346 entries under "article"

Lessons from a Feline Gaze

My former professor started writing in public recently and managed to describe transcendence in what we, here on the Internet, refer to as a “cat picture”. I’m fond of lenses that help us see the sublime in ordinary experiences. There is so much we can learn from animals and nature, such as paying attention to our natural reactions and inhibitions. Feels also like a kind of oblique strategy.

Here is Stella, instructing us on how to look at something we’ve never seen before. As our resident cat-comedian with a gift for irony, she is wondering whether this item — a conductor’s baton — can be worked in as “A” material for her next vaudeville show. The baton is also about to become a tooth sharpener, but we’ll explore that in a moment. Here, Stella is elevating attention itself into an art form, and teaching us to do the same. If that idea doesn’t resonate with you, please find your inner still-point and a moment to drink in her lucent, emerald gaze.

How I Produce a Podcast

[The easier it is, the more likely people will do it: write the introduction email so that they don't have to.]

[If they're excited about something and remind you to bring it up later, ask them right away.]

[If they receive a second wave of ideas after the interview ends, ask permission to record again.]

A Pedagogy of Improvisation

My hope is just that reading these snippets may remind you of things you have forgotten, and that you can reconnect with thise oleasurable memories.

[He was there listening to his little kid play music. His enjoyment transfered to me and increased mine. His listening supported my listening. I was able to give something back to my dad.]

[Sound and silence are complementary. Take equal care when playing either.]

[Rests are less the absence of something and more the presence of nothing.]

[What people call random might simple be too complex to explain.]

[Instead of telling me what 'root' meant, he asked me what I know about roots. When I explained that plants have roots and hold up the rest, he made the connection with roots of a chord that 'supports' the other notes.]

[When I asked which G should I play, he suggested that I try all of them and see which one I was happy with.]

The Source of Sadness

[By tolerating discomfort we actually broaden our comfort zone.]

The global streaming boom is creating a severe translator shortage

[Netflix lost about half a million subscribers in the United States and Canada, but gained over a million in the Asia-Pacific region.]

[Translating Korean to French through English makes as much sense as translating English to French through Korean.]

Try these two smart techniques to help you master your emotions

[Having a small emotional vocabulary makes it easier to reduce situations with a broad brush.]

[People with larger emotional vocabularies tend to have less health issues.]

[Make the butterflies in your stomach fly in formation.]

[Categorizing as 'not about me' saves energy when you're down, and is useful when you're up to put the emotions in perspective (the result of social reality).]

You should use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

Frames the issue not only in terms of information architecture or participant usability, but how it fits into the larger Internet ecosystem, including search engines. Although the title suggests a particular course, it drives the reader to use both more thoughtfully.

See also:

• Discussion is ephemeral
• Designed to disappear

Piracy and the four currencies, part 2

[Piracy is unauthorized access and duplication, whereas stealing deprives the owner of something.]

Stay in touch with hundreds of people.

[Automate keeping in touch to stay in sight. A List: very important, every 3 weeks, B List: important, every two months; C List: most people, every six months; D List: demoted, every year to make sure you have their correct info.]

[Find out how they're doing without asking something in return.]

[It's easy to forget and some people will appreciate you making the effort.]

The Memex Method. When your commonplace book is a public…

[If it seems significant I will blog about why I think it's important and what it adds to the picture.]

[It's neither my last word nor a repetition of what I have to say.]

it represents the synthesis of recent events with a long run of earlier events, interventions, scandals and actions. Further, it represents the evolution of my ability to convey these complex and thorny ideas, based on the reception earlier pieces on the same subject received.

[If writing is about clarifying your thoughts, your older work will naturally make you cringe. But systematically reviewing older work to observe what you got wrong and right makes it easier to avoid your own pitfalls. The structure can even be a public recap of what happened 5, 10, and 15 years ago on this day.]

Being alone with your thoughts is a skill you can practise

[67 percent of the men and 25 percent of the women who participated in the study chose to intentionally shock themselves rather than be alone with their thoughts.]

[Having a list of enjoyable topics to consult can make it easier to think for pleasure.]

Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags

[Publishing is a statement of quality when expensive and inaccessible. When it's cheap and ubiquitous, quality is determined after the fact, by how people point to it.]

Free Schools Are the Future of Education

What if the modern world had a church in schools for lifelong learning?

A Story of Stories

[Viable story viruses need to be teachable and understandable for simplicity, hard to disprove and specific as absolute truth for conviction, and applicable to a wide range of people for spreadability.]

[To drive behaviour of its host, story viruses needs promises of pleasure or pain to create incentives, claims that your behaviour will be known to facilitate accountability, coverage of the spectrum that humans believe for comprehensiveness.]

[Story evolution favours the hosts who survive.]

[Dehumanization adds superglue to the story to make it not only okay but one's 'duty' to kill the other.]

[Having a supreme leader and identifying yourself with the story ('I am a [story]ist') creates the tribal mindset that enables larger groups of humans to act in concert.]

[A tribe's military fights external threats. The police fight cancer.]

Money through the eyes of Mowgli

[The Tarzan suite analyses from the fully-formed individual onwards: the nodes make up the network. The Mowgli suite starts from interdependance and a child that needs to be cared for: the network makes the node.]

[The idea of passing a random stranger on the street did not exist in the past, as survival implied being a part of tightly-knit groups.]

[Nation states are only about 5000 years old and have dissolved the boundaries between smaller collectives to create 'the public', which we are vaguely connected to but do not know.]

[The image of 'prehistoric wilderness man' we consider today is a caricature. Primitive life was not 'solo men creating shelter and hunting' but intensely group-oriented collaboration, as can be seen in photos of indigenous tribes.]

[The myth of self-sufficiency assumes that interacting with others and trading is optional, as opposed to a mandatory means of survival.]

[The natural mechanism of 'life' is a sort of credit, where people give you things to help you survive without any immediate or precise expectation of return. You might pay it back informally or pay it forward.]

Adumbrations Of Aducanumab

This is Yagmuk. He lives in Ipmulaakiituk with his wife and children and eighteen moose. Since 2004, every single bill in the American health care system has gone to Yagmuk. He cannot read English, so he tears them into little shreds and burns them in the winter to keep warm. One day providers will realize he’s not paying, and the whole medical system will collapse.

[Q&A #02] Bombs vs. Bugs

[Banning code exploits itself can hurt efforts to counter DRM for autonomy.]

[Software exploits can be more dangerous than bombs because they are more likely to be used.]

[When exploits are used, we don't find out immediately; sometimes only years later, wheras bombs will be reported on the evening news.]

[Like viruses, exploits can be spread: using it is a risk of losing it.]

How To Build A Massive, Pacific Ocean-Sized Differentiation Moat

[Lever 1: radically different benefit for a radically different problem. To not market the features but the outcome.]

A growth masterclass with Judd Legum of Popular Information

[Create a thread to condense key thoughts from larger texts.]

[Threads indicate you are a more thoughtful person and more likely lead to new followers.]

How Abigail Koffler grew her email list from scratch

[Each week is something to cook, something to order, and something to read.]

[I ask a question every week and include the responses in the following week.]