Giancarlo Angulo's Blog
Basically, Marino resents Manning's era as much as I resent everyone younger than 30 who spent the past decade single in the Casual Sex Is Not Only OK, It's Encouraged Era.)
via Bill Simmons: NFL playoff picks, Round 1 – ESPN.
Anybody want to watch Superbowl in a National Sports Grill??
I’ve been thinking of Graduate School for a long time now and I have to admit that me going or not going is boiling down to the Question; Do I really want to or are their other reasons?? It is part of this search , this anguish filled search for meaning, for passion, for life.
I have found that most prospective graduate students have given little thought to what will happen to them after they complete their doctorates. They assume that everyone finds a decent position somewhere, even if it's “only” at a community college (expressed with a shudder). Besides, the completion of graduate school seems impossibly far away, so their concerns are mostly focused on the present. Their motives are usually some combination of the following:
* They are excited by some subject and believe they have a deep, sustainable interest in it. (But ask follow-up questions and you find that it is only deep in relation to their undergraduate peers — not in relation to the kind of serious dedication you need in graduate programs.)
* They received high grades and a lot of praise from their professors, and they are not finding similar encouragement outside of an academic environment. They want to return to a context in which they feel validated.
* They are emerging from 16 years of institutional living: a clear, step-by-step process of advancement toward a goal, with measured outcomes, constant reinforcement and support, and clearly defined hierarchies. The world outside school seems so unstructured, ambiguous, difficult to navigate, and frightening.
* With the prospect of an unappealing, entry-level job on the horizon, life in college becomes increasingly idealized. They think graduate school will continue that romantic experience and enable them to stay in college forever as teacher-scholars.
* They can't find a position anywhere that uses the skills on which they most prided themselves in college. They are forced to learn about new things that don't interest them nearly as much. No one is impressed by their knowledge of Jane Austen. There are no mentors to guide and protect them, and they turn to former teachers for help.
* They think that graduate school is a good place to hide from the recession. They'll spend a few years studying literature, preferably on a fellowship, and then, if academe doesn't seem appealing or open to them, they will simply look for a job when the market has improved. And, you know, all those baby boomers have to retire someday, and when that happens, there will be jobs available in academe.
via Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go – Advice – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
In this video a Danish mother talks about her one-night stand with a foreign tourist. “We met one and half years ago when you were on vacation here. We went back to my house and we ended up having sex,” says Karen. It looks real, but Karen is a fictional character played by an actor. The video was produced by VisitDenmark – a tax funded tourist organization.
Why would a tourist agency produce such a video? In Politiken, Dorte Kiilerich, CEO of VisitDenmark explains:
Karen's story shows that Denmark is a free place with space for you to be who you want. The film is good exposure for Danish self-sufficient and dignified women.
Politeken asked Ms. Kiilerich: “Why have you chosen to market Denmark as a country with drunk women who have unprotected sex with random tourists?”
Kiilerich's answer:
“That is not a story that I recognize. We're telling a nice and sweet story about a modern responsible woman, that lives in a free society and takes responsibility for her choices. And she uses a modern and social media.”
Danish women as tourist attractions
(This all went down a few months ago, but I just read about it on Sociological Images)
via Danish tourism board produces video marketing Denmark as a country with drunk women who have unprotected sex with random tourists Boing Boing.
The sad thing is they could run dozens of ads of variations of this concept for the Philippines
It’s been taken as a mental health supplement for hundreds of years, and is also said to benefit blood flow, and combat free radicals. Yet according to a paper recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, ginkgo biloba had no discernible affect on the mental acuity of people as they aged. This comes on the heels of a 2008 study by the same team that showed that ginkgo had no affect on Alzheimer’s or dementia. The JAMA report is a blow to the reputation of the plant and could prove potentially damaging to suppliers of the supplement who sell over $100 million in the US alone. For those looking to boost their mental agility, or to simply keep it strong as they age, it looks like ginkgo biloba is no longer a good option.
via Ginkgo Biloba Fails Again | Singularity Hub.
Finally, hope they could study all these miracle drugs that are siphoning money mostly from people who can’t afford it.
People having trouble in those areas may ask for advice, perhaps out of a latent effort to turn the problem into more of a task. Yet a lot of conventional advice doesn’t really turn the problem into the task (at least, not for everyone), but rather poses new problems, due to difficulties that Alicorn mentioned, such as lack of resources, lack of propositional knowledge, or lack of procedural knowledge.
Take, for example, “just be yourself,” or “just meet potential partners through friends.” For many people, these pieces of advice just open up new problems: being oneself is a problem of personal identity. It's not a task that you can execute as part of a step in solving the problem of dating. Having a social network, let alone one that will introduce you to potential partners, is also a problem for many people. Consequently, these pieces of advice sound like “let them eat cake.”
Society in general resists the notion that socializing (dating and mating in particular) is a problem. Rather, society treats it as a solved task, yet the procedures it advocates are incomplete, dependent on unacknowledged contextual factors, big hairy problems of their own, or just plain wrong. (Or it gives advice that consists of true observations that are useless for taskification, like “everyone is looking for something different” in a mate. Imagine telling a budding chef: “everyone has different tastes” in food. It’s true, but it isn’t actually useful in taskifying a problem like “how do I cook a meal?”)
via Less Wrong: Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks.
This was an excellent list do yourself the favor of reading the whole list. These aren’t even the best insights he writes!!!!!
23. Worrying about “Commercial vs. Artistic” is a complete waste of time.
You can argue about “the shameful state of American Letters” till the cows come home. They were kvetching about it in 1950, they’ll be kvetching about it in 2050.
It’s a path well-trodden, and not a place where one is going to come up with many new, earth-shattering insights.
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24. Don�t worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.
Inspiration precedes the desire to create, not the other way around.
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25. You have to find your own schtick.
A Picasso always looks like Piccasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven Symphony always sounds like a Beethoven’s Syynphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else’s voice but your own.
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26. Write from the heart.
There is no silver bullet. There is only the love God gave you.
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27. The best way to get approval is not to need it.
This is equally true in art and business. And love. And sex. And just about everything else worth having.
(more…)
via how to be creative | Gapingvoid.
Short Case Study #2: The Bored Programmer
Let’s tackle a non-academic example. Imagine a young man working in web development firm. His days are spent hacking CSS and doing some mild javascript programming. The pay is fine and the projects are interesting enough, but a feeling of dread is starting to tinge his daily commute.
“I’m not passionate about this,” our fictional programmer thinks. “Do I really want to spend the rest of my life doing the first random job I stumbled into, even if I don’t love it?”
The traditional view of passion recommends that this programmer immediately summon the courage to quit his job and find something that fits his passion. (Tim Ferriss tells the canonical story of this form: an overworked LA lawyer who dropped everything to open a surf shop in Brazil.)
The mastery-centric view, however, denies that such a priori passions exist. There’s probably no new job that would immediately grant him the feeling of passion he seeks. That can only come from mastery.
Assuming that the programmer doesn’t hate his job and the people he works with, he should instead consider generating a passion for his work by finding something he can master.
For example, over the next couple of years, he might put in serious time to become a Ruby on Rails expert — allowing his company to branch off into more complicated projects, and earning him more respect, pay, and flexibility in the process. Gaining this mastery could transform his view of his job as something he tolerates to something he loves. And it will accomplish this feat with more certainty than a sudden move to Brazil.
via Study Hacks » Blog Archive » Are Passions Serendipitously Discovered or Painstakingly Constructed?.
I recently quit my job for the same reasons. I’ve been asking these questions since. Interview after interview I am faced by the seeming lack of interesting programming jobs here. Mind you I didn’t even say Interesting and Well Paying programming jobs. This I admit is a little disheartening. What am I to do???? Hope I find out before the middle of march.
There’s no correlation between creativity and equipment ownership. None. Zilch. Nada.
Actually, as the artist gets more into his thing, and as he gets more successful, his number of tools tends to go down. He knows what works for him. Expending mental energy on stuff wastes time. He’s a man on a mission. He’s got a deadline. He’s got some rich client breathing down his neck. The last thing he wants is to spend 3 weeks learning how to use a router drill if he doesn’t need to.
A fancy tool just gives the second-rater one more pillar to hide behind.
Which is why there are so many second-rate art directors with state-of-the-art Macinotsh computers.
via pillar management | Gapingvoid.
This post was prompted by the fact that I’m getting frustrated with the specs of my pc. The post was a good read!
The Steve Martin Method
People often ask Martin about the secret to making it in the entertainment industry. His answer often disappoints. It does not involve any tricks (or, as we might call them: “hacks”). No insider path to getting an agent or special formatting to get your screenplay read. Instead, it’s all built on one simple idea:
“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”
via Study Hacks » Blog Archive » The Steve Martin Method: A Master Comedian’s Advice for Becoming Famous.
ravel full-time for less than $14,000 per year
While I was blowing $530 on a single day in Orlando last month, professional world-traveler Nora Dunn was contributing a guest post at I Will Teach You to Be Rich in which she describes her own quest to see the world. Dunn writes:
I “retired” from the rat race at the tender age of 30 to embrace my life-long dream of traveling the world, before life had a chance to get in the way…I am not rich. I am not a trust child, nor do I have rich parents, a sugar daddy, or a stream of income that allows me to live the high life on the road. Full time travel doesn’t have to be expensive, and after two years on the road, I’ve learned plenty of tricks to travel the world without breaking the bank, and without an end in sight.
via Travel Hacking: Smart Ways to See the World | Get Rich Slowly.
I’m seriously trying to think if this is possible for me. BTW the linked article was a treasure trove of advice.