Linked List: August 29, 2011

Monday, 29 August 2011

Republicans Against Science 

Paul Krugman:

Of course, we know what’s motivating Mr. Romney’s sudden lack of conviction. According to Public Policy Polling, only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35 percent believe in evolution). Within the G.O.P., willful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr. Romney is determined to pass at all costs.

‘Until the Last Sinew, the Last Synapse Gives Up’ 

Jean-Louis Gassée on Steve Jobs:

For a long time, I’ve seen him as having an animal inside him, the one with the desires, the instinct, the drive. In 1985, that animal threw Steve to the ground. He picked himself up at Pixar — you’d be a captain of industry for doing no more — and NeXT. Then, in 1997, armed with Pixar’s success and Next’s technical prowess, he came back to run Apple and make it really his.

He had learned to ride the animal.

Ideas, Not Hierarchy 

Tom Reestman on the notion that Steve Jobs makes — or made — all decisions at Apple:

No one denies that the Apple executive team is brilliant, yet it seems many are willing to believe they’re just puppets. I’d argue the two are mutually exclusive.

Great piece, including a perfect excerpt from Jobs’s interview with Walt Mossberg at D8.

HP’s One-Year Plan 

Al Lewis:

Let’s say you were given a year to kill Hewlett-Packard. Here’s how you do it.

Brutal.

The Macalope vs. Jackasses 

An awful lot of stupid punditry in the wake of Jobs’s resignation.

Letters of Note: ‘I Have No Personal Knowledge of Computers’ 

Letters of Note:

June, 1956: Co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, Bill Hewlett, writes to then-Provost at Stanford and the man widely considered to be one of the “Fathers of Silicon Valley,” Fred Terman, “I have no personal knowledge of computers nor does anyone in our organization have any appreciable knowledge.”

If Léo Apotheker has his way, then, he’ll take HP right back to where it started.