Ribbonfarm A Blog by Venkatesh Rao www.ribbonfarm.com AngkorwatificationPremium MediocreDomestic Cozy
Domestic Cozy An Article from Ribbonfarm by Venkatesh Rao www.ribbonfarm.com Millennials and Gen. ZA squeezable nugget of comfortPremium Mediocre vs. Domestic Cozy A Brief History of the Digital Garden
Fermi Estimates and Dyson Designs An Article by Venkatesh Rao www.ribbonfarm.com A Fermi estimate is a quick-and-dirty solution to an arbitrary scientific or engineering analysis problem. Fermi estimation uses widely known numbers, readily observable phenomenology, basic physics equations, and a bunch of approximation techniques to arrive at rough answers that tend to be correct within an order of magnitude or so. The term is named for Enrico Fermi, who was famously good at this sort of thing. …It struck me that there is counterpart to this kind of thinking on the synthesis side, where you use similar techniques to arrive at a very rough design for a complex engineered artifact. I call such a design approach Dyson design, after the physicist Freeman Dyson, who was one of the best practitioners of it (not to be confused with inventor James Dyson, whose designs, ironically, are not Dyson designs). designphysics
One Tenth of a Second An Article by Venkatesh Rao studio.ribbonfarm.com The details are fascinating, but the central argument — that the birth of modernity can be traced to a meta-crisis spawned by the 0.1s problem — is worth understanding and appreciating whether or not you’re a time nerd like me. There is no convenient leitmotif, comparable to the 0.1s problem, for our contemporary version of the rhyming conditions, but something very similar to the “tenth of a second crisis” is going on today. I suspect our Great Weirding too involves some sort of limiting factor on human cognition that we haven’t yet properly wrapped our minds around. It isn’t reaction time, but something analogous. timeanalogyprogresscognition
Mediocratopia An Article by Venkatesh Rao www.ribbonfarm.com I once read a good definition of aptitude. Aptitude is how long it takes you to learn something. The idea is that everybody can learn anything, but if it takes you 200 years, you essentially have no aptitude for it. Useful aptitudes are in the <10 years range. Leveling up aptitude You need to make the step forward skill
Premium Mediocre An Article from Ribbonfarm by Venkatesh Rao www.ribbonfarm.com Cupcakes and froyoMaya MillennialWhat premium mediocre is not societyculture
Rediscovering the Small Web An Article by Parimal Satyal neustadt.fr The vast open seasThe gatekeeperIt can also be art The small web is beautiful www
The vast open seas We didn't have Google in the early days. Other search engines like Lycos, Excite and Northern Lights did exist but were nowhere near as efficient as modern search engines. Finding something you were interested in was not as simple as typing a few words and getting to that information in one click. No, the web was much more of an adventure. It was a place that you wandered to discover new areas, like exploring the vast open seas. A new virtual space that lead to all kinds of strange, interesting, exciting places. This is what the web was like, at least, in our collective imagination. explorationwww
The gatekeeper Google has become the de facto gatekeeper of the web, an arbiter of what is useful and what should get visibility. Except, most websites that appear on the first page, the links that you are most likely to click on—less than 1% of searchers click on something in the second page—are designed to be there by optimising for Google's algorithms. One consequence of this is that most of the websites that people get to "organically" are created by professionals and marketers who "position" themselves on those keywords. This means that the smaller, amateur web gets hidden in the shadows of web professionals who design around specific keywords and audiences.
It can also be art It is worth remembering a website does not have to be a product; it can also be art. The web is also a creative and cultural space that need not confine itself to the conventions defined by commercial product design and marketing. wwwartux