My rebooted blog on tech, creative ideas, digital citizenship, and life as an experiment.
Friday, April 10, 2009 at 10:39AM Monday, April 6, 2009 at 1:53PM Lest you think having a large candidates library is bad, consider this passage from Taleb's The Black Swan: "Read books are far less valuable than unread ones." (He attributes the "anti-library" to Umberto Eco.)
What exactly is the point of the anti-library? The things we don't know is more important than the things we do?
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and non dull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with 'Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?' and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight read-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Perhaps it is in that our antilibraries represent the person we would like to be (the one that has read those books) and the one we would be if only we weren't so busy being this person. When we finally do read one of those books, it is a little graduation.(I detect a ritual there.)
Friday, April 3, 2009 at 3:40PM "Instant reward is the default setting of the brain, but we like ourselves better when we tackle unpleasant tasks ... Write out your goals daily. We're more likely to stick to our plans if we monitor our progress toward a goal."
"Using digital communications tools allows you to try everything out and see what sticks. It allows you to embrace failure at minimal or zero cost. Technology enables you to open source parts of your business."Naturally I love this. It connects directly with my How Do You Treat Life As An Experiment? philosophy.
"Many scientists argue that daydreaming is a crucial tool for creativity, a thought process that allows the brain to make new associations and connections. Instead of focusing on our immediate surroundings - such as the message of a church sermon - the daydreaming mind is free to engage in abstract thought and imaginative ramblings. As a result, we're able to imagine things that don't actually exist, like sticky yellow bookmarks."
The essence of improvisation is to churn out ideas and see what sticks.What's your wall look like? Sticky Spaghetti makes marks!
Another ingenious bit of research, conducted in Germany, demonstrated that within a brief time frame the brain can shift events forward or backward. Subjects were asked to play a video game that involved steering airplanes, but the joystick was programmed to react only after a brief delay. After playing a while, the players stopped being aware of the time lag. But when the scientists eliminated the delay, the subjects suddenly felt as though they were staring into the future. It was as though the airplanes were moving on their own before the subjects had directed them to do so.
30. And seven that can reduce productivity ... 35. (5) Yellow stickies. Everywhere.
...email is both slippery and sticky. It slithers and squirms into the oddest places and it sticks around forever. When it's unprofessional, it points a giant flashing spotlight back on you.
Principle 12.5: Resign your position as General Manager of the Universe. Don't stick your nose in someone else's business.
Remember that email messages are sticky. Think flypaper - you touch it, you handle it - it doesn't go back. Also, it's a little poisonous, so be quick! (2 minute rule).
Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 3:06PM Friday, March 20, 2009 at 10:37PM 
For each book in progress I tear off a long strip of narrow adding machine paper, which works as a combined bookmark and note index. The index is a variation of the method I described in How To Read A Lot Of Books In A Short Time: Put a pencil dot in the margin next to each sentence that strikes you, and keep an index of page numbers with dots on the paper strip. You can jot a short note next to the indexed page number, if necessary. For example, if a passage generates a blog idea I'll write just enough to remind me when I process the final notes.
