book: "Effective JavaScript" (*)

podcast:
Forrest Norvell on ES6 and our community's role at JSConf 2014 | CodeWinds
"Forrest no longer recommends Crockford’s Good Parts to new developers because half is scar tissue and dogma, instead Dave Herman’s Effective JavaScript which gives them a mental toolkit to determine their own style"

Effective JavaScript by by David Herman


Effective JavaScript: 68 Specific Ways to Harness the Power of JavaScript (Effective Software Development Series): David Herman: 9780321812186: Amazon.com: Books

ideas: Changes: cyclic, one-direction, and systemic

Flash Foresight Book
Excellent book about predicting technological future
"Flash Foresight" by Daniel Burrus
introduces concepts of two types of change:
  • "cyclical", like seasons of the year, stock market up and down etc.
  • "linear", one-way, one-direction, based on "hard trends", i.e. faster computers and network connections etc.
There are also changes that appear to be "linear", but are based on unsustainable "soft trends", such as rising prices of real estate, or increasing consumption of natural resources by human race.

Interesting observation, presented in books about interaction of humans with nature, is that some of those unsustainable "one-direction" trends of human race expansion are periodically being "adjusted" by human ingenuity to find better ways of solving hard problems in a new way... sudden systemic changes ("transformation")

How Humans Deal With A Changing Natural Environment | On Point with Tom Ashbrook:
"... 50th anniversary of the signing of the Wilderness Act of 1964.  
The act drew protective lines around millions of acres and their wildlife.  To mark the anniversary, humans and nature from two angles today.  

... Ruth DeFries calls the Big Rachet – the human pattern of pushing nature to its limits, paying a price, then recovering – even more dominant – with human ingenu
ity."


The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis: Ruth DeFries: 9780465044979: Amazon.com: Books


Ruth Defries


Ratchet (device) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ratchet is a mechanical device that allows continuous linear or rotary motion in only one direction while preventing motion in the opposite direction.

This is a very powerful concept, since instead of fatalistic
view it encourages attempting improvements...

Firefox OS $33 Smartphone

India’s $33 Smartphone Sales Surge, Setting the Stage for a Shake-Up - India Real Time - WSJ:
"The maker of India’s $33 Mozilla Firefox smartphone says sales of the world’s cheapest smartphone have been strong since it launched last week
...
than is 30% cheaper than the least-expensive smartphones which use Google Inc.’s Android operating system."



IoT: Commuter Forecast - weather.com

Commuter Forecast - weather.com:
A blurred line between (Google or Bing?) traffic maps and weather maps...
Could traffic info also be a public data service, similar to weather data?
Mobile phones feed (GPS) location info to "cloud" operators, either from apps of devices directly.
It is all one big, useful, mash-up...