A heuristic (/hjʊˈrɪstɪk/; from Ancient Greek εὑρίσκω (heurískō) 'I find, discover'), or heuristic technique, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient (good enough) for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision.[1][2] Examples that employ heuristics include using trial and error, a rule of thumb or an educated guess. Heuristics are the strategies derived from previous experiences with similar problems. (pattern-matching) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic

doing what's good enough, not best/optimal/max (more)

Idea from Balaji Srinivasan via Chris Dixon (2013): The idea maze: (more)

http://www.opensource.org/ (more)

owner of Adobe Acrobat; MacroMedia; Creative Cloud, PhotoShop, Adobe Illustrator, etc. (more)

Context: you want to make the first line of a page in your Digital Garden useful (more)

Patrick Mathias wrote a book called Baby Steps about teaching Essay Writing at Northern Lights Community School (Educating Kids). It seems like you can read the whole thing online, or buy a Printed Book, but can't download an EBook.

Talcott Parsons used the term "gloss" to describe how the mind constructs reality, "filtering" the data coming from our senses. This "filtering" is largely unconscious, and is affected by factors such as cultural constructs including language, personal experience, belief systems, and so forth. Different cultures create different glosses, all called reality (consensus reality) by the members of those societies. Failure to recognize "glossing," then, may explain what happens when cultures collide. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Talcott_Parsons#Gloss https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons (more)

Is there such a thing as Absolute Truth? (more)

Many natural systems (e.g., brains, immune systems, ecologies, societies (Human System-s)) and increasingly, many artificial systems (parallel and Distributed Computing systems, Artificial Intelligence systems, artificial Neural Network-s, evolutionary programs) are characterized by apparently complex behaviors that emerge as a result of often nonlinear spatio-temporal interactions among a large number of component systems at different levels of organization. http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~honavar/alife.isu.html (more)

A popular framing of a complex system. Cosma Shalizi says Given that that the opinion of specialists was never unanimous behind "life at the edge of chaos,'' and there is every possibility it's wrong, why was this idea picked up by some segments of educated opinion and adopted? --- even adopted pretty widely; I seem to recall Al Gore making some hay with the notion, and hearing that it was being touted by management witch-doctors. The obvious answer is that it fits nicely with some wide-spread prejudices: basically, antinomianism, a dislike of rules and rigidity and formality, a positive relish for rule-breaking. (more)

Can't find a primary reference to this, just references by Jerry Weinberg. (more)

I wrote my original NodeWeb page in 2003. (more)

unix text-editor (more)

set of 3 Robert Anton Wilson books (more)

book trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea ISBN:0440539811 (more)

A cross between File sharing and Photo sharing. Wanting to be able to have an inline image in a HTML page (from a dynamic webapp) (esp when that webapp doesn't want to do the hosting itself). (more)

Twitter-specific MicroFormat similar to OpenGraph, used to provide a Preview of a linked URL (as in a TumbleLog). (more)

Coaching ChatBot http://www.coachwilson.net/ (more)

In computer science, function composition is an act or mechanism to combine simple functions to build more complicated ones. Like the usual composition of functions in mathematics, the result of each function is passed as the argument of the next, and the result of the last one is the result of the whole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_composition_(computer_science) (more)