If you turn off the news and actually socialize with people, you’ll notice how little hate there is out there.
Catalog
Quotes tagged ‘Notes to self’
UPC (Universal Product Code) is the standard for general products and is used by almost all barcode systems. Although, for books ISBN is more often used in addition. Amazon also its own system called ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number), although it’s not prevalent outside of Amazon. SKU (St…
Depth over breadth, man. I believe in diving deeply into a small pool of information.
Greg has an interesting way, unique to New Mexico, of recharging his batteries. He grew up with a strong sense of local history, and one of his favorite hobbies is 'ghost towning,' where you get maps and track down old ghost towns in the New Mexican wilderness. 'It's incredible, these abandoned town…
Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying.
At the beginning of the new moon, for example, one's acetylcholine rises along with the capacity to perform. Acetylcholine is traditionally associated with attention. 'The mood it evokes in us is an Energizer Bunny-like pep. That vibe can be used to initiate social interactions, do chores and routin…
'When we speak of tensegrity,' Filippi explains, 'we mean the capacity a system has to redistribute tension and retain the same physical shape. Our manifested reality, from the infrastructure of our cells to the street grids of the towns and cities we live in, possess a tensegrity.'
By putting email and Twitter in our smart phones and attaching them to our bodies so that something vibrates every time we are mentioned, summoned, or pinged, we turn a potentially empowering asynchronous technology into a falsely synchronous one.
Many of us aspire to this ability to be 'on' at any time and to treat the various portions of the day as mere artifacts of a more primitive culture—the way we look at seemingly archaic blue laws that used to require stores to remain closed at least one day a week. We want all the time, to everything…
Instead of our offloading time-intensive tasks to our machines, our machines keep us humans working at their pace, or the pace of the companies on the other end of our network connections. Thanks to the Internet, we travel more on business, not less, we work at all hours on demand, and we spend our…
The point is that time is not neutral. Hours and minutes are not generic, but specific. We are better at doing some things in the morning and others in the evening. More incredible, those times of day change based on where we are in the twenty-eight-day moon cycle. In one week, we are more productiv…
Although the thing we call time might be a mere concept—variation on energy in Einstein's equations—all this chronobiological evidence suggests there is a kind of synchronization going on between different parts of our world. In other words, even if we are ultimately unhinged from any absolute clock…
...we also have internal clocks, governed by less understood metabolic, hormonal, and glandular processes. We listen to those inner rhythms while simultaneously responding to external cues, from daylight and moon phases to the cycle of the seasons. Still other evidence suggests a complex set of rela…
Leaving people in rooms with no external time cues, researchers found that the average person's biological clock would actually lengthen to a twenty-five-hour cycle. This, they concluded, is why traveling east, which shortens the day, is so much more disorienting than traveling west, which lengthens…
For [Stewart] Brand, the solution is to expand our awareness of the larger, slower cycles. He is working with inventor Danny Hillis to build a 10,000-year clock—a clock of the 'long now' that changes our orientation to time. His hope is that by beholding this tremendous time-keeping structure in the…
...the survival of a species depends on adaptation and learning on six distinct timescales. On the shortest, most immediate scale, species must exist from year to year. The unit of survival for this year-to-year existence is the individual life form. Over decades, the unit of survival is the family,…
Great ideas don't really come out of sudden eureka moments, but after long, steady slogs through problems. They are slow, iterative processes. Great ideas, as Johnson explained it to a TED audience, 'fade into view over long periods of time.'
Every choice potentially brings us out of immersive participation and into another decision matrix.
Social media lets people feed back their responses immediately and to one another instead of just back to the business or politician concerned. Then other people respond as much to those messages as they do to the product or policy. They are feeding back to one another.
New ideas seem to emerge from a dozen places at once, a mysterious zeitgeist synchronicity until we realize that they are all aspects of the same idea, emerging from a single network of minds.