Love this stuff.
Love this stuff.
I did some thinking a while back on the ephemeral vs enduring in the process of life across all sorts of stuff. Coming to an understanding that its another point which makes this specie so great; the choice in determining which to make a certain action, ephemeral or enduring. The ephemeral usually being something of concise explicit actions but with few long lasting consequences. While the enduring is generally important to many more but often broad and not poignant to the many it does affect.
This video really brought it to my forefront again. The understanding of where the activation energy required from a jump comes from and the displacement of body force, the application of various muscles, and mechanical like process which result in such fluidity. The utmost in ephemeral. While that might be seen as a slight to the people to carry out the ephemeral, they’re obviously both necessary and a certain balance differs in all our lives. For me, the ephemeral actions of others gives reason, understanding, and context to the enduring operations I seek in my own life. I want to take those ephemeral episodes to establish an arc of well purposed actions and meaning for myself even at the cost of a non-existant personal destination.
Such a shallow understanding of what makes a company and its products great. The executives that green-lit this idea obviously have such big egos that they refuse to admit that what Apple has might be special. That the vibe and long term success that Apple has had in the past 10 years isn’t a fluke or one off brilliant marketing, it’s a fundamental core understanding about making something useful and worth buying. Thinking like this is from the bottom up, the foundations of all Apple’s great products have been incredibly strong and always pointed in a clear direction from the start with top notch execution to follow. Looking at something like Windows Mobile 6.5 and the hack job they’re attempting to pass off as an upgrade is a disgrace to software development and the entire mobile computing industry. Apple’s products do have problems, but they look them square in the eye and tackle them in a way that is usually upfront and diligent. Microsoft refuses to admit it has issues and when it’s forced to, throws a giant rug over them and ships it in a new color as soon as possible.
There’s a disincentive for any of these self-help sites, and any sites that rely on you visiting over and over and over. There’s a built in disincentive to telling you when you should leave. You’ve got to turn that shit off and sit down and work.
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Merlin Mann on being circumspect with your attention.
I get so much out of his occasional videos and insights to a specific problem or something he’s obviously dealt with at a certain moment. Hero worship aside, I’ve found this to be too true myself. I have to set hard limits, etc/hosts or structured time in the library, to just get some shit done. I have to physically put myself in a place that I’m uncomfortable with and don’t like being around but facilitates a certain healthy base line just to stay productive in anyway.
One of the most basic delusions of our time is that home life takes care of itself naturally, and that the best strategy for dealing with it is to relax and let it take its course. Men especially like to comfort themselves with this notion. They know how hard it is to succeed on the job, how much effort they have to put into their careers. So at home they just want to unwind, and feel that any serious demand from the family is unwarranted. They often have an almost superstitious faith in the integrity of the home. Only when it is too late — when the wife has become dependent on alcohol, when the children have turned into cold strangers — do many men wake up to the fact that the family, like any other joint enterprise, needs constant investments of psychic energy to assure its existence.
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Maybe if I keep quoting this book, I will learn how to spell the author’s name) (via mickipedia)
… between 33 percent and 43 percent of Americans claim to attend church weekly. Using the low end of that range, we get a figure of around a hundred million people. So, what is the maximum number of seats available at any given time in all of America’s churches? … just little over a half of what would be necessary to accommodate all the people who claim to go to church weekly.The stats are quite funny.
useful bookmarklet for making more printer friendly pages. I wrote a really janky script that did something similar a few years ago but this is much better than I could ever hope for.
can’t get enough of Mr Brooker. Although his most recent game show gig isn’t good, at all.
