July 2009
4 posts
The Art of Selling a Lemon Orchard
During the Zappos acquisition last week, I saw someone tweet something to the effect of “Congrats on your acquisition!” to the CEO. It struck me as a bit odd, and I didn’t know why at the moment. So I’ve been thinking about it. Why do we congratulate people on an acquisition? Consider, for instance, growing a lemon orchard from seedlings. The value of that orchard is the...
Discovering Important Features Using TF-IDF
Ever since I discovered the nltk (natural language toolkit) for Python, I’ve become somewhat of a closet natural language junkie. Why? Because language is one of those areas of science for which you can’t write simple rules. After browsing the nltk documentation and online book, it’s pretty amazing how far you can get, though.
One feature I’ve come across in document...
Fewer, Better Ingredients on the Web
I remember it quite clearly. It was two years ago: the day I started loving to cook. I was wandering around the bottom floor of San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore and happened upon a copy of Alice Waters’s “Simple Food”. Since the opening of Waters’s Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley in 1970, Californian Cuisine has become somewhat of a cult following in...
A thought to start things off
Everything starts as an idea or at least an intention. Most of the time ideas and intentions never manifest themselves in anything but talk. The single common element in everyone who ends up doing is that they tried - sometimes many times - but surely at least once. Knowing this, what would you try today? What would you attempt tomorrow? Surely you have a list, no?
Well here’s what...