December 2011
2 posts
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Tomorrow's going to be awkward.
So I never got around to figuring out who Whatshisname’s executive assistant is. As a result, not only do I not know where our Seattle office is, but even if I did, I wouldn’t have a desk. This just means I’m working from home. Oh well.
But home is an empty shell of an apartment and my landline and Internet access aren’t being hooked up until Tuesday, and who knows when...
November 2011
1 post
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October 2011
6 posts
“This analysis (…) suggests that a large part of the tooling in its supply chain...”
– Horace Dedieu (Asymco) is really smart. And he makes me smarter because he shares his analysis. (via wnstn)
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6 tags
LEYNER: But I do think about the people who do read my books, yeah, and what their habits are.
WALLACE: Because it's an act of communication. What makes the analogy okay but also makes it break down is the part of the [Bobby] Fischer-like obsession Mark's talking about consists of a kind of mental and emotional dance with a constructed reader that you figure has a life more or less like yours, and whom in a weird way you're talking to. Again, again, I'm like totally with you about fifty percent of it. The thing about it is that the light and fun and all that stuff is definitely, that's, that's part of what makes art magical for me, but there's another part, there's a, there's the, [sigh] and you see I'm afraid I'm going to sound like a Puritan or a prig, but --
LEYNER: That's okay. Go ahead.
FRANZEN: You do that, Dave.
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A colleague and I argue endlessly about what builds a better product: teams of generalists or specialists. My position is that specialists speak different languages and therefore embed mistakes of isolation in their solution, whereas generalists can synthesize multiple disciplines to offer greater overall value. His position is that generalists lack the hours in the day to be as good at their...
September 2011
5 posts
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And what I find jarring about this formulation is the same thing that bothers me about the alarming trend of weddings in which the photographers and videographers have free reign, even during the ceremony, in order to get the best, most cinematic record of the event, at the expense of the event itself and everyone participating. It’s a conflation of the record of the event with the event itself,...
Gunning for Wall Street, with Faulty Aim →
Ms. Tikka had taken off all but her cotton underwear and was dancing on the north side of Zuccotti Park, facing Liberty Street, just west of Broadway. Tourists stopped to take pictures; cops smiled, and the insidiously favorable tax treatment of private equity and hedge-fund managers was looking as though it would endure.
“I’ve been waiting for this my whole life,” Ms. Tikka, 37, told me.
...
Anonymous asked: Why did your twitter picture turn sad. It was so nice when you were giggling in the old pic! Flower in hair in new pic is very cute, tho!
Socrates, kind of a dick.
MENO: Can you tell me, Socrates — is being good something you can be taught? Or does it come with practice rather than being teachable? Or is is something that doesn’t come with practice or learning; does it just come to people naturally? Or some other way?
MENO: No, I suppose not. But come on, Socrates; do you really not even know what being good is? Is that what you want us to say...
Today’s meanderings through human knowledge included:
YouTube: Van Gogh: Painted with Words
“Nothing can be said of Van Gogh that he didn’t say himself. There are 902 letters here.” (with an unsurprisingly excellent performance by Benedict Cumberbatch as Van Gogh)
Wikipedia: Zaraϑuštra
The cardinal concept of aša—which is highly nuanced and only vaguely...
July 2011
2 posts
This appeals to a lot of the people that have popularized Twitter: A-list celebrities, media outlets, politicians and megabrands. Their primary purpose on Twitter is to relate their version of events. It isn’t about conversing with their audience. CNN doesn’t really want to talk to you. They want to talk at you. This isn’t entirely about lack of desire, it’s also a matter of time. - Solving the...
June 2011
1 post
In “The Social Animal,” David Brooks suggests that human happiness is possible when the world (particularly other people) affirm the mental models our brains spend all their time devising. These little bursts of pleasure tell us that all’s well with the world, forming a reliable call-and-response pattern of well-being and satisfaction. This seems very sensible. But then he goes...
May 2011
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“Anytime we think the problem is ‘out there,’ ” Covey writes, “that thought is the problem.” Don’t concern yourself with external conditions… Concern yourself with how you think about external conditions. It is a technique for auto-hypnosis, a guidebook for remaking ourselves in a manner more analogous to the “human consciousness” that Covey has somehow divined. And so from our desire for...
April 2011
5 posts
1 tag
…the scientists found that fetuses [of twins] begin reaching toward their neighbors by the 14th week of gestation. Over the following weeks they reduced the number of movements toward themselves and instead reached more frequently toward their counterparts. By the 18th week they spent more time contacting their partners than themselves or the walls of the uterus. Almost 30 percent of...
Mulpuru Says Facebook Not Driving Online Retail... →
(translated by yours truly)
Some Random Person With Suspicious Name I Can’t Pronounce Says Facebook Not Driving Online Retail Sales (Can You Believe It? Seriously)
Q: How do you actually know that Facebook isn’t awesome?
A: It’s widely believed that purchase decisions are influenced by friends and family endorsing this or that through social media, but the data from online...
So I am spending a lot of time at empire avenue, which gauges my value based on my tumblr activity, but I can’t be active on tumblr because I’m spending all my free time on empire avenue aaaaagh.
Stanford University Video Podcast: Human... →
Wow. Stanford has made the lectures from its 2010 course on Human Behavioral Biology (also known as Behavioral Evolution), available for free via iTunes University. The course is taught by Robert Sapolsky, a MacArthur Fellow, primatologist and neuroscientist whose talk on the uniqueness of humans among primates was featured on TED in 2010.
What an age we live in!
March 2011
7 posts
1 tag
Recently it has been argued that restrained emotion displays are suggestive of mastery of one’s life and of competence in general (Warner & Shields, 2007)—conversely, relaxedness, as far as this is reflected in one’s voice, is associated with high status and dominance (Hall & Friedman, 1999). Similarly, showing any emotional reaction to an event may at times be seen as a sign...
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[Addicts] completing a program for opiate addiction often report experiencing a secondary set of related symptoms including depressive-like symptoms that can include problems with concentrating, low energy levels and problems with sleep quality. This group of vague symptoms is often called “protracted abstinence syndrome” and can last for several weeks or even months after abstaining from an...
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“I’m a strong believer in the free market,” said Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., the bill’s sponsor. “I’d like to see NPR rework its business model and begin to compete for all of its income.”
“U.S. House Votes to Cut NPR Funding” by Terence Burlij, as reported on PBS NewsHour, March 17, 2011
The mission of NPR is to work in partnership with...
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EG: The Greeks would call it the Muse. The Romans called it the ingenium, the genius, which was an interesting idea because it’s not the way we use “genius” today, right? Today, we say a person is a genius but, back then, they would have said a person had one. And, again, it’s this… separation so that… the creative person has this externalized...
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Individuals who [statistically] behaved honestly showed no sign of engaging additional controlled cognitive processes when choosing to behave honestly. These individuals exhibited no additional neural activity of any kind when they chose to forgo opportunities for dishonest gain. Dishonest behavior was associated with neural activity in brain regions associated with cognitive control… this...
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…when rats were shifted from a training program in which they received a reward after every response to one in which they were only rewarded after making several responses, researchers found increased dopamine activity in the prefrontal cortex. This may indicate that the increased opportunities for anticipating the reward, as opposed to actually consuming the treat, represent a healthy...
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Perhaps Generation Facebook have built their virtual mansions in good faith, in order to house the People 2.0 they genuinely are, and if I feel uncomfortable within them it is because I am stuck at Person 1.0. Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their...
December 2010
1 post
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October 2010
2 posts
3 tags
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September 2010
3 posts
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3 tags
