You’ve had hundreds of hours of discussions on what your open relationship will look like? Check!
You’ve written down a list of limits, boundaries, rules, and expectations? Check!
You’ve created dating profiles that honestly detail what you are looking for and the honesty with your existing relationship? Check!
You’ve read at least 3 books together on the topic of nonmonogamy? Check?
You and your partner subscribe and listen to at least 3 nonmonogamous friendly podcasts? Check!
You’re all set! You open up the relationship and go off on your first dates… WHAM, arguing, suspicion, jealousy, withholding information, yelling,
crying, breaking down… and a month later, you believe you don’t know each other anymore and you’re ready to call a marriage counsellor, divorce, forget you ever opened up your
relationship, or all of the above.
This week, a video of a 12-year-old girl coming out as gay to her Mormon congregation in Eagle Mountain, Utah, went viral — and it’s easy to understand why. Savannah is adorable. She wears a red tie, which is already a
statement, since wearing pants to church as a woman can be controversial. She stands in front of a room of adults delivering her testimony about how her Heavenly Parents “did not mess up when they gave me freckles. Or when they made me
gay. God loves me just this way because I believe that he loves all of his creations.”
His nuclear research helped a judge determine that former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko had been assassinated – likely on Putin’s orders. Just months after the verdict, the
scientist himself was found stabbed to death with two knives. Police deemed it a suicide, but US intelligence officials suspect it was murder…
Something that jumped at me, recently, was a rendering dilemma that browsers have to encounter, and gracefully handle, on a day-by-day basis with little, to no, standardization.
Take the following page for example. You have 4 floated divs, each with a width of 25%, contained within a parent div of
width 50px. Here’s the question: How wide are each of the divs?
The problem lies in the fact that each div should be, approximately, 12.5px wide and since technology isn’t at a level where we can start rendering at the sub-pixel level we tend to
have to round off the number. The problem then becomes: Which way do you round the number? Up, down, or a mixture of the two? I think the results will surprise you, as they did me…
Some people think that usability is very costly and complex and that user tests should be reserved for the rare web design project with a huge budget and a lavish time schedule. Not
true. Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
In earlier research, Tom Landauer and I showed that the number of usability problems found in a usability test with n users is:
N (1-(1- L ) n )
where N is the total number of usability problems in the design and L is the proportion of usability problems discovered while testing a single user. The typical
value of L is 31%, averaged across a large number of projects we studied. Plotting the curve for L =31% gives the following result…
Software engineers go crazy for the most ridiculous things. We like to think that we’re hyper-rational, but when we have to choose a technology, we end up in a kind of
frenzy — bouncing from one person’s Hacker News comment to another’s blog post until, in a stupor, we float helplessly toward the brightest light and lay prone in front of it,
oblivious to what we were looking for in the first place.
This is not how rational people make decisions, but it is how software engineers decide to use MapReduce…
In the speech in which she committed to keep governing despite calls to stand down, the prime minister made reference to extending powers for the security services. Those powers –
which include regulation of the internet and forcing internet companies to let spies read everyone’s private communications – were a key part of the Conservative campaign, which failed to
score a majority in the House of Commons.
