the steve lim web review

#34

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:45:21 -0400

If you can’t explain it, you don’t know it well enough…
derived from Albert Einstein:

Feynman was once asked by a Caltech faculty member to explain why spin 1/2 particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. He gauged his audience perfectly and said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But a few days later he returned and said, “You know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it.”

#27

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 01:06:52 -0500

So if you’ve got talent, figure out what you have to do and go.

#26

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 01:05:07 -0500

Self-awareness trumps talent (alone).

#25

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 17:07:29 -0500

Hard work trumps talent (alone).

First laugh!

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 23:03:23 -0400

First laugh!

My Round up of The New Detroit Lions

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:00:00 -0400

Ndamukong Suh:
Here’s what he looks like compared to a guy my size

Javid Best:
2009 Cal Highlights

Why he was the third running back taken:
Scary neck injury

Why iPad naysayers are dead wrong:

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 13:56:40 -0400

When the original desktop GUI was invented at Xerox Parc, computers were used for creating content. Now they are more frequently used for consuming content for which windows don’t work so well. We’ll see more single function or fewer function devices.

— Cordell Ratzlaff, nine-year Apple veteran
(former head of Apple’s human interface group during the time Apple acquired NeXT and began developing Mac OS X)

From 2006 SXSW Interactive Panel “Behind the Scenes: Developing OS X and Longhorn”:

http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?306 http://www.macobserver.com/article/2006/03/15.9.shtml

An Alex Chilton Story that I found today…R.I.P.

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:33:08 -0400

An Alex Chilton Story that I found today…R.I.P.:

Choire: What is your favorite Alex Chilton video, song or tale?

Paul: My favorite tale is from Our Band Could Be Your Life, when he shut down Gibby Haynes’s rampage through the Netherlands:

Moments later a man entered the dressing room and asked if he could borrow a guitar. “BORROW A GUITAR??!!! WELL, WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU???!!! [Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers] screamed, eyes flashing in delirious anticpation of forthcoming violence.

But the man was totally unfazed.

“I’m Alex Chilton,” the man answered calmly.

Haynes was flabbergasted. After a long pause, he methodically opened the remaining guitar cases one by one and gestured at them as if to say, “Take anything you want.”

Wu-Note Project: Two great tastes that taste great together (via...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:02:00 -0500

Wu-Note Project: Two great tastes that taste great together
(via boing boing)

Flicker set link

President Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:32:41 -0400

President Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize:

This would not have happened had an antithetical “Anti-Peace” Prize that they would have gone to the “President-who-shall-not-be-named”.
Or as Time Magazine calls it: “…for Not being George W. Bush”.
via Daring Fireball

That little girl is the First Lady, how cool is that!?!?

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:07:00 -0400

That little girl is the First Lady, how cool is that!?!?

iPhones on Verizon? What does Steve Lim think?

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:52:00 -0400

—I was asked this twice in one day, so I thought I should commit my opinion to type.

Heard? Not much…but I have a lot of educated guesses:

Because Verizon and Sprint are on CDMA, and the rest of the world is not, this puts them at a disadvantage as a candidate to be apple’s carrier. —Making a phone that works for the whole world and then making another one for just the US, is something that would really irritate Steve Jobs.

As far as a “company personality” Verizon is also a bad match. Until the iPhone came along, all the carriers bullied phone manufacturers. They knew any great cell phone was useless w/o a service carrier, so they would make companies change or remove buttons, change software and user interfaces “or else”. It’s not a forgiving process, like the Transportation Dept. telling car manufacturers to make airbags standard in 2 years, they will be presented with phone prototypes that are ready for manufacture, and order changes to the hardware.

Part of this personality disorder is power grabbing, but part of it is fear: they don’t want to be just a bunch of pipes for wireless data. That’s why we see all those dumb commercials for “ESPN only on Verizon” type stuff. They are trying to become like cable companies that control content.

—The worst of the bullies is Verizon. Over the years that I’ve reading reviews for the best phones, Verizon have simply never had compelling phones. I don’t think this is something of an accident. Steve Jobs also firmly believes the the carriers are just a bunch of pipes. —He’s known to refer to the carriers as “orifices”.

So that supports this third-hand report from wired (when the iPhone first came out):

“At one point, Jobs met with some executives from Verizon, who promptly turned him down. It was hard to blame them. For years, carriers had charged customers and suppliers for using and selling services over their proprietary networks.”

Verizon had their chance.

But I think the future for Verizon is what they make of it. I think Verizon learned a lesson (maybe), but AT&T hasn’t been taking their new iPhone profits and reinvesting in infrastructure. There’s speculation that AT&T service is getting worse and worse, now that there are more and more iPhone users and the network isn’t expanding to keep up with the increasing data and voice demands. So they’ll have an opportunity to be a carrier —IF they want to.

The world will be moving to a faster wireless standard (4G or whatever), and I heard that Verizon is ahead of AT&T in setting up the infrastructure. Apple is also just as unhappy with AT&T as consumers are. So when the world is ready to be switched over, they will be on equal footing with AT&T as long as they are willing to cooperate.

The best video I’ve seen in long time (not just because...

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:48:00 -0400

The best video I’ve seen in long time (not just because it’s the only video I’ve seen in a long time).

Wow, when I first heard a snippet of this song on some BlackBerry commercial, my first thought, was: “This song sucks, —it is simply just not anywhere near as strong as the major single releases we’ve come to hear from U2.”

But after watching this, I like this song very much.
Moral of the story: MTV never should have stopped playing videos.

emptyage : Are You Going to San Francisco

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:03:28 -0400

emptyage : Are You Going to San Francisco:

San Francisco is the kind of place where nobody will tell you when you have a bad idea. That’s just how it is. In an effort to remain tolerant, people go out of their way not to judge. That can be a bad thing…

“Hey, dude, I think I’m going to pierce my eyelids with this sliver of depleted uranium for Burning Man this year.” “Right on, that’s cool.” No. No, it’s not cool. It’s a very bad fucking idea.

I always suspected this, even though I know nothing of life in San Francisco.

Philly Goes Back to Old Logo

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:05:00 -0400

Someone in Philly grew a brain and good taste.

76ers Go Back to the ’60s with Red, White, and Blue Logo

Former Sixer Bobby Jones:

“…It also represents some very good teams that have played under that logo.”

—That reminds me of all the crappy teams (despite having good players) that wore the worst Sixer uniforms.

iPhone 3GS owner uses "Find My iPhone" to successfully find phone and confront very reluctant samaritan.

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:51:13 -0400

iPhone 3GS owner uses "Find My iPhone" to successfully find phone and confront very reluctant samaritan.:

Can anyone chime in on the Medill Neighborhood of Chicago?

Getting choked up from a Pixar movie that I haven't seen yet…

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:18:48 -0400

Getting choked up from a Pixar movie that I haven't seen yet…:

Pixar grants girl’s dying wish with home viewing of ‘Up’

From the minute Colby saw the previews to the Disney-Pixar movie Up, she was desperate to see it. Colby had been diagnosed with vascular cancer about three years ago, said her mother, Lisa Curtin, and at the beginning of this month it became apparent that she would die soon and was too ill to be moved to a theater to see the film. After a family friend made frantic calls to Pixar to help grant Colby her dying wish, Pixar came to the rescue.

from the comments:

A friend told me that the people involved with delivering the movie and gifts weren’t really authorized to do so but did it anyway. That’s why they had to keep it [the employee’s identity] anonymous.

“Our brains are wired for narrative, not statistical uncertainty.”

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:15:38 -0400

“Our brains are wired for narrative, not statistical uncertainty.”

New President Feature Revealed: Reading and Responding to News

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:36:51 -0400

Health Care Spending Disparities Stir a Fight

In response to this: Annals of Medicine: The Cost Conundrum: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

“There’s always this zero-sum way of painting any given industry or trend, while the reality...

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:49:07 -0400

“There’s always this zero-sum way of painting any given industry or trend, while the reality will be more nuanced.”