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Simplicity is not about making something without ornament, but rather about making something very complex, then slicing elements away, until you reveal the very essence.

After all the slicing away, you may realize, now that you can clearly see the idea, that it’s actually not very good.

That’s the hardest part: letting go of an idea that, having spent a number of passionate nights with, you have fallen in love with. Even with a certain amount of routine, this letting go sadly doesn’t become easier. The natural instinct then is to rely on what you know is working. It’s unfair, but this is the surest path to boring and predictable results.

The painful and inevitable struggle remains to create in a childlike and openhearted manner, but to be un-wistful and cruel when judging one’s creation.

A nice little utility that lets you work with hex color codes in the default Mac color panel. Thanks to my friend Zef for letting me know about it.

Really impressive.

John Cassidy has an interesting perspective on what’s motivating David Einhorn’s battle with Apple’s management:

According to a piece on Forbes.com, Einhorn and Tepper paid an average of about five hundred and seventy-seven dollars for their shares, which suggests that they are each sitting on a paper loss of close to a hundred and thirty million dollars. Naturally, they aren’t pleased, but their predicament isn’t Cook’s responsibility.

In buying Apple shares last year, when the stock was heading for seven hundred dollars, investors were willfully ignoring the law of large numbers and the laws of supply and demand. With Apple’s annual revenues reaching a hundred and fifty billion dollars and rivals, like Samsung, launching top-notch products at lower prices, its rapid growth rate and expansive profit margins were virtually certain to come down. Now that’s happened, a bit sooner than expected, and the stock has cratered even as Apple has continued to post record-breaking numbers: in its most recent quarter, which ended on December 29th, Apple reported $13.1 billion in profits on revenues of $54.5 billion, an all-time record for the company. (By comparison, Exxon Mobil, the oil juggernaut, generated $9.95 billion in profits during its most recent quarter.)

If Einhorn and Tepper were really as smart as their media cuttings suggest they are, they would have been shorting Apple’s stock, not piling in with everybody else. But they decided to play the momentum game, which backfired on them. Now Einhorn is trying to bully Cook into distributing some of the hundred and forty billion dollars in cash that is sitting on Apple’s balance sheet, which translates to about sixty-five dollars per share. As a stockholder, that is his right: Apple is a public company, after all.

From age 30 to 36, [Ang Lee is] living in an apartment in White Plains, NY trying to get something — anything — going, while his wife Jane supports the family of four (they also had two young children) on her modest salary as a microbiologist. He spends every day at home, working on scripts, raising the kids, doing the cooking. That’s a six-year span — six years! — filled with dashed hopes and disappointments. “There was nothing,” he told The New York Times. “I sent in script after script. Most were turned down. Then there would be interest, I’d rewrite, hurry up, turn it in and wait weeks and weeks, just waiting. That was the toughest time for Jane and me. She didn’t know what a film career was like and neither did I.” It got so discouraging that Lee reportedly contemplated learning computer science so he could find a job during this time, but was scolded by his wife when she found out, telling him to keep his focus.

Put yourself in his shoes. Imagine starting something now, this year, that you felt you were pretty good at, having won some student awards, devoting yourself to it full time…and then getting rejected over and over until 2019. That’s the middle of the term of the next President of the United States. Can you imagine working that long, not knowing if anything would come of it? Facing the inevitable “So how’s that film thing going?” question for the fifth consecutive Thanksgiving dinner; explaining for the umpteeth time this time it’s different to parents that had hoped that film study meant you wanted to be a professor of film at a university.

Exactly what it says on the tin.