Dear Code Fairy:

Dear Code Fairy:

I understand that your sudden fascination with Latent Dirichlet Allocation corresponds orthagonally to your idea of normalized HTML document databases with XPATH, but no, you may not resurrect Project ToXIC (Terabytes of XML, Indexed, Compressed). We don't have time.

But damn, LDA is cool. So much cooler than the TF/IDF (Term Frequency Over Inverse Documents Frequency) stuff we were doing back in '91-'92. And I still have a copy of the MG software package somewhere. For a document store, LDA would be golden. For a text-backed forum like Usenet, it would be platinum.

Whoa, there's a paper on LDA for Tag Normalization. OMG!

Dammit, I have work to do. Must. Not. Geek. Out!

A keeper!

Conor Friedersdorf gets mail:

Business is much more about being organized and managing people than it is about ideas. Past a certain scale, ideas don't seem to matter much . You and your competitors all have a basic concept of what to do. The areas that seem to offer the most scope for creativity are actually the areas where not enough data exists to formulate good ideas, and random guesses are worth as much as multi-million-dollar consultant reports.

Y'know what upsets me about GTD gurus?

I read all of these how-tos about become more efficient, being more effective. Most of the stuff is straightforward and simple. But then I read about how these guys put their own stuff into practice, the polyphasic sleepers, the "I get to bed at 8:30pm every night without fail" dudes, the "I simplify so that nothing gets between me and accomplishment" people, and I realized today: none of them have children. Or wives. Or girlfriends. Or lives.