I went skiing yesterday. It was awesome. Fresh snow, knee-deep powder in places, and no lift lines despite it being Saturday of a holiday weekend. The part which never fails to astonish me is that I can still ski. I hadn’t been skiing in probably close to three years. And skiing is not like any […]
Category: thoughts
Repetitive Blindness of Meaning
Jofish recently pointed me at a recording of Cry If You Want To, a song performed by the Holly Cole Trio. I really liked it, and started listening to it regularly. Interestingly, the more I listened to it, the less I appreciated it. It became a song I listened to as a whole, without listening […]
Rules as thinking substitutes
[ed. note: I’ve been mulling this post over for a while (I wrote about half of it last week), and it hasn’t quite come together yet (probably because it’s more like two or three posts), but I figure the only way to get it done is to just post it.] This line of thought was […]
Douglas Hofstadter at Stanford
Douglas Hofstadter, of Godel Escher Bach fame, gave a lecture at Stanford this evening. I happened to hear about it, and convinced DocBug to go with me (which worked out great when I didn’t allow enough time for traffic because he was able to save me a seat despite a standing-room-only crowd). Hofstadter’s a great […]
Social butterfly
It’s one of those perfect storm social weekends for me. I’m hanging out with an out-of-town friend tomorrow afternoon, and then I’m invited to three parties tomorrow evening, with three completely different social groups. And it got me thinking about my social network. I don’t tend to consider myself a very social person. I’m not […]
Meta-BrainJamming
As mentioned in a post last month (gosh, it’s been a while since I’ve been blogging), I co-led a session on “Meta-BrainJamming”, aka “Building a Better BrainJam”. It was interesting to me primarily because there is no “right” way to run one of these things; each of the choices is a design choice. One of […]
Talent in a free agent world
A few weeks ago, I was talking with a friend of mine who is working as a consultant these days. We worked together at Signature, developing research prototypes together. He’s interested in doing similar work as a consultant, but it’s difficult to pull together a good team of research scientists and engineers when there is […]
Incomplete realities
Responding to my End Times theory, Brian commented “Can we show that one reality is better than another? I hope so!” I’ve been struggling on and off with this question of what makes one reality “better” than another for at least six years. In that rant (itself a follow-up to these thoughts on morality), I […]
Three realizations
Last week, after getting back from the work trip to DC, I went to a holiday party hosted by Chris Heuer, organizer of BrainJams. I figured I’d stop by, chat with a few people, and head home. Instead, I ended up in this fascinating conversation with Brian of CivicEvolution (thus meeting the challenge from my […]
BrainJamming
As noted previously, I went to a “BrainJam” on Saturday. It was excellent, everything I had hoped it would be. I met a bunch of interesting people, had some thought-provoking conversations, and was left wanting more, even at the end of a long day (9am-7pm) of talking. In the morning, they started off with essentially […]
