“If you're a politician, admitting you're wrong is a weakness, but if you're an engineer, you essentially want to be wrong half the time. If you do experiments and you're always right, then you aren't getting enough information out of those experiments. You want your experiment to be like the flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come up heads or tails. You want to not know what the results are going to be. ”
A Slate interview with Google Research Director Peter Norvig on Google's product development process.
[via]
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear
on Aug 7, 2010 -
20 comments
Must people who work in book shops have an English Literature degree? "At Foyles, the book-lover's bookshop, I approach the counter with a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses. "I bought this book the other day," I say, "and I want my money back. It's full of typing errors and there's no punctuation." But who dumbed down first, the readership or the book trade? Also, I notice Books
etc isn't included, perhaps because the clerks in that chain have to write little reviews of all the books they read, which are then put on the edges of the shelves ...
posted by feelinglistless
on May 7, 2002 -
39 comments
"Kill duck before cooking" and other chortle-worthy corrections from The New York Times. If newspapers were smart, they'd recognize that their corrections columns are a potential gold mine in terms of entertainment value, and promote them accordingly. But, alas, newspapers are not smart. (NY Times link, naturally, so the usual warnings apply.)
posted by nathanstack
on Jan 21, 2002 -
4 comments
