I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I started “Creativity, inc.” In the end, it’s a bunch of anecdotes strung together to explain certain business practices that Ed Catmull believes has made Pixar successful. Half biography, half management guide if you like.

While the stories are engaging, and he has a surprising degree of humility, it’s difficult to see how many of the ideas can be successfully translated to other industries. Which is not to say that he’s wrong just that I wouldn’t expect to take his advice and immediately apply it to your workplace.

• An Attribution Failure Theory – “Credit is easy. Well, mostly easy. It might have been hard to get the format of citations right at first in school when we were writing papers, but the act of citing is easy. You just do it. Yet, people all over the Internet don’t.”
• You Are Not Ruthless Enough – “Here’s the thing: you are not ruthless enough. You are certainly not ruthless enough to your objects, and you probably need to be more ruthless to yourself.” Programming Is Hard, Part 381.
• You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You – “The seven step, ten minute download process (which will be about ten seconds when US internet speeds catch up with the rest of the world) is the real enemy the studios should be trying to tackle.”

• The BBC Micro turns 30 – Pretty much every Brit around my age will remember the Model B. It felt so… professional after using the Sinclair Spectrum!
• Thanksgiving Is Un-American – Socialism and illegal immigration… Why thanksgiving is un-American.
• Coders are creatives too: Where’s our love? – “How did a person whose greatest educational achievement is crayoning without going over the lines get termed ‘a creative’, when the people who built our world are dismissed as geeks and bottom feeders?”

• Coders are creatives too: Where’s our love? – “How did a person whose greatest educational achievement is crayoning without going over the lines get termed ‘a creative’, when the people who built our world are dismissed as geeks and bottom feeders?”
• Happy 40th birthday, Intel 4004! – In a way this stated the whole microcomputer… I hate to say “revolution” but I can’t think of a better word.
• Steve Jobs: The parable of the stones – “It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. And if you just tell all these other people ‘here’s this great idea,’ then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product.”

• Pope merchandise – “The pope is visiting the UK soon, and the merchandise is already on sale, but it’s rubbish. This week’s challenge is to show the Vatican what they should be selling to mark the occasion. God will be delighted.” (via @bengoldacre)
• The Creativity Crisis – “The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded.” It’s always bugged me when people refer to ’the creatives’ when talking about designers or artists. This is why! But back to the article… it’s interesting that you can “teach” or at least encourage creativity.

• Why Creativity Needs Shorter Copyright Terms – The subject line says it all. The “creative” industries have done a good job of convincing politicians that longer copyrights are better, but they’re only better for those middle-men…
• Giant ring detected around Saturn – “The scale of the new ring feature is astonishing. Nothing like it has been seen elsewhere in the Solar System.”
• I don’t go to restaurants to tell the truth – “Tips are embarrassing and stupid – they’re vestigial haggling in a society that has otherwise moved on. If you’re going to a restaurant to be served and eat a meal, why is the price of the delivery open to negotiation but not that of the food itself, the ambience, music, heating or use of the furniture? All of these things can disappoint or delight. It’s illogical to fix the price of one element but not the others.”

• Senior City-zens: The World’s 10 Oldest Still-Inhabited Cities – “I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from.” Maybe Eddie Izzard should have gone with “I was born in the middle east, where the really old history comes from.”
• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule – If you can’t actually avoid meetings, then at least try to schedule them so you can maximise your productivity. Rings true…
• There’s a pretty significant problem in the new… – I’m starting to expect Graham Chapman to burst in at any second and announce that this is getting far too silly. Apparently any iPhone app that allows “unfiltered internet access,” everything from web browsers to Twitter clients to, presumably, delicious.com clients, now requires a 17+ rating.

• The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty) – “I hope that this article might serve as a counter-point to the articles that seem to go around the web about devs making hundreds of thousands of dollars off an iPhone app. Everyone within the dev community understands that the odds of that happening are very slim, yet those are the stories that people like to hear.”
• Why we’ve reached the end of the camera megapixel race – I had many reasons for upgrading from my 300D, but the 6MP sensor wasn’t one of them.
• Bring bad design to justice – Do your part…

• The League of Moveable Type – Most free or open source fonts I’ve seen have been pretty poor but these guys seem to have the right idea.
• Government plans travel database – “When your travel plans, who you are travelling with, where you are going to and when are being recorded you have to ask yourself just how free is this country?”
• Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age: A New Model for the Workplace – Fascinating ten minute video on what Pixar look for in candidates, summarised as Depth, Breadth, Communication and Collaboration. Given those criteria I’m guessing they’re very selective!

• China ‘Strikes Hard’ in Tibet – Not good.
• Creativity and stretching the sweatshirt – “For me, creativity is the stuff you do at the edges. But the edges are different for everyone, and the edges change over time.”
• Red Dwarf voyages back to Earth – I’ve been watching the reruns and, well, the episodes I’ve seen so far just haven’t been as good as I remembered them to be. I’ll probably still watch the new ones of course…
• Banks now refusing to lend pens – Only funny because it’s true. Ish.