accidents like structural discrimination? Here’s a pattern I’ve been thinking about lately. It has to do with a flaw in the way we think about cause and effect. Each year in the US, we see around 40,000 people killed in traffic accidents. One way of measuring the frequency of accidents is to […]
Politics is often considered a dirty word. When something bad happens, we often blame ‘politics’. I don’t think “politics” should be a bad word; rather, I think politics is an important part of human activity, and is very poorly understood. I believe many of our problems stem from bad politics — not from politics itself. Skagit Bridge […]
