Ben Fry:

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin's theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin's On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime.

Using the six editions as a guide, we can see the unfolding and clarification of Darwin's ideas as he sought to further develop his theory during his lifetime.

See also, the Darwin Correspondence Project:

The main feature of the site is an Online Database with the complete, searchable, texts of around 5,000 letters written by and to Charles Darwin up to the year 1865. This includes all the surviving letters from the Beagle voyage - online for the first time - and all the letters from the years around the publication of Origin of species in 1859.

Lee Alan Dugatkin:

It began as a small difficulty with honeybees. At first glance, it did not seem like the sort of complication that could sink a theory that many have characterized as the most important one that biology has ever produced. But it turned into a problem that troubled biologists, fascinated naturalists, engaged popular writers and the general public, and even worked its way into political discourse for the next 145 years.

From The World in 2009:

Someone once accused Craig Venter of playing God.

His reply was, "We're not playing."

The Preservation of Favored Traces

Paul Ohm:

Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacy-protecting power of anonymization, the name for techniques for protecting the privacy of individuals in large databases by deleting information like names and social security numbers. These scientists have demonstrated they can often 'reidentify' or 'deanonymize' individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease. By understanding this research, we will realize we have made a mistake, labored beneath a fundamental misunderstanding, which has assured us much less privacy than we have assumed. This mistake pervades nearly every information privacy law, regulation, and debate, yet regulators and legal scholars have paid it scant attention. We must respond to the surprising failure of anonymization, and this Article provides the tools to do so.

Lee Gomes:

This preoccupation with keeping data anonymous can lead to surreal outcomes.

Kip Hawley:

Our Behavior Detection teams routinely -- and quietly -- identify problem people just through observable behavior cues.

Decius:

No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.

Michael Froomkin:

Despite growing public concern about privacy issues, the United States federal government has developed a number of post 9/11 initiatives designed to limit the scope of anonymous behavior and communication. Even so, the background norm that the government should not be able to compel individuals to reveal their identity without real cause retains force. On the other hand, legislatures and regulators seem reluctant to intervene to protect privacy, much less anonymity, from what are seen as market forces. Although the law imposes few if any legal obstacles to the domestic use of privacy-enhancing technology such as encryption it also requires little more than truth in advertising for most privacy destroying technologies.

Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov:

We present a new class of statistical de-anonymization attacks against high-dimensional micro-data, such as individual preferences, recommendations, transaction records and so on. Our techniques are robust to perturbation in the data and tolerate some mistakes in the adversary's background knowledge.

Flynn23:

Once someone cracks a really interesting problem that just requires sensitive data to be collected, shared, and analyzed, then all bets are off.

Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization

Siobhan Gorman:

In 2003, Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal, pitched an idea to Alexander Karp: Could they build software that would uncover terror networks using the approach PayPal had devised to fight Russian cybercriminals?

Alexander Karp:

"We were very naive. We just thought this was a cool idea."

Mary Beth Long:

"It's a new way of war fighting."

Gorman again:

Karp and his colleagues make frequent trips to Palo Alto to make sure they don't lose "the vibe of the Shire."

Karp, in a recent conversation with Charlie Rose:

You know, terrorism is asymmetric. Asymmetry presupposes software ... and we thought that [the Paypal] approach would be effective in this context and would do two things. It would allow humans to find needles in haystacks, so make the data intelligible to you and me, which it's not, and by doing that, it would allow them to find bad people trying to destroy our society, and could be used also to protect civil liberties by making the data so transparent that it is very clear what the government is doing and how they are doing it, which is a particular passion of our company.

Paul Graham:

In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination--partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent.

The more willful you are, the more disciplined you have to be. The stronger your will, the less anyone will be able to argue with you except yourself. And someone has to argue with you ...

Sam Kean:

There's nothing crueler the gods can do to an artist than misalign his talents and passion.

Gary Wills:

The deeper you go into one thing, the more it connects you with other things.

How Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade

David Cho:

A year after the near-collapse of the financial system last September, the federal response has redefined how Americans get mortgages, student loans and other kinds of credit and has made a national spectacle of executive pay. But no consequence of the crisis alarms top regulators more than having banks that were already too big to fail grow even larger and more interconnected.

Sheila Bair, today:

"It is at the top of the list of things that need to be fixed."

Sheila Bair, last December:

We need to return to the culture of thrift that my mother and her generation learned the hard way through years of hardship and deprivation.

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Vanessa Grigoriadis:

The meritocracy wasn't supposed to work this way.

A final thought from the bankers:

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

Banks 'Too Big to Fail' Have Grown Even Bigger

Gold Star

David Grann:

Did Texas execute an innocent man?

Justice Scalia:

"This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent."

Also worth a "look" -- The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, which has been misinterpreting bad punctuation since 2005.

Justice Stevens:

Imagine a petitioner in Davis's situation who possesses new evidence conclusively and definitively proving, beyond any scintilla of doubt, that he is an innocent man. The dissent's reasoning would allow such a petitioner to be put to death nonetheless. The Court correctly refuses to endorse such reasoning.

Decius:

Conor Clarke suggests that Scalia and Thomas are not crazy in holding the view that federal courts are powerless to help a convicted but demonstrably innocent death row inmate.

I think this is one of those moments when there is a clear division between right and wrong

Trial By Fire

Ashby Jones:

People who follow the world of law firms know, among so much else, two things: 1) that billing-by-the-hour has long been the way law firms get paid and 2) companies have over the years had only limited success in getting firms to agree to do it any other way.

That's changing. In a big way.

Decius, in 2007:

There is a substantive difference between a competitive threat and a blogger, and any lawyer worth his salt ought to be able to articulate that difference in a court room. But its in the interest of the firm to stoke that fear. That fear turns into billable hours. By telling corporate managers with a straight face they have to generate these C&Ds or toss their trademark away, the firm generates revenue.

Fear is the reason that a handful of lawschools have dominated the market.

Bob Skrivanek:

"You have this expectation that when you get out of law school, things will be better. Sometimes it's not true."

ABA Journal:

Of the 2,377 respondents who answered all or part of the survey, 84.2 percent indicated they would be willing to earn less money in exchange for lower billable-hour requirements.

Has the Clock Struck 12 on the Billable Hour?

Adrian Slywotzky:

Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years. You can't, because there isn't one. And that's the problem.

From last year's best-of:

Any technology that is going to have significant impact over the next 10 years is already at least 10 years old.

Richard Hamming:

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

Doug McIlroy:

In 1997, on his retirement from Bell Labs, Doug McIlroy gave a fascinating talk about the "History of Computing at Bell Labs."

Michael Griffin:

It is clear that an understanding of the broad issues, the big picture, is so much more influential in determining the ultimate success or failure of an enterprise than is the mastery of any given technical detail.

The Economist:

Under [Vannevar] Bush's plan [of the 1940's], universities researched basic science and then industry developed these findings to the point where they could get to market. The idea of R&D as two distinct activities was born. Firms soon organized themselves along similar lines, keeping white-coated scientists safely apart from scruffy engineers.

This approach was a stunning success. AT&T's Bell Labs earned six Nobel prizes for inventions such as the laser and the transistor.

Robert M. Siegmann:

When we net it all out, competition in the telecommunications industry has come at a tremendous cost -- our country has lost its crown jewel.

Where Have You Gone, Bell Labs?

Peter Seibel:

Based on nearly eighty hours of interviews with fifteen all-time great programmers and computer scientists, Coders at Work provides a multifaceted view into how great programmers learn to program, how they practice their craft, and what they think about the future of programming.

Alan Perlis, via Peter Norvig:

Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers.

Matthias Felleisen, et al:

Indeed, good programming is a fun activity, a creative outlet, and a way to express abstract ideas in a tangible form. And designing programs teaches a variety of skills that are important in all kinds of professions: critical reading, analytical thinking, creative synthesis, and attention to detail.

We therefore believe that the study of program design deserves the same central role in general education as mathematics and English. Or, put more succinctly, everyone should learn how to design programs.

Fiona MacCarthy on Richard Sennett:

Pleasure in making comes from innate necessary rhythms, often slow ones. As we know in our own lives there is much more satisfaction in cooking a meal or caring for small children if we are not in a hurry. Doing a job properly takes the time it takes. Sennett argues in a fascinating way that, while we are working, submerged processes of thought and feeling are in progress. Almost without being aware we set ourselves the highest standard which "requires us to care about the qualities of cloth or the right way to poach fish". Doing our own work well enables us to imagine larger categories of "good" in general.

Paul Graham:

You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

Nir Rosen:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Pico Iyer:

It seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn't pursued.

I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media -- and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can't think of a single thing I lack.

Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

Aaron Zinman:

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Decius:

Noooooo problem ... don't worry about privacy ... privacy is dead ... there's no privacy ... just more databases ... that's what you want ... that's what you NEED ... Buy my shit! Buy it -- give me money! Don't worry about the consequences ... there's no consequences. If you give me money, everything's going to be cool, okay? It's gonna be cool. Give me money. No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.

Michael Osinski:

Here's one thing that's definitely true: The software proved to be more sophisticated than the people who used it, and that has caused the whole world a lot of problems.

Michael Lewis:

Jake DeSantis just wanted to know why the public perception ... was so different from the private perception ...

Anthony Lane on Peter O'Toole as T. E. Lawrence in David Lean's 1962 film:

He halts and shouts across the water, "Who are you?," and again, "Who are you?" We look at the face of the man from the desert. His eyes are even bluer than the canal, but he says nothing. Maybe his tongue is too dry for speech. Maybe he has no answer.

Personas | Metropath(ologies)

Fans of Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store may be interested in Robin Sloan's new short story.

The young writer rolled his eyes. This was not the first time he'd been cursed.

From the archive, The Horror, The Horror:

Owner: Take this object, but beware it carries a terrible curse!

Homer: [worried] Ooooh, that's bad.

Owner: But it comes with a free Frogurt!

Homer: [relieved] That's good.

Owner: The Frogurt is also cursed.

Homer: [worried] That's bad.

Owner: But you get your choice of topping!

Homer: [relieved] That's good.

Owner: The toppings contain Potassium Benzoate.

Homer: [stares]

Owner: That's bad.

Paul Graham:

Don't just not be evil. Be good.

The Writer & the Witch