As I mentioned last month, I was reading this book mostly because I enjoyed The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid so much. I finally finished it off last weekend, and figured I should at least do a perfunctory review. It was pretty awful. The writing was terrible – I […]
I’m published!
Issue 3 of Ambidextrous Magazine has just come out (so recently that it’s not even listed on their website yet), and an article I wrote is in there. This is very exciting for me, as it is the first time I have been published. The article was something I concocted based off of a quote […]
Searching for continuity
I apologize for the relentlessly solipsistic posts recently. Being in New York in a new environment is giving me a chance to re-examine what I take for granted. It’s interesting to see what behaviors translated through the move untouched (e.g. I still prefer eating in to going out), and what hasn’t (e.g. I don’t miss […]
The fundamental interconnectedness of all things
DocBug wrote up a great post, discussing how he has been trying to “translate” the spiritualistic beliefs of some of his friends “into a form that a philosophically-minded but skeptical materialist like myself can accept.” I think this is a fascinating topic, because I’ve been on a similar journey. The more I learn, the more […]
Positioning, by Ries and Trout
Amazon link This is a classic book in marketing, and therefore one of the books that Joel asked us to read. The main message of the book is that consumers have a limited mindspace. They can only pay attention to a certain number of things before they just lose track and don’t care any more. […]
Humility
I have been extraordinarily fortunate in my life to have things generally go as I hope they will. I got to go to the schools I wanted to, I got the jobs I wanted to, I’ve done the activities I wanted to. Things just seem to fall into place for me. Part of it is […]
Living forever
One of the topics that came up in conversation last night with Wes’s crowd was whether people wanted to live forever. Opinions varied; some people felt that without the pressure of death, we would never get around to doing anything at all – procrastination would always win out. Others felt strongly that life was too […]
Keeping busy
Gosh, what have I been up to since my last journal post two weeks ago? The day after that post, I went to see my first Dorkbot in NYC, which was excellent. I really enjoyed John Arroyo’s presentation on rhythmic research. He’s using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to analyze drum beat patterns in songs. Originally […]
The Passionate Self
I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of passion since my post about narcissism. It’s also come up in a variety of places, from conversations I’ve had with friends, to books I’m reading. I don’t know if this is one of those coincidental things, or because the universe is trying to tell me something, […]
New experiences
So in the spirit of my last post, let’s recount some new experiences of the last week, aka a “This is what I’ve been doing” post. Last Wednesday, I went to see a talk by Natalie Jeremijenko at the Whitney Museum (I got a free ticket through the dorkbot list), who I first saw speak […]
