On the 8 Spot

I found this an excellent read. I seem to periodically ask myself this question. How do you live your life and say at the end I wouldn’t have changed a thing. In a way this is the goal I’ve been crawling towards.

When I was about 29 years old I got a spiritual  “assignment” on an Easter morning in the old city of Jerusalem. According to this assignment my job was to live as if I had only 6 months left to live. I was in perfect health and in the middle of a ten-year round the world trip, so this interruption was unexpected and strange. I’ve told the full story of that curious mission on the very first episode of This American Life, the public radio storytelling hit, 10 years ago, so I won’t go into further detail because you can hear my account  on this streaming audio file from the NPR site.

The short version is that what I decided to do in my last 6 months surprised me, and that living with only 180 days in front of me turned out to be harder than I thought. But I did live with a very conscious countdown toward the final day; I remember that last day very well.

via Conceptual Trends and Current Topics.

Loved reading this, finish the whole thing at the linked site. The comments at Overcoming Bias are really topnotch!!!!!

Praise Polymaths

By Robin Hanson · February 12, 2010 9:15 am · Discuss · « Prev · Next »

Once upon a time folks who traveled far were treated with suspicion. Sure if you were rich and traveled like the rich you weren’t more suspicious than other rich. But those who traveled more than their class were suspected, correctly on average, of being less loyal to their neighbors.

Today travel is mostly celebrated; people love to talk about their trips and admire the well-traveled, even beyond the wealth it signals. But travel today doesn’t much threaten loyalty – intellectual contact with locals is limited, and usually selected to be like-minded. Ooh look, another pretty building. True intellectual travel, where you actually take the time to see things from different perspectives, is rare, more valuable, and yet elicits more suspicion than admiration.

You see, our beliefs are severely distorted by our culture and training, and intellectual travel remains our only remotely reliable remedy. We all know that we would have been inclined toward different beliefs had we been raised in different cultures or disciplines. We see consistent differences between folks trained in West vs. East, science vs. humanities, economics vs. sociology, and in different schools of thought of most any discipline. We like to think that we correct for this, but when we realize how hard that is, we throw up our hands saying “what ya gonna do?”

via Overcoming Bias : Praise Polymaths.

No sooner have I ignored the Orwell awards than I am invited to nominate myself for a Wincott award. Which invokes the same response – I’m not interested.

For one thing, the criteria for both awards is absurd. The Orwell asks for a sample of 10 pieces, the Wincott for five. For any active blogger, this is just 2-4% of one year’s content. Handing out awards on the basis of such a tiny sample would be like basing Oscars on one scene per movie, or Grammys on a single bar of music.

Which brings me to my bigger gripe. Why should I give a damn about the opinion of people who are prepared to make such absurd judgments? One of the main reasons I blog is precisely as a reaction against the empty suits who think their opinion matters. Anyone who’s read this blog for any time will have gotten bored of me pointing out that the “judgment” of people in authority – or who aspire to authority – is flawed. So why should I want an award from such folk?

via Stumbling and Mumbling: Against awards.

This has ruined the Star Wars reboot for me, read the whole thing if you dare. Damn didn’t think of that.

Damn reminds me of what a friend says about reboot Spock. Reboot Spock was an asshole counter to the original series spock where he was irritating not for being an asshole but for being sooo damn logical.

ty to Brad Delong for the pointer

Something that really bugs me about the recent Star Trek movie

Mitch Wagner

There’s a scene at the end of the movie—and I don’t think this is a spoiler, the movie has been building to this point the whole time—where Kirk has the bad guy on the main bridge viewscreen. The bad guy is defeated, his ship crippled, and Kirk offers amnesty. The bad guy proudly refuses, and instead dies with his ship.

Spock approaches Kirk afterward and asks if Kirk was really going to help the bad guy out. And Kirk smirks and says, no, of course not. Spock is happy about that.

It seems to me that one scene spits in the face of one of the greatest things about the original Trek. The show was primarily an action-adventure program, with plenty of fistfights and stirring ship-to-ship battle. But in the end, Gene Roddenberry and the rest of the people who created Trek were espousing a philosophy of peace and forgiveness. Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise extended forgiveness to enemies many times, including the very first time they encountered the Romulans, in a sequence that the movie echoes.

The message of Trek: It’s better to talk than to fight. It’s better to forgive your enemies.

via Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Something that really bugs me about the recent Star Trek movie.

Some people are too obsessed with labels and appearances that they end up finding nothing. from Moshe Safdie’s TED talk(I’d link to the talk but I’m a little too tired to be nothing but lazy!!!!):

He who seeks truth shall find beauty.
He who seeks beauty shall find vanity.
He who seeks order shall find gratification.
He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed.
He who considers himself the servant of his fellow beings shall find the joy of self expression.
He who seeks self expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance.
Arrogance is incompatible with nature.
Through nature, the nature of the universe, and the nature of man, we shall seek truth.
If we seek truth, we shall find beauty.

Read the whole thing here, and the article that prompted the post from paste mag here.

No, “indie” isn’t dead. Indie has just become a genre. And I’d like us to make a distinction between the “indie” of Belle and Sebastian or Vampire Weekend and the “indie rock” of Pavement or Superchunk, thank you very much.

As a side note, the “badge of honor” of being “true punk” or “true indie” is silly. It’s a distraction from the real, meaningful questions: Is the music good? Is the music truthful? (From the heart, inspired by experience, informed by a viewpoint; authenticty.) Do people like it? Does it improve their lives? Does it inspire them to be greater?

Whether the music comes from a bedroom or a boardroom does not singularly determine the answers to those questions.

No, indie isn’t dead. But what’s next?

via Classical Geek Theatre: Is Indie dead?.

However, the real heroes are the people of Haiti. Despite tremendous challenge and suffering, they still show an incredible strength of spirit and resilience to the harshest of conditions. Seeing the people firsthand left me with a vastly different impression than I had going in based on news reports. Instead of roving gangs of violent criminals, I found people caring for the wounded and providing critical supplies to those most in need. Instead of people weeping of despair, I saw people busy rebuilding their lives in the most challenging of environments.

via too: Hope.

The first step that you should take is to invest yourself in something non-trivially. Want to learn rails, then go buy agile web development in rails, want to learn github, move an active project out there, want to learn linux, reformat your machine so that’s all you have. You have to invest yourself, it plays a trick on your brain that makes it want to not waste that “investment” by quitting. If you can burn your boats (Hernán Cortés reference) all the better. I had no choice but to learn git or else I couldn’t keep working on my project, and as a side bonus I got the joy (and frustration) of working in git everyday.

Get out there and hustle, learn something new, do something that scares you, reach beyond your grasp.

via hustle | ihumanable.

I need you to understand something. I wrote this for you. I wrote this for you and only you. Everyone else who reads it, doesn’t get it. They may think they get it, but they don’t. This is the sign you’ve been looking for. You were meant to read these words.

via I Wrote This For You.

The above is the tag line of a blog I discovered while trying to read through mail I sent myself.

I found this :

All persons entering a heart do so at their own risk. Management can and will be held responsible for any loss, love, theft, ambition or personal injury. Please take care of your belongings. Please take care of the way you look at me. No roller skating, kissing, smoking, fingers through hair, 3am phone calls, stained letters, littering, unfeeling feelings, a smell left on a pillow, doors slammed, lyrics whispered, or loitering. Thank you.

also from the same blog here:

http://pleasefindthis.blogspot.com/2009/08/rules-of-engagement.html

from here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2009/05/05/beyond-ownership/

The work of life is doing, not having. Even if having is what you’re doing, it’s the doing that matters. Life is process, not product. That process is one of contribution, I think. We want to leave the world with more than it had when we entered it. And with goods that are beyond measure or price. Goods which, like time, we can only give.

With the Net we have invented an excellent place to do that.

Let’s just say that the way the world is going/working right now is not really making me happy. Stuff doesn’t make me happy. Hope I find that something , that seems to be missing.

Millions share his vision because they see, and feel it. Perlas is someone crying out in the wilderness and asking people to come to him and share his vision for the Nation. Perlas wants to unite people and fight against poverty. Perlas wants to eradicate graft and corruption. Perlas will exercise strong political will to fight the forces that weaken the Motherland. And Perlas will see to it that those who have committed grave injustices against the People are put behind bars.There is something terribly wrong when people like Nicanor Perlas who once lived peacefully in their rich hamlets are suddenly seen in the streets, preaching the Gospel of Salvation from poverty and wants. When people who hate politics are suddenly going around town, preaching of “New Politics”, that’s surely a sign that things have turned for the worst.It just means that the exploitation, the degradation, the immorality, the amorality, the misery of the human condition, has seeped into the comfort zones of those who are not of the hungred kind.And I laud Blogwatch.ph and the Vibal Foundation for allowing me to partake of Nicanor Perlas’ vision even for an hour. Meeting him just makes me realize that the end is definitely not near, because there are still a few good men left who will sacrifice everything, just so that others may live better lives.

via Nicanor Perlas and the Dreams of an Ordinary Citizen | Filipino Voices.