[In a discussion of whether Twitter is a pointless waste of time or not, on That Mailing List...]
"A little while ago, Tim O'Reilly had this talk he gave at a bunch of conferences (I saw it at a Boston 'Ignite!') where he was complaining about hackers wasting their time on trivial techno-tchotchkes. (His pet example was an 'iBeer' app for the iPhone that displayed a picture of beer in a glass, and used the motion sensors so that the person holding the phone could pretend to take a sip.)
"What struck me was this: as technical pursuits go, it doesn't get a whole lot more trivial than baseball statistics. But some of the best political coverage available anywhere during the last election was from a top-flight amateur baseball stats-freak who took the same tools he was used to using on baseball stats, and starting applying them to polling data (Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com).
"Playing around is how people learn to do the serious stuff..."
-- Robert Thau, 2009-06-15