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rePost:: Drive safely and don't abuse alcohol, drugs or candy :: Letters of Note

This illustrates how small nudges can have large effects on who we are.  This was very inspiring.

Drive safely and don’t abuse alcohol, drugs or candy

When asked by his teacher to write to a contemporary artist as part of a school project in 1997, 13-year-old Green Day fan Austin Kleon immediately opted to contact collage artist Winston Smith – the man responsible for creating the artwork for the band’s 1995 album, Insomniac – and after finding his address via a gallery curator, Austin sent his letter to the artist and hoped for the best. A few months later when nearly all hope was lost, the stunning 14-page reply seen below, along with pages and pages of artwork, arrived at the teenager’s home. He was ecstatic:
I couldn’t believe it. An artist—a real artist!—had written me back!
To me, it was the equivalent of Rilke writing back to the young poet. He told me about his life and his methods. He urged me to always question authority, stay away from drugs, and keep getting straight As so one day I could pay the bills. (An artist—a real artist!—was telling me it was okay to get straight As!) I’d never heard anybody talk about the kind of things he wrote about—art, America, growing up in a small-town—it was like a time-bomb that went off in my brain.
The letter, and I’m not exaggerating, changed my life.via Letters of Note: Drive safely and don’t abuse alcohol, drugs or candy.

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rePost:: Sentences to ponder :: Marginal Revolution

Hmm. I’m in the don’t plan vacations camp. This troubles me. I may not be maximizing happiness.

Sentences to ponder

The study, published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life, showed that the largest boost in happiness comes from the simple act of planning a vacation. In the study, the effect of vacation anticipation boosted happiness for eight weeks.
There is more information here.
via Marginal Revolution: Sentences to ponder.

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Learned Today::Your eyes betray the timing of your decisions : Neurophilosophy

can you train yourself to see this change? I think I’m too slow or absent minded to notice this.

The researchers used an infrared eye-tracking device to measure the diameter of the participants’ left pupils up to 2,000 times per second while they performed the tasks. They found that pupil dilation was tightly coupled with the time at which the decisions were made, and betrayed the participants’ decisions before they were openly revealed. In the first experiment, maximum pupil dilation was observed during the 2-second interval in which the button was pressed. In the second, where there was a delay between the choice and the participants’ report of which number they had chosen, their pupils were maximally dilated during the interval at which they chose the digit. During task three, maximum dilation was again observed during the time at which the participants “chose” the underlined number.

via Your eyes betray the timing of your decisions : Neurophilosophy.

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rePost::The One Who Got Away – Pictory

Click through, the romantic in me is moved.

Think about the people missing from your life, and how you feel about them. What we remember — and what we forget — may reveal more about ourselves than about them. We have photos, letters, souvenirs, and fragments of memory, but our powerful imagination takes over from there: We color in the blanks. And that’s OK. Retouching old loves is a way of understanding what we want. It helps us find our way to new ones.
It’s impossible to know whether the experiences below are about infatuation, true love, lust, or something else entirely. But we can be sure that each of these contributors learned about life and themselves in the process.
via The One Who Got Away – Pictory.

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rePost:: » Tips for Stress-Free Travel » The Art of Non-Conformity »

Nice set of advice. I learned the quoted advice implicitly from tonio and chuck. It came from observing that what’s important is the experience everything else should be in the background. What does this mean? Well bring lot’s of money and have a who cares attitude about money. Some caveats would be, at least for me.
Learn to haggle without being stressed (I needed to learn this)
some more travel advice:

  • Learn to ask for directions.
  • Learn if the area has a map (especially useful for introverts like me)/cultural/tourist office.
  • It’s not how many places you visit it’s about how happy you were when you visited those places. (Let the bad things slide)
  • You travel to travel not to tell other people about it, which basically means photos are there to remind you of the happy moments.
  • Basically BE IN THE MOMENT(I can still recall vividly the first panoramic view of the Mt Pinatubo crater lake or each second of the Dahilayan zipline, It was because I was so into the moment it was as if nothing else existed.)
  • Travel Light.  (This was taught to me by walking with 2 bags with a combine weight of around 25kg walking for more than 15km from davao’s eco bus station to the davao museum and to a few more places. When you are thinking of bringing anything just say to yourself YOU AREN’T GOING TO NEED IT)
  • Always carry change.
  • Dress down, dress comfortably. (I find that dressing down automatically signals to people you are asking for directions/advice to point you to the least expensive options.)

Spend more money. I often get stressed out spending small amounts of money. Overall, this isn’t always bad—it’s led to a healthy paranoia about debt and a lifelong adherence to frugality. However, it has its downsides too, in that I can spend hours walking around trying to decide what to eat, or hours trying to figure out the public transit system somewhere instead of just flagging down a taxi.
It only took me about 100 countries—I’m a slow learner—but I finally created a $10 rule for myself that has been rocking my world. The $10 rule is that when I’m traveling, I deliberately avoid worrying about most things that cost $10 or less. As I said, this makes a big difference. I actually eat three meals a day now. If I can’t find free WiFi, I’ll walk into a hotel and pay for the connection. SO MUCH LESS STRESS.
via The Art of Non-Conformity » Tips for Stress-Free Travel.

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Quote::The Case Against Credentialism – James Fallows

Wow we are being penalized for our reliability.  I have a strange feeling that data analyst / programmer / consultant would be closer to doctors/lawyers than engineers.

The newly organizing groups could call themselves professions, and not simply resurrected medieval guilds, because their members’ mastery of a new body of knowledge gave them claims to a competence beyond the amateur’s reach. Doctors could take advantage of the new breakthroughs in germ theory and anesthesia, engineers of refinements in industrial technology. “A strong profession requires a real technical skill that produces demonstrable results and can be taught,” a sociologist named Randall Collins wrote in a history of educational credentials. “the skill must be difficult enough to require training and reliable enough to produce results. But it cannot be too reliable enough to produce results. But it cannot be too reliable, for then outsiders can judge work by its results.” Indeed, when historians try to explain why engineers have never become as pretigious and independent as doctors or lawyers, one of their answers is that the engineer’s competence is too clearly on display. (When a patient dies, the doctor might not to be blame, but if a bridge, falls down, the engineer is.)
via The Case Against Credentialism – James Fallows.

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rePost:: The Gifts of Doubt :: Experimental Theology

1. Epistemological
This isn't news, but truth claims are more difficult in modernity. Particularly those outside of the range of science. Collectively, we've lost the meta-narrative (the big overarching story that shaped everyone's worldview) and have traded it in for more particular and local stories and perspectives. Big T Truth has been lost to little t truths. And this move isn't all bad. The stories of the weak and marginalized (their small t truths that were being written out of the history books by the Big T Truth of Empire) are slowly being recovered.
Doubters tend to flourish in the modern context. The fractured epistemological situation of modernity (often called “postmodernity”) demands a degree of epistemic humility. Doubters are very comfortable with this. Doubters tend to shy away from shouting meta-narratives at people who don't believe in meta-narratives. That is, rather than lamenting the modern situation, as the fundamentalists do (“No one believes in Truth anymore!”), the doubters will “get” the modern person and, due to certain shared sympathies, be more likely to articulate the faith in a way that makes sense to outsiders. Doubters trade in paranoid shouting for intelligible conversation.
via Experimental Theology: The Gifts of Doubt.

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rePost:: Nine Tips for Feeling Happier When You’ve Lost Your Job — or Fear You Might. :: The Happiness Project

If not for the kindness of friends I would have been unemployed come the end of this month.  The advice on this linked post was good nonetheless. Read the whole thing!

5. Help someone else. Your self-esteem may have suffered a blow, so remind yourself of how much you have to give. Teach someone something useful. Make helpful connections for other people. Volunteer your skills. Donate blood. Go through your closets and give away the clothes you don’t need (see #6). If you can’t face doing anything else, you can at least sign up to be an organ donor. It takes one minute, and you have potentially saved the lives of five people. You can feel great about your day if you’ve done that!
via The Happiness Project: Nine Tips for Feeling Happier When You’ve Lost Your Job — or Fear You Might..

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rePost::Can chocolate lower your risk of stroke?

I’ve been on a diet for a little over a week. Let’s just say the half pound of chocolate in my fridge is beginning to be looming presence every time I open the fridge door.  I sometimes hate atkin’s diet, but it’s the easiest diet I’ve been on by far. This is a trillion dollar drug. The miracle diet pill with no bad side effects really needs to be created!!!!!

Can Chocolate Lower Your Risk of Stroke?
ScienceDaily (Feb. 12, 2010) — Eating chocolate may lower your risk of having a stroke, according to an analysis of available research that was released February 11 and will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 62nd Annual Meeting in Toronto April 10 to April 17, 2010. Another study found that eating chocolate may lower the risk of death after suffering a stroke.
via Can chocolate lower your risk of stroke?.

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rrePost:: Invisible platform : Manuel L. Quezon III: The Daily Dose :: The Long View

If machinery wins National Elections (I’m acutely aware that local elections can be won by a better party machinery) then Pichay should be a senator now. Obviously he isn’t. QED.
Wish people really call BS on these politicians. We would have a shorter news cast.

I have heard it said that Teodoro played a central role in formulating the NPC platform and he himself has been saying things that suggest familiarity with a draft platform. This has been particularly true in recent weeks, coinciding with the period work on a platform has been taking place, as Magno mentioned. The term “subsidiarity” that he mentioned at a recent forum is a vintage Christian Democratic one and is, surely, a hint of what the Lakas-Kampi-CMD platform might put forward. This inability to publish a platform means the ruling coalition believes Prospero Pichay’s statement that their candidate will win because of party machinery and not public sentiment.
via The Long View: Invisible platform : Manuel L. Quezon III: The Daily Dose.