“In an already imprecise field, Dr. Michael West has taken forensic odontology to bizarre, megalomaniacal depths. West claims to have invented a system he modestly calls “The West Phenomenon. In it, he dons a pair of yellow goggles and with the aid of a blue laser, he says he can identify bite marks, scratches, and other marks on a corpse that no one else can see—not even other forensics experts.

Conveniently, he claims his unique method can’t be photographed or reproduced, which he says makes his opinions unimpeachable by other experts.

In one case he claimed to have positively traced a half-eaten bologna sandwich at the murder scene to the defendant’s teeth based on bite marks in the sandwich. The defendant was convicted, but the case was later tossed out when West admitted to disposing of the sandwich after studying it. Because no one can replicate his methods, West said, the sandwich was no longer necessary.

“Using MVC to render information about a person to the screen, we’d create a number of templates that we’d use throughout the application. We would probably create a template for rendering the data, a template for rendering the form, and perhaps a template for rendering a table of people. This wouldn’t be too difficult except we have to do this again and again for every new data structure we come up with. We end up generating nearly the same HTML manually - all that’s changing is a list of fields. Weblocks automates this work.

“People with more education appear to be on Facebook while those in the margins of nearly every aspect of our culture can be found on MySpace.

“All zoogles are boogles. You saw a boogle. Is it a zoogle? Adolescents who make a mistake answering this kind of question on their SAT may not make it to college. But those who get very high scores can still feel a chill of fear when someone from the wrong side of town steps into the elevator.

Many people confuse the statement “almost all terrorists are Moslems” with “almost all Moslems are terrorists”. Such confusion partakes of a trivial, very trivial, logical error. Not even professors are particularly immune to such errors. Complicated equations do not tend to cohabit happily with clarity of mind.

“The really painful thing to recall is not just that I accumulated all this useless stuff, but that I often spent money I desperately needed on stuff that I didn’t. Why would I do that? Because the people whose job is to sell you stuff are really, really good at it.

“What if Verizon, and AT&T, and Comcast, and half a dozen other huge broadband ISPs suddenly cut deals with some search company other than Google and your ISP-supplied browser and homepage no longer give such prominence to Google? How different are the search results these days from one engine to another? Not very different.

“Abbreviations might be good.
Removing Accidental Complexity is better.
Providing Useful Abstractions is best of all.

“You could implement the Twitter user interface using the API. Compare it to Apple, who reserves for itself and a few partners, under terms we don’t know, the right to develop rich apps for the iPhone.

“The Novice has been the focus of an alarming amount of attention in the computer field. It is not just that the preferred user is unskilled, it is that the whole field in its application rewards novices and punishes experts.

“Being profitable too soon gives investors, rightly or wrongly, an idea of what the margins are on the business, as opposed to what they could be in some perfect world. As a result, it takes a mighty force for them to not start wading in with discounted present value worksheets, and the like, thus hammering your valuation and generally making funding much more complicated (and equity consuming) than if you were wildly unprofitable.