Found on MakeUseOf.

I recently finished reading Blink: The power of thinking without thinking, a wonderfully written book by Malcolm Gladwell which goes into the details of intuition, first impressions, subconscious judgements, involuntary prejudices; the snap-judgements we make within seconds of seeing something.

He illustrates his points with a myriad of fascinating examples and experiments which make this book a captivating read.

More to whet your appetite for this, and his other books, here

I'm sure this must mean something, but I can't work out what:

"There are excepted from the effect of registration all estates, rights, interests, powers and remedies arising upon, or by reason of, any dealing made in breach of the prohibition or restriction against dealings therewith inter vivos contained in the lease."

Could one being whether a member of this planetary system or otherwise though generally referenced with the nomenclature including but not limited to "solicitor" or "lawyer" or "barrister" possibly conceive a selection of words and word order and general phrasing as to cause greater confusion to the lay reader or readers than the selection of words and word order and general phrasing as witnesseth in the paragraph herinabove? (Preferably with the containment and inclusion of words suchas: whereupon, hereinabove, hereinbelow, hereunto, witnesseth, whereof, and omgthereforebbqwtf)

I can understand that a watertight contract may inevitably be confusing, but I don't think that the Shakespearian tint and run-on sentences help the clarity.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

    — Arthur C. Clare (1917–2008)

Since an overwhelming majority of poll respondents indicated that they "get paid to do geeky things" I figure I it is safe to post on some more technical subjects, such as the book which I recently finished reading at work. (I've been struggling to find chunks of time to read this book, having started it over a year ago, so I'm glad to finally have finished it.)

Framework Design Guidelines, by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams, encompasses a lot of the hard lessons that were learnt in bringing the .NET Framework to us. Building an intuitive and powerful programming API is a non-trivial activity, and a lot of people underestimate the importance of framework design and design testing.

This book explains a lot of concepts that are relevant to .NET developers (even if you're not explicitly building a framework) and boils each area down to a set of easy-to-understand "Do" and "Do not" rules (a lot of which are captured by the automatic analysis of FxCop and its successors).

If you want to learn from the mistakes at Microsoft, understand design principles, and build robust, easy-to-use APIs with .NET, then I'd recommend you read this book.

(There's even a Second Edition on the way, "to cover the new features in the .NET Framework 3.0, 3.5, and new advances in languages (e.g. LINQ) that are relevant to Framework design.")

Labels, by Louis De Bernieres, is a short story about a man who gets caught up with an obsession of collecting the labels from tins of cat food. Entirely random though it may be, it gradually ruins his life.

With only one or two dozen (small) pages of writing this was a refreshing break from Branson's 600 page monolith.

Gliding horizontally at 180km/h.
"It was absolutely fantastic; freedom in three dimensions…I felt like a bird."

Read more (+ videos)

Ambitious; Unbelievable; Insane; Illicit; Bad-ass. These are just some of the words I wrote down whilst reading Richard Branson's autobiography, Losing My Virginity.

This book gives a unique insight into the life and times of one Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson. From ambitious schoolboy, to business start-up entrepreneur, criminal, adventurer, and philanthropist. It's interesting to see that there was nothing magical about the growth of Virgin to the monstrous brand it is today — some luck, perhaps, but a lot of insight, hard work, and perseverance through minor and major setbacks alike. (You'll never believe how many times Virgin has come so close to financial ruin!)

I highly recommend this inspirational read.

It's art!