Books and Links: December

This year is almost done! I'm working on a year in review thingy... how many years have I done that now?

Books

I haven't finished any books this month... I've been burning down the remaining 15+ hours of a podcast entitled Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, a podcast series by Darryl Cooper. It examines the birth and growth of Zionism, starting in the late 19th century all the way up to the birth of the modern Israeli state.

I went into this idly interested, but wound up being enthralled… and horrified. I appreciated how he confronts the listener with the experience of people in that time and context, honestly asking the hard question: "what would you have done?"

On deck: The 12 Week Year, House of Leaves.

Links

What’s a Linkable App and Why Does Linkability Matter? – Hook

I'm obsessed with this weird app at the moment.

People have become so accustomed to the weird fact that, without Hook, information resources are not easily addressable on the Mac that they tend not to realize that its just as important to be able to address local (or cloud synced) resources as it is to address remote resources.

What’s a Linkable App and Why Does Linkability Matter? – Hook

Walmart and autonomous trucks - Marginal REVOLUTION

Since last year, those trucks have been operating on a two-mile route between a “dark store” (a store that stocks items for fulfillment but isn’t open to the public) and a nearby Neighborhood Market in Bentonville, Arkansas. Since then, the vehicles have racked up 70,000 miles in autonomous mode with a safety driver.

I guess that future is here.

Walmart and autonomous trucks - Marginal REVOLUTION

By The Numbers: A Year and Half with Atomic CSS

The results speak for themselves. Refactoring our CSS to the functional approach led to a 30% decrease in size. It could have been even smaller, but we left some legacy styles in place to refactor at a later time.

By The Numbers: A Year and Half with Atomic CSS

Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy • Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching • Iowa State University

The authors of the revised taxonomy underscore this dynamism, using verbs and gerunds to label their categories and subcategories (rather than the nouns of the original taxonomy). These “action words” describe the cognitive processes by which thinkers encounter and work with knowledge.

A statement of a learning objective contains a verb (an action) and an object (usually a noun).

While this is generally fascinating, this has direct application for us productivity nerds: how we write project and to-do titles. I heard CGPGrey say on Cortex that it's good to phrase projects or to-dos in the past tense… some taxonomy like this could be helpful.

Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy • Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching • Iowa State University