As some of you know, I bought myself a Mercedes SLK230 a year and a half ago, a completely impractical obnoxious two-seater hardtop convertible. But I figured, what the heck, I was young and single and male, and when would it be more appropriate for me to have such a car than now. And, damn, […]
Category: thoughts
More on language alignment
I’d been meaning to follow up on last week’s post on conversational alignment but hadn’t gotten around to it. As I admitted in the livejournal comments on that post, I may have over reached in saying that reality coefficients had to be aligned to have a good conversation, because, as Dan pointed out, we can […]
Comedy and drama
While driving into work yesterday, I started thinking about humor for some reason. I guess I was thinking of practical jokes, of the variety that Ashton Kutcher purveys on Punk’d, and why I find such jokes shallow and cruel and not very funny. It seems to me that such jokes are funny because the audience […]
Conversational Alignment
This is a post I’ve been thinking about for a while, partially wrote, but never got around to finishing. And I’m only finishing it today because I want to write another post that refers to it. Welcome to the wacky world that is my mind. Here’s the question of the day: why is it that […]
Context sensitivity
I’ve talked about the importance of context to cognitive subroutines before, but I wanted to pick up on it again this morning. I’ve just spent most of the last three weeks in New York City, living a very different kind of life in a different place. I walked almost everywhere I went, I was going […]
Virtual cues
There was one particularly interesting topic at the dinner party which I’ll record here so that I hopefully pick up on it later. We were discussing the role of technology-mediated communication such as cell phones and email in our lives. One woman was trying to make the case that we should give up on it, […]
What is powerful, part two
[Apologies for the barrage of posts – I’m trying to be more disciplined about spending a couple hours writing in the morning, and, well, I generate a lot of verbiage. The editing part still needs work obviously. But you’ll have to suck it up. Or just skip it.] In the previous post, I suggested a […]
What is powerful?
In yesterday’s post, I quipped “art is in the network, not in the nodes.” While walking around yesterday, I started trying to figure out what I meant by that. It’s a cute quip, but what does it mean? I also wanted to tie it into the ideas I presented towards the end of this post, […]
Art as a web
DocBug put up an interesting post, wondering why we put all the fame and glory on a particular artist, when their work is often the result of a dense web of collaboration, influences and support. I started responding to that post in a comment, and then realized I had a lot more to say than […]
Cognitive subroutines extensions
In my last post about cognitive subroutines, I extended the idea to allow for us to use other people as part of our internal routines. I was using this in the idea of team building, but this idea of leveraging elements outside of ourselves can be extended even further. While I was at the Whitney […]
