otrops: jeff van campen's personal blog

In which we explore the wonderful flaws of technologies old and new.

In which I realize how much I miss working with a team.

In which Claude Lévi-Strauss & Apollo 13 teach us about mashups.

Oftentimes, the thing that turns a hunch into a real breakthrough is another hunch that’s lurking in somebody else’s mind. And you have to figure out a way to create systems that allow those hunches to come together and turn into something bigger than the sum of their parts. That’s why, for instance, the coffee [...]

One of the major ways we get around the smart biped paradox is by growing infant’s head after birth… And that means that you are coping with an ever more helpless child. So the argument is that the baby sling is invented by bipedal Australopithecine females because they need that for their energy equations… [...]