Colbert & The Prez via the Himmelsblog - It's Stephen Colbert's world, we just live in it.
A Rake Too Far - Bill Gurley is a super successful VC and a great writer. His advice here is simple, keep your greed in check and you can build a big, lasting business.
Alexander Graham Bell's Voice Recording Recovered - simply amazing.
Courtvision: The Year in Charts - Nowadays most people know about Moneyball and how statistics reshaped baseball. But baseball is relatively straightforward to analyze because it's just a hitter vs. a pitcher and you can draw clear conclusions from this one on one contest because there aren't that many variables. In Information Technology terms, Baseball is Structured Data. But basketball is a whole different animal. There are five different players on each team all interacting and the players are constantly being subbed in and out. Basketball is Unstructured Data and this type of information is much harder to handle. That's what makes Kirk Goldsberry work charting NBA shot patterns and player efficiency so ground breaking. He's teaching us all that if we are clever enough, we can use quant approaches to make sense out of almost anything. Goldsberry's analysis on the evolution of Lebron James is one of the best things I've read all year. Quant is cool.
Five Worries About Mad Men - it used to be my favorite show, but I can barely stand Don Draper now. Tim Goodman's analysis of the show's slow decline is right on. Btw - Goodman is televisions best critic and always a great read.
Don't Launch Your Product - big product launches in the Internet space are a fool's game. The best services start small, stay small for a while as they find their footing, and then they explode. Better to give yourself some time to figure things out and build a loyal user base than to crash and burn out of the gate.
