Dan Pallotta writes that worry isn’t work, and that our attitude of self-punishment equalling responsibility is flawed. We have to rethink what it means to work and to be productive. We have to disentangle self-hatred from responsibility, self-criticism from self-care. What does re-thinking mean in this case? Start thinking of being hard on yourself as being irresponsible. Start thinking of wasting half of your brain power on fantasies about your own destruction as self-indulgent. Conflate self-negativity with laziness. Start thinking of time for yourself as being responsible. Start thinking of a healthy mid-day meal as essential to your productivity, time away from your desk as productive. It also doesn’t hurt to find a job doing something that you love. They say you never work a day in your life.

A tad blurry, but still really like this one.

Here’s an interactive overview of the milestones in the data visualizations. It’s a kitchen sink approach, so the interface is a little bit on the awkward side, but there’s a ton of information there. The periodic table of visualization methods might be of interest as well. It’s easier to see examples of the method, but light on background information.

An article from Richard Morgan about his experiences in seven years as a freelance writer. Freelancing requires such strict adherence to toadyism, to sycophancy, to the grubbiest, lowliest submissions. It is an on-spec life and it is full of what can only be described as insane serendipity (or serendipitous insanity). An interesting read if you’ve got any designs on being a freelance writer.

Steve Sasson developed the world’s first digital camera in 1976, while working at Kodak. He discusses the development of the camera in this video. It was a camera that didn’t use any film to capture still images – a camera that would capture images using a CCD imager and digitize the captured scene and store the digital info on a standard cassette. It took 23 seconds to record the digitized image to the cassette. The image was viewed by removing the cassette from the camera and placing it in a custom playback device. Given Moore’s Law, they estimated that it would take 15 to 20 years before such a camera reached the general consumer. The patent file contains a description and drawings of the apparatus.

Amusing Ourselves to Death, a comic from Stuart McMillen, comparing the futures found in Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984. The comic is based on Neil Postman’s book of the same name. It essentially comes down to our society having more in common with Huxley’s vision than Orwell’s.

The story behind Madden NFL and how it became a video game dynasty (via marc). EA saved more than $35 million by reverse engineering the SEGA console, and signing a deal that guaranteed they wouldn’t give the technology to competitors. Hawkins assembled a team to reverse engineer the console — that is, figure out a way to make EA’s games run on Sega’s hardware without its technology or approval as a way to avoid licensing fees altogether. The game has evolved far beyond it’s modest roots, and can be somewhat daunting to play for the first time. I find the same thing when I try to sit down with one of the newer incarnations of the NHL series, compared to the console game. In the versions I played as a kid, you could pretty much just shoot, pass and check. I imagine most of the EA sports games are like that these days, drifting more towards simulation than arcade style play.