May 2012
36 posts
joinsessions:
While many of us wonder just how much exercise we really need in order to gain health and fitness, a group of scientists in Canada are turning that issue on its head and asking, how little exercise do we need?
Read more here.
April 2012
32 posts
“Tracking nearly anything you do is alarming and humbling. The aggregates of our...”
– Tom MacWright (Quantified Self)
Take this on repeat with headphones, a coffee, and...
How to Build an Owl
jackcheng:
by Kathleen Lynch
Decide you must.
Develop deep respect for feather, bone, claw.
Place your trembling thumb where the heart will be: for one hundred hours watch so you will know where to put the first feather.
Stay awake forever. When the bird takes shape gently pry open its beak and whisper into it: mouse.
Let it go.
The Habit Onion →
habitlabs:
Layer 1: the habit you want to change
Layer 2: the habit of being consistent during different emotional states and environments
Layer 3: the habit of getting back up when you fall off the wagon
Almost all habit change philosophies focus entirely on the 1st layer of the habit onion, and assume that the other layers are healthy and thriving (and if they aren’t, just get them...
What I believe V1
The results of thinking about what I believe for a day (mentioned in this post). It’s incomplete, and subject to change whenever my brain decides to flip-flop on me.
On Morality
Gay marriage should be legal everywhere
Marijuana should be legal
Being good is in our nature (being evil requires misinformation or partial information)
Abortion should be legal
Assisted suicide should be...
My Sunday experiment: what do I believe?
I feel like stepping back a little from all of the responding and spending a little time thinking about what I believe these days. From religion to politics to technology to predictions about the future… there’s got to be something there below all of the opinions, reactions, and instincts, right?
My exercise for the day: make a list of things (big, small, obvious and crazy) that I...
“Don’t ignore your dreams; don’t work too much; say what you think; cultivate...”
– From the top of Paul Graham’s ToDo List. (via arainert)
“In article after article, one theme emerges from the media coverage of...”
– Why It’s OK to Let Apps Make You a Better Person - Evan Selinger - Technology - The Atlantic
A pretty great article about how we’re using technology to supplement weaknesses in our own willpower.
meta-decisions
me: [option A] is about hedging bets, [option B] is about going all in
me: if you use hedging bets logic, you'll end up with the hedging bets answer
me: if you use all-in logic, you'll get the all-in answer
me: the rationale you use to make the decision will determine the outcome
“Carving out a space for yourself online, somewhere where you can express...”
– Andy Baio (via austinkleon)
“This idea of labour being hidden in things, and the value of things arising from...”
– - Matt Webb quoting John Lancaster summarizing Marx.
This quote sorta just blew my mind. The word congealed, mostly.
Imagine labor as a substance that is collected in the things you spend time doing.
Imagine Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, etc not as websites or services or businesses, but as...
“What is the labour encoded in Instagram? It’s easy to see. Every “user” of...”
– Instagram as an island economy (11 Apr., 2012, at Interconnected)
There you have it: a generalized economic theory of social networks.
(via buzz)
I sort of love this metaphor.
“Facebook and Instagram are two distinct companies with two distinct...”
– Om Malik | Here is why Facebook bought Instagram (via courtenaybird)
It’s so interesting to think about what makes us love some things and only like others. What threatens love, and what makes it stronger? Staying true to yourself is a big part of it. And of course, loving back.
HOW DO WE CHANGE OURSELVES?
Two conflicting ideas that keep showing up for me:
Have a Freaking Goal (I both love and totally disagree with this post)
Free Will (I probably am a bit too infatuated with this book at the moment)
Simplified versions of the 2 conflicting ideas:
We aren’t gonna get any closer to our goals if we don’t have them
Making goals doesn’t get us any closer to our goals either
I...
On motivation
joinsessions:
Motivation — A mythical, precious commodity, rumored to make it easy to begin things. If only you had enough of it, the things you wanted to be done would get done.
I gave up on motivation years ago. As far as I’m concerned, if motivation is anything at all, it’s an undependable luxury. It’s a fleeting set of emotional circumstances that make a certain course of action a...
Urban Airship's Mobile Messaging Gets Smarter →
If you’re following the context-based reminders meme, this is big news. Of course it will be used for advertising more than for facilitating/reminding us of our intrinsic desires to live better lives… but the tech is the same on the back end and this is definitely a big step forward.
WHOA: 2 New Programs, now free!
Check it out!
habitlabs:
By popular demand, today we’re releasing Stretch Animal and Plank Animal!
Pushup Animal has been so well loved - and so effective it surprised even us - that we made two of the next most requested programs ANIMAL programs as well.
In Plank Animal, first learn how to plank (we’re talking about what yoga people call “dolphin plank” - not about this kind of planking),...
2 different kinds of personal assistants from the...
Which option would you rather have as a personal assistant:
An automated service that knows you better than you know yourself, and surfaces opportunities of serendipity at the right moments
A robot who is conscious and thinks of itself as an individual
Artificial Intelligence is all about achieving Option 2, but I think Option 1 is both more useful to us as humans, and easier to achieve...
“Put yourself out there and give yourself permission to suck. That’s not to say...”
– Michael Ian Black’s advice for those attempting comedy & other creative pursuits, as told to The Rumpus (via sarahspy)
This is a bit of a Catch-22. In order to give yourself permission to suck, you have to have made a consistent fool of yourself in the past (probably not intentionally), and...
no upside: Learn to code →
noupside:
But if you’ve decided you want to be “a programmer,” professionally, one or two online courses in Rails won’t get you there. You need strong algorithmic knowledge, an understanding of how a computer works, and a solid grasp of discrete mathematics. Years of development experience resulting in technical fluency is what it really takes; I have a CS degree, and I’m not a programmer.
I...
