This is not a pipe.

1968
by René Magritte

A McGuffin

The master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock built some his most suspense filled movies around a key concept called a McGuffin. Many famous films of his like Notorious, North by Northwest and Psycho were triumphs of this aspect of story telling. What exactly is a McGuffin?

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 as an example of a sentence whose grammar (logical form) is correct but whose semantics are nonsensical, and therefore has no meaning to understand. An example of a category mistake, it was used to show inadequacy of the then-popular probabilistic models of grammar, and the need for more structured models.

A poem and an image.

A Super Macro Photo on a Cell Phone Camera

I just saw this amazing hack. An ingenious way to circumvent one of the major drawbacks of bad cell phone cameras. Cell phone cameras are rather dodgy when it comes to macro photography.

Albert Speer

This is the second part in the series Visions of Space that I saw. This is a look at how the works of three remarkable architects of the 20th century shaped our modern world. It examines how each one of them used space to express our response, respectively, to the power of the corporation (Meiss van der Rohe), the power of the State (Albert Speer), and religion (Antoni Gaudi).

The second part is about Albert Speer and is called Size Matters.

Firefox is the browser of choice for a huge number of web designers and developers because it is open source and extensible. It is possible to write extensions which enables the user to create features that are not available by default. For those who cannot write these extensions, there is a rich pool of free ready made extensions already available. Some of these extensions enable us to do a fair amount of web design and development without the use of IDEs, without leaving the browser.

Here, I present a simple checklist to help you configure Firefox for Web Development. I am sure that most web developers and designers out there use most of these extensions already. This serves a checklist for me to quickly configure a machine which is not set up the way I want it, when I have to work on it. I hope it will be useful to others as well.

Words and ideas. The power of rephrasing?

Today people urge you to be enthusiastic about everything. It is fascinating for me to find out that such a common word as enthusiasm has a topsy-turvy history behind it.

The word enthusiasm comes from Greek and has a religious angle to its meaning which is very nicely hidden under the surface. For a certain time, enthusiasm was used in a negative and derogatory sense. This is certainly one of the words that has now undergone a complete transformation.

Procrastination is a learned behavior. Here is a very interesting metaphor of procrastination that I ran into recently in the book The Now Habit by Neil Fiore.  I am not much of a self help book reader, however, this section on procrastination was highly recommended to me. This helps us to understand how we procrastinate. What goes on in our minds that leads us to develop habits of procrastination. I found the part very interesting and would like to share it with you here.

A visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken Robinson led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements.

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity.