Category: rePosts

Excellent List, hope you can read the whole thing!

4. Find happiness now.
Don’t look at happiness as something that will come when you’re done with this goal, or when you’ve attained a certain accomplishment or certain amount of wealth or material goods. Don’t look at happiness as a destination, something that you’ll get later.
Happiness is possible right now. Always remember that. When you push it back until later, it’ll never come. When you learn to be happy now, it’ll always be here.
When you’re doing whatever you’re passionate about, whatever matters most, whatever you decide is worthy of your time and heart and focus … be happy! You’re doing what you love. And that is truly a gift.
via How to Make the Most of the Fresh Start of a New Year.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a resource for the multitude of interesting things undereported or lacking a hub.  Blogs and wikis are the starting point, hope somebody makes the next generation of communication/sharing platform the current one is getting stale.

But! A web resource devoted to boosting Internet connectivity in Manhattan, now that would attract some serious money. I met with Jeff Jarvis on this trip and he asked me to think about ways for news orgs to make money. This is how you do it. Understand your community and the needs of its economy, where money is flowing, and where it’s being held back due to a lack of information, and pour resources into that area. You will find a way to draw money from the activity you’re covering.
Now, back to John Robinson’s query. Why should news orgs host blogs for members of their community? Because the business of news organizations is information. Gather it up, sort it, organize it, keep it current and do it again. People have a huge thirst for new information, more these days than ever and increasing all the time. It's ridiculous that information-gathering orgs should be shrinking in a time where what they do is in such high demand. We’re constantly checking our Droids and Nexus One’s for new stuff to interest our short attention span.
Let the people in so you can find the wells that need digging. We can poke around the surface, but we have lives and jobs — other missions. Watch where we go, and help us achieve. The rewards will be our trust and the money of businesses that want to learn from and educate through that flow. Same way Twitter, Facebook and Google are expanding now, that should be happening in the news business.
via Why newspapers should host blogs. (Scripting News).

This reminds me of Richard Hamming, questioning colleagues of the important questions of their field and whether or not they are working on it. I believe some people choose to  go the easier path, for it offers foreseeable rewards whilst some others go for the impossible questions reveling on the easy excuse for failure, that Big Questions are often times hard, and mere mortals  cannot expect to overcome it; While most fall in the middle finding the balance of reward and excuse for failure that suits their personalities. Are you tackling the Big Questions of your field?

When young, I imagined that the giants of the intellectual world would be found chipping away at our deepest most important questions. Sure perhaps most intellectuals would work on practical problems with paying customers, or do less glorious but needed ground work, but the best and the brightest would focus on combining that ground work into deep answers. Aspiring to high status, I also tried to identify and chip away at deep questions.
Imagine how strange, then, the real world seems to me. For example, Caltech prof and top science blogger Sean Carroll publishes a well-written book, From Eternity to Here, arguing for his explanation for the arrow of time, clearly one of our deepest questions. Yet not only are such attempts rare, they get surprising little engagement. Of the fourteen other blurbs, reviews, and articles (besides mine) listed at the book website, none express an opinion on whether Carroll’s answer is right, much less offer reasons for such an opinion. Of the six Amazon reviews, two do express an opinion, one by complete-crank Ranger McCoy, and one by Lubos Motl, who says there is no arrow of time problem. I also found a review by Peter Woit, who rejects the whole idea of a multiverse. Geez, what does it take to get serious engagement of a proposed answer to a deep question?
via Overcoming Bias : Big Questions.

There are a lot of libraries that are closing down, maybe we could get those books and put up libraries in the poor provinces in the Philippines.

Mr. Tracy’s library
January 11, 2010
Edge's annual question for 2010 is “How is the Internet changing the way you think?” Some 170 folks submitted answers, including me. (I found it a bit of a challenge, since I wanted to avoid pre-plagiarizing my upcoming book, which happens to be on this subject.) Here's my submission:
As the school year began last September, Cushing Academy, an elite Massachusetts prep school that’s been around since Civil War days, announced that it was emptying its library of books. In place of the thousands of volumes that had once crowded the building’s shelves, the school was installing, it said, “state-of-the-art computers with high-definition screens for research and reading” as well as “monitors that provide students with real-time interactive data and news feeds from around the world.” Cushing’s bookless library would become, boasted headmaster James Tracy, “a model for the 21st-century school.”
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Mr. Tracy’s library.

The efficient life of Arthur Rosenfeld, energy pioneer
rosenfeldbrightidea.jpg
Safe, simple and cheap, energy efficiency is probably the best way to tackle greenhouse gas emissions. And octogenarian nuclear physicist, Arthur Rosenfeld, is the father of American energy efficiency. He retires this week from the California Energy Commission, a milestone commemorated in a great L.A. Times profile.
via The efficient life of Arthur Rosenfeld, energy pioneer Boing Boing.

What the MTRCB has been doing is blatant abuse of it’s power.  This is the same small mindedness that has afflicted the comelec.

Roces encouraged students who guested on the show to ask questions from their teachers. She went on to describe teachers as “repeaters.”
“Huwag kayo makukuntento sa mga itinuturo ng libro at ng teacher. Kung magtatanong kayo, hindi masama iyon. Dahil ang mga teacher, they were just repeaters. Tinuturo lang nila kung ano ang itinuro sa kanila. Hindi na nila itinuturo kung ano ang gusto malaman ng mga bata,” she said.
(If you ask questions, that's not bad. Because teachers, they were just repeaters. They just teach what was taught to them. They don’t teach what the children want to know.)
via MTRCB suspends ‘Showtime’ over Osang’s remarks | ABS-CBN News Online Beta.