An excerpt from the essay “Wrong—Again—About Plain Language” by Joseph Kimble; written in defense of Plain Language legislation and in response to an attacker:

Advocates believe that “it is more important to be clear . . . than to be accurate.”

This charge could not be more wrong. I responded to Mr. Stark on this same point 18 years ago.[14] No reputable advocate has ever said that clarity trumps accuracy. Yes, I have said, “Your main goal is to convey your ideas with the greatest possible clarity.”[15] But of course I mean “convey your ideas accurately.” Nobody who knows my work — or the work of any other advocate — could possibly think otherwise. We all take the need for accuracy as blindingly obvious.[16] But we do think that, with rare exceptions, clarity and accuracy are complementary — not competing — goals. As Reed Dickerson, the father of modern-day legal drafting, wryly put it: “The price of clarity, of course, is that the clearer the document the more obvious its substantive deficiencies.”[17] Or in the words of another expert: “The purposes of legislation are most likely to be expressed and communicated successfully by the drafter who is ardently concerned to write clearly and to be intelligible.”[18] Time after time, we have seen clarity improve accuracy by uncovering the ambiguities and errors that traditional drafting tends to hide. Yet if in some instance, on some point, accuracy and clarity really are at odds, then accuracy wins. It goes without saying — almost.

From “Secrets: A memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers” by Daniel Ellsberg:

“Henry [Kissinger], there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.

“I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.

“First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all – so much! incredible! – suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.

“You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t… and that all those other people are fools.

“Over a longer period of time – not too long, but a matter of two or three years – you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn.

“In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What could this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues… and with myself.

“You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”

From The politics of Helen Keller: Socialism and disability by Keith Rosenthal:

For instance, in a groundbreaking article, “The Unemployed,” written in 1911 for a magazine for the blind Keller argued,

We have been accustomed to regard the unemployed deaf and blind as victims of their infirmities. That is to say, we have supposed that if their sight and hearing were miraculously restored, they would find work. But I wish to suggest to the readers of this article that the unemployment of the blind is only part of a greater problem.

Mass unemployment, Keller argued, is due not to “physical defects or lack of ability,” but rather to the fact that capitalist production requires “a large margin of idle men.” The capitalist class use the pressure of unemployment to force workers to compete with one another, and in that process, “the weaker workmen are thrust aside.” Thus, she argued, blindness may be a contributing factor to a person’s unemployment, but not the primary cause. Linking the struggle of blind people for the right to work with the struggle of all unemployed people for jobs, she wrote, “We know that the blind are not debarred from usefulness solely by their infirmity. Their idleness is caused by conditions which press heavily upon all working people.” She concluded that “it is not physical blindness, but social blindness which cheats our hands of their right to toil.”

[…]

Sadly, the fundamental dream that Helen Keller maintained throughout most of her life ultimately eluded the grasp of her generation. In the years since her death, that dream—the dream of a socialist world, free of oppression, exploitation, and war—has likewise been deferred for subsequent generations. And yet, that dream has not died, and will not die as long as there are people in the world who remain animated by the memories and legacies of Helen Keller and all of our other fighting ancestors. It is in such a spirit that this article ends at the beginning—with an excerpt from the very first public lecture given by Helen Keller, in February 1913.

I am going to try to make you feel that no one of us can do anything alone, that we are bound together. I do not like this world as it is. I am trying to make it a little more as I would like to have it.

It was the hands of others that made me. Without my teacher I should be nothing. Without you I should be nothing. We live by and for each other. We are all blind and deaf until our eyes are open to our fellow men. If we had penetrating vision we would not endure what we see in the world today.

The lands, the life, and the machinery belong to the few. All the work they do gains for the workers a mere livelihood. It is the labor of the poor and ignorant that makes others refined and comfortable. It is strange that we do not see it and that when we do we accept the conditions.

But I am no pessimist. The pessimist says that man was born in darkness and for death. I believe that man was intended for the light and shall not die. It is a good world and it will be much better when you help me to make it more as I want it.

Came across this quote from John Kenneth Galbraith in a presentation by L. Carson of the University of Sydney about Strategic Questioning (pdf):

Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

From Sandi Metz’s “The Shape at the Bottom of All Things”:

I totally understand that this is a small example and that these techniques can feel like overkill for a problem of this size. Perhaps they are; I wouldn’t resist if you insisted it were so. However, there are bigger problems for which these techniques are the perfect solution and I rely on your ability to see the larger abstraction. You can’t choose whether to use these techniques unless you know them and it’s much easier practice on a small example like this.

From the Chapter 1 of Robert Martin’s Clean Code:

Consider this book a description of the Object Mentor [the group of authors of this book] School of Clean Code. The techniques and teachings within are the way that we practice our art. We are willing to claim that if you follow these teachings, you will enjoy the benefits that we have enjoyed, and you will learn to write code that is clean and proessional. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that we are somehow “right” in any absolute sense. There are other schools and other masters that have just as much claim to professionalism as we. It would behoove you to learn from them as well.

Indeed, many of the recommendations in this book are controversial. You will probably not agree with all of them. You might violently disagree with some of them. That’s fine. We can’t claim final authority. On the other hand, the recommendations in this book are things that we have thought long and hard about. We have learned them through decades of experience and repeated trial and error. So Whether you agree or disagree, it would be a shame if you did not see, and respect, our point of view.

“The Heriarchy of not-for-profit rigor” from White Courtesy Telephone;

At a certain level of experience in some fields, one realizes that “the problem” is not that people are incompetent or bad at their jobs, but rather that they are spectacularly excellent at what they are doing but they happen to be doing the wrong thing. Which is what makes the above chart so enjoyable for me, having reached the level of nonprofit experience in which I can juxtapose the superb competence of those inside the sector with those voices outside the sector braying of its incompetence, while recognizing just how closely aligned both of them are.

From  Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby:

Let’s start with some deep breathing. Give me a good deep breath and count to four with me.

Here we go. 1. 2. 3. 4. Now exhale. You can feel your eyes. Good, that’s exactly it.

Now let’s take a deep breath and, in your mind, draw a hippopotamus as fast as you can. Quick quick. His legs, his folds, his marshmallow teeth. Okay, done. Now exhale.

Take another deep breath and hold it tight. As you hold it tightly in your chest, imagine the tightness is shrinking you down into a bug. You’ve held your breath so hard that you’re an insect. And all the other bugs saw you shrink and they loved the stunt. They’re clapping and rubbing their feelers together madly. But you had an apple in your hand when you were big and it just caught up with you, crushed the whole crowd. You’re dead, too. Now exhale.

Give me a solid deep breath and imagine you live in a town where everything is made of telephone cords. The houses are all telephone cords, the shingles, the rafters. The doorways are a thick mass of telephone cords which you simply thrust yourself through. When you go to bed, the bedspread is telephone cords. And the mattress and box springs are telephone cords, too. Like I said, everything is made out of telephone cords. The telephone itself is made of telephone cords. But the telephone cord going to the telephone is made out of bread and a couple sticks. Now exhale.

Breathe in. 1. 2. 3. 4. Breathe out.

Breath in. 1. 2. Another short breath in. 3. 4. Imagine both of your hands snapping off at the wrists and flying into your computer screen and programming it from the inside. Exhale.

Big, big deep breath. Deep down inside you there is a submarine. It has a tongue. Exhale.

Breathe through your nostrils. Deep breath. Filter the air through your nostrils. Breathing through the nostrils gives you quality air. Your nostrils flare, you are taking breaths of nature’s air, the way God intended. Imagine a floppy disk drive clogged up with orphans. And while it chokes on orphans, you have good, wholesome God’s breath in your lungs. But that pleasurable, life-giving air will become a powerful toxin if held too long. Hurry, exhale God and nature’s air!

Now, you will wake up, smoothing out the creases of this page in your web browser. You will have full recollection of your whole life and not forgetting any one of the many adventures you have had in your life. You will feel rich and renewed and expert. You will have no remembrance of this short exercise, you will instead remember teaching a rabbit to use scissors from a great distance.

And as you will wake up with your eyes directed to the top of this exercise, you will begin again. But this time, try to imagine that even your shadow is a telephone cord.

I’ve spent the last 6 months working at OkCupid Labs building an iOS native mobile app I’m very proud of: Ravel!—”Share Photos. Meet People.” We’ve described it as a dating app for Instagrammers: your public profile is the photos that you pull in from Instagram, Facebook or your camera roll and you can introduce yourself and start chatting with other people based on the photos they share.

We built Ravel! using RubyMotion, a toolchain for writing native iOS apps in (nearly)Ruby. In building it, I learned a lot more both about Ruby and Objective-C along with the intricacies of developing for a mobile device. The mobile app is powered by a Rails-based API server, which is also the backend for the website (for sharing your photo and profile via the web). One of the strengths of RubyMotion is its wonderful automation tools; and the drawbacks is that it’s memory management still has requires some work and workarounds. Perhaps you’ve seen this quote: “It’s not just you. I’m experiencing these memory-related types of crashes (like SIGSEGV and SIGBUS) with about 10-20% of users in production.” That was me on the RubyMotion mailing list.

I also learned a lot of about instrumentation and building a consumer-facing app. Even though a lot of our focus was on in-app engagement, we also invested a lot of time in growth and retention. From optimizing the download  and App Store texts, to adding events and triggers in-app and on the server, to adding sharing and open graph integration through Facebook and on the web.

As I cycle off of Ravel!, time will tell how it survives as a product, but I’m very proud of how we brought it to market.

2012 was a big year for Day of the Shirt: it moved from being one of a constellation of hobby projects to becoming the main focus of my spare development time and a largely self-sustaining business.

As a project

As a technology project, Day of the Shirt went through a lot of changes in 2012. Including:

• It started off the year featuring just 10 t-shirt vendors. By the end of the year, that number had grown to 21 vendors, including some that featured multiple shirt sales.

• The technology stack morphed a lot. Originally built in PHP, I first rewrote the backend in Node.JS (though I was still using PHP for HTML templating). Then, as the year closed out, I began the task of rewriting it for Ruby on Rails.

• In moving Day of the Shirt from PHP to Node (and towards Rails), I improved the instrumentation and error logging a lot. This meant I’m much more quickly able to respond to changes in t-shirt vendors websites and ensure that designs on Day of the Shirt are up-to-date.

• Added a daily RSS Feed

• Started pushing daily updates to Facebook (in addition to Twitter) with about 1,500 likes on the Facebook Page by year’s end.

As a business

2012 marked the first time that Day of the Shirt ever earned any money. Like:

• After 1.5 years of having Google Adsense advertisements on Day of the Shirt, I finally received my first payout in February.

• In addition to showing advertisements, I also started adding affiliate links to shirts. The majority of t-shirt vendors I list don’t have affiliate programs, but I went ahead and signed up as an affiliate for those that do.

• Because I was actually earning some revenue for the first time, in November I completed the process of registering Day of the Shirt as a Sole Proprietorship in the City of San Francisco.

• The income has allowed me to pay a designer to help with the visual and interaction design and a developer to help migrate the t-shirt collection scripts to Ruby: having already migrated a lot of automated scripts from PHP to Javascript, I was happy to lighten my load and focus on building out the website itself.

As a passion

I’ve always juggled several web projects (like Brompt and Panlexicon… and all of this), but 2012 really cemented my commitment and interest in Day of the Shirt:

• Traffic went up, way up. Over the course of the year Day of the Shirt went from having 200 daily visitors in January to more than 8,000 by December.

• People started writing about Day of the Shirt on Reddit and online forums. And tweeting about it. And in November Day of the Shirt was featured on Lifehacker.

• People started emailing me (and we don’t feature our email address very prominently): thanking me for the website and suggesting new daily t-shirt vendors to add to the website.

2012 was a really important year for Day of the Shirt and has set a lot of the foundation for improvements and new features I’m adding in 2013.

Roger Scruton:

Thomas Aquinas, who devoted some two million words to spelling out, in the Summa Theologica, the nature of the world, God’s purpose in creating it and our fate in traversing it, ended his short life (short by our standards, at least) in a state of ecstasy, declaring that all that he had written was of no significance beside the beatific vision that he had been granted, and in the face of which words fail. His was perhaps the most striking example of a philosopher who comes to believe that the real meaning of the world is ineffable. Having got to this point, Aquinas obeyed the injunction of Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus concludes with the proposition: “that whereof we cannot speak we must consign to silence.”

But Aquinas was exceptional. The history of philosophy abounds in thinkers who, having concluded that the truth is ineffable, have gone on to write page upon page about it. One of the worst offenders is Kierkegaard, who argues in a hundred ways that the ultimate is inexpressible, that truth is “subjectivity,” that the meaning of life can be given by no formula, no proposition, no abstraction, but only by the concrete experience of surrender whose content can never be given in words.

[…]

The temptation to take refuge in the ineffable is not confined to philosophers. Every inquiry into first principles, original causes and fundamental laws, will at some stage come up against an unanswerable question: what makes those first principles true or those fundamental laws valid? What explains those original causes or initial conditions? And the answer is that there is no answer — or no answer that can be expressed in terms of the science for which those laws, principles and causes are bedrock. And yet we want an answer. So how should we proceed?

There is nothing wrong with referring at this point to the ineffable. The mistake is to describe it.