Stuff I Have Found Interesting Last Week

Fun With Statistics - Veneer of Verisimilitude Edition

I have always hated precision mistakes. Now to use verisimiltude in casual conversation :-)

Chart of the Day: S&P500 P/E Ratio

It's easy to see why the stock market was due for a crash.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting this Week

What makes a ‘good’ programmer?

Interesting take on an old question. I like the baker and cook prototypes. I tend to be more baker than cook.

The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare

This is the best article on healthcare I have read ever and it comes from the CEO of Whole Foods.

Kanban In Time-Boxes: The Cadence of WIP and Sprints

Good article that shows how iterations can lead to utilization and how iterations can be used with a Kanban system as a delivery time frame. Lots of good diagrams and explanations.

Review of "1789"

Subtitled "The Threshold of the Modern Age" by David Andress. The book's goal is best quoted from the publisher, Macmillan:

T

he world in 1789 stood on the edge of a unique transformation. At the end of an unprecedented century of progress, the fates of three nations—France; the nascent United States; and their common enemy, Britain—lay interlocked...David Andress reveals how these events unfolded and how the men who led them, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, and George Washington, stood at the threshold of the modern world.

I did learn some interesting things while reading it's 398 pages. Taxes in France of the 1780's where paid almost completely by the lower end of the populace as the royalty and rich where mostly exempt from taxation. Also, France was completely broke and this as much as anything led to their revolution. In England, Thomas Paine's writing were so incendiary that he had trouble finding publishers. For his part two of the Rights of Man he had to sign off as publisher to give the actual publisher protection. Cornwallis, after failure in war with America, went on the oversee India and then Ireland with some success.

I have mixed feelings about this book. It is well written and full of history, which I love, but I didn't like this book. I think that this book might be too advanced for me. Maybe if I knew more of the details of English, French history of the 1780's I would have been able to see deeper meaning meant by the author. As it was, I just picked up some interesting tidbits and the rest mostly rolled through the brain.

Stuff I Have Found Interesting Yesterday

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Quite long but full of good information. If you still believe markets are efficient then please read this. If not then just browse it for some cool graphs.

Exceptions: The Airbags of Code & Defensive Programming, or Why Exception Handling Is Like Car Insurance

This first one links to the second one. They both cover roughly the same subject but slightly different and they are short. Basically is you use an Exception to handle a predictable case (like divide by zero) you should consider a different career.

2 steps to improve your website load time by 50%

I never heard of Content Delivery Network before this post. The concept isn't new, but the fact that Amazon cloud supports this so cheaply is shocking. I guess there is more out there than I have time to learn.

Choosing a non-relational database; why we migrated from MySQL to MongoDB

Another DB I have never heard of as well as a list of non-relational DBs with details on MongoDB.

Lean Primer [PDF]

A good, long paper on Lean that covers the subject well.