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Optimal Flow
I have been hearing alot about the concept of Flow popularized mostly by the pyschologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I decided to read the book to see what more there was to it all. While I liked most of it and I think the concept is a useful one, the book suffers from the same problem most…
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Don’t need that extra D
I don’t have much good to say about 3D virtual worlds like Second Hype or Croquet. But what about just using 3D in the user interface for other applications? Are we going to start seeing more and more applications with 3d user interfaces? Probably some, but not very many in my view because in most…
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Second Hype
Every time I think the PR hype machine that is Second Life will come to an end, reality steps in and proves me wrong. I guess there is no end of Celebrity X Appears in SL stories to write and the press seems total happy to print them no matter how inane they are. Here’s…
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The Secret Life of Machines
I don’t watch much TV anymore. I watched enough when I was younger to last for a couple of lives. We only get basic cable which luckily includes the Discovery channel so I get a Myth busters fix every now and then. We get the coveting channel too which has Living with Ed which is…
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Doubling Down
A long time ago I was in Vegas watching a man gamble his money away at roulette. He was betting red or black and mostly losing. But he was determined and each time he lost he would double his bet thinking he would make up the next time and be back to where he was,…
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Yoda Sez.
Like alot of people I have been on a kind of spirtual quest for answers. It probably started 20+ years ago when I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and for the first time started to think there might actually be a need to find answers that weren’t going to be in any…
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Economic Efficiency
I do believe in the power of the markets to maximize efficiency. From an engineering perspective I respect all processes which seek to create a more optimal solution via continual refinement. There are two common pitfalls which keep us from getting to this optimal state. One is when the process gets stuck in local maxima…
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Sunday Morning NPR Perfection
This sunday morning NPR was close to perfect. No Iraq war just Jonathan Coulton and Alton Brown back to back. It possible that Code Monkey is no longer my fav JC song. I think its been replaced by Shop Vac. Maybe you don’t like Alton. But really how can you not like someone that makes…
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Barlow on Happiness
I have nothing much to add to this. So I’ll just quote it alot. Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness. – Chuang-Tzu (350 B.C.) Openly agitating against the very pursuit of happiness was considered a sedition of the most insidious hazard. Because nearly everyone feels its weird invisible pressure – driving them…
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Eating on 1$ a day
Pretty neat little blog experiment. For the month of November, I’m only spending $30 on food. The only exception will be things that are freely available to the average person (salt taken from restaurants, sauce packets from Taco Bell, free coffee from an office). Buying in advance is fine, but at the end of the…
“You know what truth is? It’s some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, “Yeah, yeah – ain’t it the truth?”