Correlation does not imply causation, as the saying goes.

Although it’s often pretty much all we have. This image is from this infographic at Bloomberg Businessweek.

If you want to link to one of the Oxbows, you can do it by hovering over the hashtag next to the sub-title and seeing what the local link is and forming the link thus:

The above is more for me than you because I always forget how to do it. (Alternatively, if you hover over the link text above and click the second icon, it will copy it to your clipboard.)

I often find myself trying to write a quick blog post and then getting sidetracked. “Oh hai, where was that cool ‘correlation does not imply causation’ image that will illustrate my point perfectly?” For example, I just spent an hour testing different plug-ins to display snippets of code better for that bit above. Stupid. Fun. But stupid.

So, these little linky posts aren’t me giving up on writing stuff. More an attempt to pre-build the sidetracky stuff.

Steven Berlin Johnson describes how he’s coming up with ideas for his latest book and says some interesting things. Hence me posting it here. Hmmm, I need to work on these introductions.

Anyway, you should read it.

Here’s the bit I found most interesting as he suggests the moral of his story:

I find it interesting that there are certain kinds of questions that I now send out by default to Twitter, not Google. The more subtle and complex the question, the more likely it’ll go to Twitter. But if it’s simply trying to find a citation or source, I’ll use Google. So trying to figure out who wrote Seeing Like A State was a Google query, but wondering about the origins of the Internet made more sense on Twitter. (I should add that the responses I’m looking for on Twitter are links to longer discussions, not 140 character micro-essays.)

Priming is everything. All these new tools are incredible for making rapid-fire discoveries and associations, but you need a broad background of knowledge to prime you for those discoveries.

What he doesn’t say, but perhaps should, is that, as well as needing a broad background of knowledge, having a million and a half followers on the Twitter helps.

The Command Line Crash Course – Controlling your Computer from the Terminal is a free ebook.

This is the ticket to verbier interfaces! I’m starting today as part of the whole Code Year and 12412.org thing.

This is from the introduction. What’s not to like?

The only piece of advice I am going to give you is this:

Shut up and type all of this in.

Sorry to be mean, but that’s what you have to do. You have an irrational fear of the command line and the only way to conquer an irrational fear is to just shut up and fight through it.

I like stern, Dickensian teachers.

Some Suggestions for Better Tagging is full of useful ideas.

I really don’t see any alternative to NOT learning about tagging. Sad but true.

Here’s some of the suggestions:

1. Don’t tag with data already available

2. Use lowercase tags. Always

3. Don’t use “flagged” or other time sensitive tags

I’m terrible for using time-sensitive tags. (Which I’m guessing is linked to the ‘terrible at getting out blog posts’ business, although correlation does not imply causation, natch.) Or, rather, I was — this post has changed all that.

2012 etc.