Month: July 2008

Insanity Is Repeating the Same Stupid Cliche Over and Over

One of the worst cliches is the claim, frequently though almost certainly incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein, that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This is, of course, false and trivially false at that.

Whenever I hear people say something along those lines, I wonder what they expect to happen if they flip a coin. Say, they flip a coin once and it comes up heads. Do these folks expect all future coin flips to come up heads until the end of time?

In fact there are so many counterexamples to this particular claim, that its hard to understand how it ever became popular cliche (unless the attribution to Einstein was sufficient).

Update – May 2009: This phrase seems to originate in a 1983 novel by Rita Mae Brown. If anyone knows of an instance of the phrase appearing in print prior to 1983, I’d to know about it.

Timestamp Plugin for WordPress

WordPress has a nice ability to set the post date on a blog entry to whatever the hell you want it to be. The only problem is, the default is that the timestamp field is hidden and the user has to click on a link to expand it. Which is a real pain in the ass if you use that feature a lot to schedule posts.

Mark Jaquith solves that problem with a one-line plugin that keeps the timestamp field open automatically.

Cuil – Three Columns of Ugliness

TechCrunch writes about the increasingly small window companies have to make an impression with new product launches, citing the lousy launch of Google-wannabe Cuil.

The thing that boggles my mind about Cuil is still the three-column search results page. WTF? That just makes my eyes bleed and has me running back to Google to lay down my privacy in exchange for relevant results normal people can actually read.