Burn After Reading
By Kristian Glass
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Burn After Reading - Issue #9
PyCon UK 2022 is happening this year after a hiatus - in person, in Cardiff, from Friday 16th to Sunday 18th September 2022. We never tried to run it as an online conference, but Emilia Lazer-Walker's "So you want to run a virtual event" looks to be full of e…
Burn After Reading - Issue #8
The Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness is a brilliant piece of writing in Terry Pratchett's Men at Arms that does a great job of illustrating how it's expensive to be poor. Siderea's The Vimes Boots Theory: Further Reflections has the theory in full, an…
Burn After Reading - Issue #7
The "Eisenhower matrix" of urgent/important is a fairly well-known model, but if just knowing about a model solved problems, everything would be much easier - Joe Dunn's "How to Dig Yourself Out of Overwhelm" covers a range of techniques and approaches to get…
Burn After Reading - Issue #6
It's great to see more and more home automation kit on the market. It's sad to see how much of it is terrible, overly intrusive, or unnecessarily internet-connected. As a homeowner, fortunately, it's almost entirely my choice. Unfortunately for Lesley Carhart…
Burn After Reading - Issue #5
Patrick McKenzie has a great series of general questions that would be valuable to ask during a project - when I think about things that I've worked on, almost all would have benefited from someone raising some of these! A particular favourite: "How can we ge…
Burn After Reading - Issue #4
Currently making headlines, the question: Will Jeff Bezos Get Half of MacKenzie Bezos’s Fortune in the Divorce? Except most places aren't quite addressing it that way. Penelope Trunk looks at divorce and how stay-at-home spouses are so commonly and frequently…
Burn After Reading - Issue #3
You read the first 20 pages of a book and find no typos. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence - you probably wouldn't expect the probability of a typo in the entire book to be zero, but what might it be? John D. Cook explains the rule of three, a "qu…
Burn After Reading - Issue #2
On the back of last week's Twitter thread from Patrick McKenzie, Grey Baker sent me some fascinating reading about signalling: Feltovich, Harbaugh and To's paper "Too cool for school? Signalling and countersignalling" (with a nice summary write-up in the Econ…
Burn After Reading - Issue #1
Chelsea Troy wrote a great article on Syllabus Design. I've done some basic syllabus design before, for short internal / client workshops, but it's all been very ad-hoc - this article walks through a sample syllabus with context and rationale, and looks great…