I was thinking a little bit more about the point I mentioned in my previous post where the iPod Shuffle is actually easier to use because it doesn’t give you a choice about what music to listen to next. With my other MP3 player, I’ll often spend a few minutes trying to decide what kind […]
Category: thoughts
Technology affordances
I bought an iPod Shuffle before Christmas. I had actually planned to buy an iPod Nano, but when I walked into the Apple store, I compared the size of the two, and realized that the Shuffle was about one third the size. I like hearing albums in their entirety, but I decided to give the […]
Patterns, stories and communities
I was thinking about the P.S. in my learn-and-latch post and trying to figure out the process by which people absorb general patterns into themselves. In fact, what are those general patterns? What forms do they take? My thesis of the day is that the general patterns I was talking about are stories. I circle […]
Learn and latch
On the plane ride to my parent’s place, I read the book Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace, by Grant McCracken. I’ve been reading McCracken’s blog, titled This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics for a while and really enjoy his commentary on the process of ethnology […]
Pitching oneself
Liz commented on my Conversationalist post that it’s often difficult to talk about things that are important and meaningful to us. I think it especially applies to esoteric things like a graduate student’s research, where 99% of the world doesn’t even know what it’s about, and doesn’t care. I’ve definitely had the same feeling – […]
Conversationalist
One of the skills I continue to work on is the art of conversation. This seems to be key to so many things I’m interested in, from management to communication to cognitive science. And it has the added benefit of being useful at parties! So what makes for a good conversationalist? One of the qualities […]
Urbis
It’s interesting how wishing sometimes makes it so on the Internet. Or at least how enough people are thinking along the same lines that ideas pop up in multiple places last month. A few months ago, I went to a Social Media Club meeting, and came back musing about feedback karma, where it “would be […]
Idea functionalism
This isn’t quite coming together yet, but I’m so happy to be done writing for class that I want to write a blog post this evening, so bear with me. One bit of preamble – for the sake of this discussion, when I talk about truth, I am not talking about logical consistency, e.g. proving […]
Patterns and truth
But in Ender’s mind, madness. Thousands of competing contradictory impossible visions that make no sense at all because they can’t all fit together but they do fit together, he makes them fit together, this way today, that way tomorrow, as they’re needed. As if he can make a new idea-machine inside his head for every […]
Group flow
I was telling a friend about the Buffy singalong today and mentioned that one of the reasons it was so enjoyable was because everybody in the theater was a Buffy fanatic, or at least Buffy-fanatic-friendly. Because the show had sold out earlier in the week, only the fanatics had tickets. And that created a really […]
