In recent months (make that years?!) far too many tidbits have accumulated on index cards I carry around with me, on bookmarks tucked into half-read tomes, in scrapbook pages here on ZhurnalyWiki, in Twitter and Facebook link-posts, etc. Time to try to take that those small quanta of thought and toss a few handfuls at the wall, to see what sticks ... or at least, make them findable again, even if they don't rise to the level of musing-essay-worthy. An initial core sample:

• "A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It" — an essay by David Parnas and Paul Clements, something to read some day — a great title that shows healthy cynicism (and the tug-of-war between the words "rational" and "fake") — see Wikipedia:Waterfall_model. WickedWork, etc.
• "Sudelbücher" — a cute German word for "scrapbooks" or more literally "waste books" — see Wikipedia:Georg_Christoph_Lichtenberg for information about Lichtenberg's notebooks which he called that
• Gerd Gigenrenzer — a German psychologist who has written about "calculated risks" and other topics that might be good to study more of — see Wikipedia:Gerd_Gigerenzer
• "gamification" — and the myth (or common perception) that if one can just turn a dull or difficult task into a game, then one can for free get unlimited resources to solve it — ignoring the finiteness of resources in the world, and the fact that luring people into spending more time on one thing generally steals time for it from other pursuits — like the "piece of the stomach" wars between various snack food manufacturers, and charity fund-raising events — note however that some "crowdsourcing" could be a different beast, especially if it involves tapping into and bringing together scattered knowledge

Perhaps some day some of these can be promoted into ZhurnalyWiki pages of their own?

^z - 2013-07-01