Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Posts for 2011

24 Jan 2011, 10:18 a.m.

Atul Gawande, "Better"

I keep recommending in-person that people read Atul Gawande's Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, so I ought to write about it too. I describe it, tongue-in-cheek, as a secular self-help book. Gawande, Michael Lewis, …

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22 Jan 2011, 8:18 a.m.

May Already Exist

Variation: Google Platitude. It analyzes your recent SMSes, your emails, and the galvanic response of your skin to choose a cliché relevant to your mental state, and displays that to you and your circle of …

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20 Jan 2011, 19:06 p.m.

Listen All Of Y'all It's a Self-Sabotage

We learn from surprises, failures, jokes, and disorientations. I recently had a surprise that taught me about my own competence. In response, I wrote a new Geek Feminism post: "On competence, confidence, pernicious socialization, recursion, …

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20 Jan 2011, 11:49 a.m.

Clothed For Submissions

At my first WisCon, Ellen Kushner's aid led to a new shirt in my wardrobe. It's dark and velour and has a mild V-neck. Leonard calls it my T'Pol shirt, after the Vulcan from Star …

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19 Jan 2011, 20:10 p.m.

Least Useful Con Report Ever

Am barely back from Boston. In old newspaper speak, "slugs" were phrases referring to stories, unique identifiers a few words long, just for that day. I have slugs rattling around, stories to be told or …

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13 Jan 2011, 8:55 a.m.

Do Your Choice! I Have No Job!

Leonard & I are watching Battlestar Galactica from the beginning -- we'd started watching at season 3 while it was airing. Leonard says that the worst sin on BSG is not doing your job. Maybe …

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10 Jan 2011, 10:17 a.m.

What's Obsolete & What's Still True?

In India the number of institutions and organizations installing computers is growing at a rapid rate. This is a welcome sign. More and more of our workers in factories and offices will now turn the …

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06 Jan 2011, 13:51 p.m.

After-Action Report

Asheville, North Carolina, is a radiant place to visit. The gorgeous downtown is the most walkable I've ever seen, even a vegetarian can't help but eat very well, and the beer is tremendous. (My tasting …

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02 Jan 2011, 12:16 p.m.

Bountiful Abundance

I started off 2011 by making friends laugh, learning more Unix and git and Python, reading that great David Foster Wallace essay for the first time, taking a nice long train trip next to a …

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