Good advice

I’ve taken the evening off (well, the whole weekend really!) and been fortunate enough to stumble across a couple of really good pieces of advice.

1) According to Kyle Gabler, of 2D Boy and World Of Goo (now available natively on Linux) fame, if you care a lot about a project it usually ends up sucking, whereas if you don’t care if you totally fail it’s much easier to make awesome stuff.

2) According to Sergey Brinn, no introductions needed, one thing that Google did in the early days was to focus not on how their product would change the world, how many people would use it, or how much money they would make, but on making the best search engine they could. OK, not really advice, but I took it as such and think just focusing on the task at hand, not getting ahead of yourself etc etc etc is.

Evolution

When you here evolution described as a theory it seems fairly straight forward to grasp, but when you hear the evolution of the species described, stretching from single celled organisms, through to fish developing load baring limbs, onwards to mammals and reptiles, birds and insects, it seems mind boggling. Even today with so much evidence documented, visible throughout the fossil record and around us in creatures that are still living, it seems hard to grasp. Great credit is rightly bestowed upon Darwin and some of his contemporaries for their foresight, but the processes that allowed an idea, that at first glance seems unthinkable, to flourish deserve great credit also.

If I have a single hope for my life, it is that I might contribute something to the further development and strengthening of these processes, working to make information available to all and to ensure that free thought is encouraged and not met with unfounded or malicious criticism.