ad7am

Mother London does it (greatness) again.

2009-12-24T00:10:00.001-05:00

The Honest $10000 SPAM.

Useful Find: an OS X character that sorts to the END of an alphabetical list

2009-11-05T12:13:00.003-05:00

It's been bothering me for years that I didn't know the answer to this question, and I finally took a few minutes to suss it out.

It's ⌥0. (That's Option+Zero.)

How To Show Boolean Filter Dropdown Menus in a Finder Window Search Field (i.e. Spotlight) : OS X 10.5 Leopard

2009-05-13T15:56:00.000-04:00

Open a Spotlight window by pressing Command+F. Or just type into the Finder Window's Search field. You’ll see a horizontal strip below the Finder toolbar, labeled Search. The Apple Human Interface Guidelines call this a scope bar. Beneath the scope bar should be a filter row with default scope buttons for Kind and Any. If you don’t see this filter row, press the + button on the scope bar.

When you have the filter row visible beneath the scope bar visible, press and HOLD THE OPTION KEY and the + button on the filter row will change to an … (ellipsis). Click the ellipsis button and a new filter row will appear. This new filter will allow you to set multiple Any/All/None filter rules (Boolean) to any of the predefined search attributes provided by Apple. If it’s a search you use often, save it for future use.

I'm an idiot. How could I not know about this??

Figured this might be useful to others as well...

Family Guy - O.J Simpson throws Stewie to Chris

2009-04-25T14:50:00.001-04:00

How to fix the dreaded "self-assigned IP address" in OSX.

2008-11-04T09:45:00.001-05:00

If you're on OSX, trash these files, empty the trash, and restart:

1) MacintoshHD/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/NetworkInterfaces.plist

2) MacintoshHD/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist

3) MacintoshHD/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist

4) MacintoshHD/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.network.identification.plist

Another great graduation speech, from an unlikely source: Patton Oswalt

2008-08-24T12:20:00.000-04:00

Worth sharing, I think, and I almost never send viral emails.
(Patton Oswalt is a comedian if you didn't know.)

from << http://www.pattonoswalt.com/index.cfm?page=spew&id=83 >>:

AND NOW, THE ACTUAL SPEECH
7.9.2008

Here's the actual speech I gave at my old high school on June 18th.   Well, more or less.   There were some extra, last-minute thoughts I threw in there.   I think the core idea of what I was trying to say was unchanged.

What a great group of kids.    What a bunch of smarty-pants, too.    Brainy bunch.   Very intimidating.   Their valedictorian had a 4.35 GPA.   That means she took extra classes in a PARALLEL DIMENSION, and then found a way to have the credits count in this one.

4.35?   She introduced me, and brought me onstage.   And then she shook hands with 2.71.   And then I said this:

First off, I want to thank the teachers and faculty of Broad Run High School for first considering and then inviting me to speak here.   It was flattering, I am touched and humbled, and you have made a grave mistake.

I'm being paid for this, right?   Oh, wait, there's some advice, right off the bat – always get paid.   If you make enough money in this world you can smoke pot all day and have people killed.

I'm sorry, that was irresponsible.

You shouldn't have people killed.

Boom! Marijuana endorsement eleven seconds into my speech! Too late to cancel me now!

It's dumb-ass remarks like that which kept me out of the National Honor Society and also made me insanely wealthy.   If I move to Brazil.

I graduated from Broad Run High School 21 years ago.   That means, theoretically, I could be – each and every one of you – your father.    And I'm speaking especially to the black and Asian students.

So now I'm going to try to give all of you some advice as if I contained fatherly wisdom, which I do not.   I contain mostly caffeine, Cheet-o dust, fear and scotch.

I know most of you worked very hard to get here today but guess what?   The Universe sent you a pasty goblin to welcome you into the world.   Were The Greaseman and Arch Campbell not available?

So, 1987.    That's when I got my diploma.   But I want to tell you something that happened the week before I graduated.   It was life-changing, it was profound, and it was deeper than I realized at the time.

The week before graduation I strangled a hobo.   Oh wait, that's a different story.   That was college.   I'm speaking at my college later this month. I've got both speeches here.    Let me sum up the college speech – always have a gallon of bleach in your trunk.

High school.   A week before I graduated high school I had dinner, in Leesburg, with a local banker who was giving me a partial scholarship. I still don't understand why.   Maybe he had me confused with another student, someone who hadn't written his AP English paper on comparisons between Jay Gatsby and Spider-Man.   But, I was getting away with it, and I love money and food, so double win.

And I remember, I'm sitting at this dinner, with a bunch of other kids from the other local high schools.   And I'm trying my pathetic best to look cool and mysterious, because I was 17 and so into the myth of myself.   Remember, this dinner and this scholarship was happening to me.

And I figured this banker guy was a nice guy but hey, I'm the special one at the table.   I had a view of the world, where I was eternally Bill Murray in Stripes.    I'd be the one with the quips and insights at this dinner.   This old man in a suit doesn't have anything to teach me beyond signing that check.   I've got a cool mullet and a skinny leather tie from Chess King.   And check out my crazy suspenders with the piano keys on them.   Have you ever seen Blackadder?   'Cuz I'll recite it.

And then this banker – clean-shaven, grey suit and vest – you'd never look twice at him on the street – he told me about The Five Environments.

He leans forward, near the end of the dinner, and he says to me, "There are Five Environments you can live in on this planet.   There's The City.   The Desert.   The Mountains.   The Plains.   And The Beach.

You can live in combinations of them.   Maybe a city in the desert, or in the mountains by the ocean. Or you could choose just one. Out in the plains somewhere, perhaps.

"But you need to get out there and travel, and figure out where you thrive.

"Some places you'll go to and you'll feel yourself wither.    Your brain will fog up, your body won't respond to your thoughts and desires, and you'll feel sad and angry.

"You need to find out which of the Five Environments are yours.   If you belong by the ocean, then the mountains will ruin you.   If you're suited for the blue solitude of the plains, then the city will be a tight, roaring prison cell that'll eat you alive.

He was right.   I've traveled and tested his theory and he was absolutely right.   There are Five Environments.   If you find the right combination, or the perfect singularity, your life will click…into…place.   You will click into place.

And I remember, so clearly, driving home from that dinner, how lucky I felt to have met someone who affirmed what I was already planning to do after high school.   I was going to roam and blitz and blaze my way all over the planet.

Anywhere but here.   Anywhere but Northern Virginia.    NoVa.   You know what a "nova" is?   It's when a white dwarf star gobbles up so much hydrogen from a neighboring star it causes a cataclysmic nuclear explosion.   A cosmic event.

Well, I was a white dwarf and I was definitely doing my share of gobbling up material.    But I didn't feel like any events in my life were cosmic.   The "nova" I lived in was a rural coma sprinkled with chunks of strip mall numbness.    I had two stable, loving parents, a sane and wise little brother and I was living in Sugarland Run, whose motto is, "Ooooh!   A bee!    Shut the door!"

I wanted to explode.   I devoured books and movies and music and anything that would kick open windows to other worlds real or imagined.   Sugarland Run, and Sterling and Ashburn and Northern Virginia were, for me, a sprawling batter's box before real experience began.

And I followed that banker's advice.   I had to get college out of the way but once I got my paper I lit out hard.

Oh this world.   Ladies and gentlemen, this world rocks and it never lets up.

I've seen endless daylight and darkness in Alaska.   I've swum in volcanic craters in Hawaii and saw the mystical green flash when the sun sinks behind the Pacific.   I got ripped on absinthe in Prague and watched the sun rise over the synagogue where the Golem is supposedly locked in the attic.   I stood under the creepy shadow of Christchurch Spitafields, in London's East End, and sank a pint next door at The Ten Bells, where two of Jack the Ripper's victims were last seen drinking.   I've fed gulls at the harbor in Galway, Ireland.   I've done impromptu Bloomsday tours of Dublin.

I cried my eyes out on the third floor of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, all those paintings that Vincent and his circle have to each other as gifts because they were all broke some cold Christmas long ago. I've eaten crocodile in the Laneways of Melbourne Australia and ortolans on the Left Bank of Paris, France.

I've been to Canada.

I've been to every state in this country.   I've been to hidden, subterranean restaurants in New York with the guys from Anthrax and eaten at L.A. taquieras with "Weird" Al Yankovic.   I held the guitar that Hendrix torched at Monterey Pop and watched Woodstock '99 burn to the ground.   I've lingered at the corner of Bush and Stockton in San Francisco where Miles Archer took a bullet in The Maltese Falcon, and brooded over the grave of H.P. Lovecraft in Providence, R.I.    I've hung out with Donny Osmond and Jim Goad, Suge Knight and Aimee Mann, Bill Hicks and Don Rickles.

I've done stand-up comedy in laundromats, soup kitchens and frat houses, and onstage at Lollapalooza and Coachella.   I've toured with bands, been to the Oscars and the Superbowl, and been killed in movies by vampires, forest fires and air-to-air missiles.

And I missed the banker's lesson.   100%, I completely missed it.

In my defense, he didn't even know he was teaching it.

Telling me about the 5 Environments and urging me to travel?   That was advice.    It wasn't a lesson.   Advice is everywhere in this world.   Your friends, family, teachers and strangers are all happy to give it.

A lesson is yours and yours alone.   Some of them take years to recognize and utilize.

My lesson was this – experience, and reward and glory are meaningless unless you're open and present with the people you share them with in the moment.

Let me go back to that dinner, 21 years ago.   There I was, shut off from this wise, amazing old man.   Then he zaps me with one of the top 5 pieces of information I've ever received in this life, and all I was thankful for was how it benefited me.

I completely ignored the deeper lesson which is do not judge, and get outside yourself, and realize that everyone and everything has its own story, and something to teach you, and that they're also trying – consciously or unconsciously – to learn and grow from you and everything else around them.   And they're trying with the same passion and hunger and confusion that I was feeling – no matter where they were in their lives, no matter how old or how young.

I'm not saying that you guys shouldn't go out there and see and do everything there is to see and do.   Go.   As fast as you can.    I don't know how much longer this world has got, to be honest.

All of you have been given a harsh gift. It's the same gift the graduating class of 1917, and 1938, and 1968 and now you guys got – the chance to enter adulthood when the world teeters on the rim of the sphincter of oblivion.    You're jumping into the deep end.   You have no choice but to be exceptional.

But please don't mistake miles traveled, and money earned, and fame accumulated for who you are.

Because now I understand how the miraculous, horrifying and memorable lurk everywhere.    But they're hidden to the kind of person I was when I graduated high school.   And now – and it's because of my traveling and living and some pretty profound mistakes along the way – they're all laid open to me.   They're mine for the feasting.    In the Sistine Chapel and in a Taco Bell.   In Bach's Goldberg Variations and in the half-heard brain dead chatter of a woman on her cell phone behind me on an airplane. In Baghdad, Berlin and Sterling, Virginia.

I think now about the amazing thunderstorms in the summer evenings.   And how – late at night, during a blizzard, you can stand outside and hear the collective, thumping murmur of a million snowflakes hitting the earth, like you're inside a sleeping god's thoughts.

I think of the zombie movies I shot back in the gnarled, grey woods and the sad, suburban punks I waited on at Waxie Maxie's.   I think of the disastrous redneck weddings I deejay'd for when I was working for Sounds Unlimited and the Lego spaceships my friends and I would build after seeing Star Wars.

I think about my dad, and how he consoled me when I'd first moved to L.A. and called him, saying I was going into therapy for depression, and how ashamed I was. And he laughed and said, "What the hell's to be ashamed of?" And I said, "Man, you got your leg machine-gunned in Vietnam. You never went to therapy. Humphrey Bogart never went to therapy." And my dad said, "Yeah, but Bogie smoked three cartons of cigarettes a day."   And how my mom came down to the kitchen when I was studying for my trig final, at 2 o'clock in the morning, and said, "Haven't you already been accepted to college?" And I said, "Yeah, but this test is really going to be hard." And she asked, "What's the test for again?" And I said, "Calculus" and she closed my notebook and said, "You'll never use this. Ever. Go to bed or watch a movie."   And how when I got my first ever acting gig, on Seinfeld, my brother sent me a postcard of Minnie Pearl, and he wrote on it, "Never forget, you and her are in the same profession."

I didn't realize how all of these places and people and events were just as crucial in shaping me as anything I roamed to the corners of the Earth to see.   And they've shaped you, and will shape you, whether you realize it now or later.   All of you are richer and wiser than you know.

So I will leave you with some final advice.   You'll decide later if this was a lesson.   And if you realize there was no lesson in any of this, then that was a lesson.

But I'd like all of you to enter this world, and your exploration of the Five Environments, better armed then I was.   And without a mullet.   Which I see you're all way ahead of me on.

First off: Reputation, Posterity and Cool are traps.   They'll drain the life from your life.   Reputation, Posterity and Cool = Fear.

Let me put that another way.   Bob Hope once said, "When I was twenty, I worried what everything thought of me.    When I turned forty, I didn't care what anyone thought of me.   And then I made it to sixty, and I realized no one was ever thinking of me."    And then he pooed his pants, but that didn't make what he said any less profound.

Secondly:   The path is made by walking.    And when you're walking that path, you choose how things affect you. You always have that freedom, no matter how much your liberty it curtailed.   You…get to choose…how things affect you.

And lastly, and I guarantee this.   It's the one thing I know 'cause I've experienced it:

There Is No Them.

I'm going to get out of your way now.    Get out there.   Let's see which one of you is up here in twenty years.    If you're lacking confidence, remember – I wouldn't have picked me.

If you want a new idea, shut the eff up inside.

2008-04-30T04:22:00.001-04:00

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/04/why-we-are-biggest-obstacle-to-our-own.html

If you want a new idea, you have to silence your inner critic. Your sense of right and wrong, of smart and stupid works by comparing new ideas to what you already know. Your sense of what would be a good fit for you works by comparing new things to who you already are. To learn and grow, you must let go of you, you must be young again, you must accept that you don't understand and seek to understand rather than explaining why it doesn't make any sense.

Steve Jobs on Microsoft

2008-04-28T17:45:00.001-04:00

Hell yeah.

Buying a car: How I saved $2400

2008-04-01T12:57:00.002-04:00

I bought my 2008 Nissan Rogue SL AWD from Jeff Brunson at Napoli Nissan in Milford CT. This is the exact vehicle I got:

with two things added (e.g. thrown in): a "tow hitch package" and a "rear bumper protector".

And I paid $25,700. That includes all dealer fees, but not tax and registration.

To get that price, I emailed this letter to dealers statewide:

As you can see, I got the going prices from Edmunds.com. The price I ended up paying was about $700 under invoice — and about $2400 less than the average price nationwide.

Jeff was a great guy. Tell him I sent you. But also promise him that while you'll drive as hard a bargain as I did, you won't be nearly as much of a pain in the butt.

Why Write

2008-04-01T12:46:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite quotes:

(from http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html )

Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well.

Video Animation: "I Guess You'll Do"

2008-03-24T23:46:00.001-04:00

I Guess Youll Do - Watch more free videos

Add keyboard shortcut to a command in a submenu

2008-03-15T15:03:00.001-04:00

HUGE hint for the keyboard-jockey:

Surprisingly, you can add a keyboard shortcut to a command that is one level down in a menu by simply pretending that it isn't. In other words, well, see the following example.

In Mail.app I wanted ⌘K to be my shortcut for adding a link in the body of a message. But the command is usually only available via the submenu Link > Add… under the Edit menu. On a whim, I went to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts, hit the plus sign and in the box for Menu Title entered "Add…" (no quotes, and using option-semicolon for the elipsis). It worked!

Of course, you probably need to restart Mail.app for this to work.

Skiing "SKI BONK" on Google Maps

2007-12-16T11:54:00.000-05:00

http://www.skibonk.com/ski/index.jsp?where=%5B42.65012181368022%2C44.82860426955568%2C-74.6575927734375%2C-70.0762939453125%5D%3A8&name=&_booleanHelper_onlyOpenResorts=onlyOpenResorts&_id=&_className=ski.user.SkiRequest

Great ad? I think so but you be the judge

2007-08-31T16:52:00.001-04:00

http://www.aglassandahalffullproductions.com/

Mormon Theology

2007-01-04T23:25:00.000-05:00

Thought you'd find this interesting

2006-10-10T17:52:00.000-04:00

From ThrowawayyourTV.com:

http://throwawayyourtv.com/2006/09/maps-of-war.html

Two reasons you MUST click the link:

2006-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00

1) Watch the whole video clip. Be proud. Then be ashamed. We get the government — and the press — we deserve.

2) Check out the photo on the upper left — yes that's Dan! ( What the hell happened?? ;p )

http://chiefofstaff.blogspot.com/2006/09/please-be-my-president-again.html

Closer w/ Trek

2006-09-18T22:45:00.000-04:00

Colbert's Wikiality (embedded)

2006-08-31T12:25:00.000-04:00

Colbert's Wikiality

2006-08-31T12:14:00.000-04:00

<< http://sis382.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_sis382_archive.html#115506235177801950 >>

Déjà Vu, Again and Again - New York Times

2006-08-16T16:25:00.000-04:00

July 2, 2006

Déjà Vu, Again and Again

By EVAN RATLIFF

Correction Appended

Pat Shapiro is a vibrant woman of 77, with silver hair, animated blue eyes and a certain air of elegance about her. She lives with her husband, Don, in a white two-story Colonial in Dover, Mass., a picturesque town set on the Charles River east of Boston. After 56 years of marriage, Pat and Don have a playful repartee that borders on "Ozzie and Harriet," and her still-sharp mind is on display in their running banter. "Don, we haven't had an 'icebox' in years," she'll say, interrupting one of his winding stories. "It's called a refrigerator."

Her short-term memory isn't quite what it used to be, she says, but it's nothing that impacts her life. "Her long-term memory is meticulous," Don says. "She can remember details from our trips to Europe years ago that I can't."

One day last December, however, an odd thing happened to Pat Shapiro. She was sitting in a car outside of a store with her daughter Susan, while another daughter, Allison, shopped inside. From the front seat Pat noticed a woman who seemed intensely familiar getting into a nearby car with a baby. "I saw her last time I was here," Pat remarked. "That baby did that exact same thing."

Looking up, Susan thought the comment strange; it seemed odd even that her mother had been to this store recently. Then Pat noticed another woman, smoking and chatting on a cellphone. "There's that woman who was smoking a cigarette, with the scarf on," she said.

This time, Susan protested. "Ma, the chances of the other woman, who doesn't know that woman, coming to the parking lot, smoking a cigarette —"

"No, they were there last time," Pat insisted. She couldn't place when exactly she'd been there before, but she felt positive she'd seen the women.

Allison returned, and as they left, Pat noticed two nuns on the sidewalk. They, too, she said, had certainly been there before.

"Mom, are you O.K.?" Susan asked.

"I feel fine," Pat replied.

Worried, Susan called her father later that day and asked if Pat had ever claimed to recognize strange people or places. "Oh, it happens every once in a while," he said. Susan asked if the episodes bothered him. "Only when she is determined to make me think that something has gone on that way," he said.

Later, though, Pat admitted to Susan that she was having such experiences frequently. As often as several times a day, in fact, she was struck with what sounded to Susan like an intense sensation of déjà vu, a familiarity with a place or situation that — logically, at least — she couldn't have encountered before. She would claim to recognize details of restaurants she'd never been to, and occasionally greeted total strangers as if she'd met them before. To Pat, in such moments, the familiarity didn't feel like déjà vu. It just felt like a memory. Like reality.

Take a moment to remember what happened during your day yesterday. Images and sounds begin to flash through your mind: people you spoke to, places you went, meals you ate. One scene cues up another, leading you on vivid tangents as you cycle through the day. Now ask yourself: how do you know that you are remembering those images as they happened, not altering or inventing them? The question sounds inane at first; you were there, after all. But what is it about those images that makes them authentic to you? Try inserting a completely false memory into your day, say that of running into a celebrity. You can picture it, sure, but it doesn't feel real. Why not?

Memory, like most systems we depend on continually, tends to fade into the background when it's working properly. Only when it fails or misleads us do we begin to ponder its mechanisms. The structure of memory has for centuries been one of psychology's most intractable mysteries. To the extent that science claimed to understand it at all, memory was seen as a kind of filing cabinet in which recollections were neatly stored, retrieved on demand and occasionally misplaced.

The research of the last three decades, however, has shattered that metaphor. The Canadian cognitive psychologist Endel Tulving struck a significant blow in the 1970's, when he postulated a distinction between episodic memories — our recollections about our own experiences — and semantic ones, involving facts and concepts. Knowing the capital of France is a semantic memory, for example; recalling your trip to Paris, an episodic one. When we access episodic memories, Tulving further observed, we don't just call up raw information. We actually re-experience the events themselves, and that feeling of recollection is part of what tells us that the memory is real. "Remembering," Tulving summarized in 1983, "is mental time travel, a sort of reliving of something that happened in the past."

Tulving and a group of fellow cognitive scientists — aided by advances in neuroimaging technology — began to tease apart the relationships between recollection and consciousness. They showed episodic memories to be a product of a complex network of signals, scattered across the brain and then reassembled, ad hoc, when the moment arises. Some of those signals, centered in an area of the brain's temporal lobes called the hippocampus, are now thought to be vital in creating the recollective experience that Tulving described.

Simultaneously, psychologists began to demonstrate the myriad ways in which memories can and do go wrong — not only when we forget, but also when we incorporate distorted or false information. At the University of California at Irvine, Elizabeth Loftus conducted an important series of studies in the 1990's, in response to a wave of "recovered memory" child-abuse cases, showing that false memories could be induced in research subjects. In 1995, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis demonstrated that people who were read a list of words like bed, rest, awake, dream, wake and slumber, when tested later, would often definitively remember hearing the word sleep. Research into post-traumatic stress disorder found that PTSD sufferers can be tortured by distorted memories of traumatic events. All of this work converges today on an ominous question: How is it we can be fooled by memories that are simply wrong? The answer lies not necessarily in the content of our memories but in the experience of reassembling and recalling them.

One way to try to understand that experience is by examining memory's tricks and illusions. "Memory doesn't just depend on a storehouse of knowledge, like putting cherries in a bowl and pulling out a cherry for each memory," says Morris Moscovitch, a prominent episodic-memory researcher at the University of Toronto. "What these unusual cases do is draw your attention to something that we only get a hint of in real life. This is a philosophical conundrum that has been struggled over for centuries: how is it that we distinguish ongoing experience from memory, and waking experience from dreams?"

Pat's daughter Susan began to scour the Internet, looking for information about her mother's repeated déjà vu episodes. She eventually came across the work of Chris Moulin, a neuropsychologist at Leeds University, in England. Moulin and several colleagues had published two scientific papers describing something they called persistent "déjà vécu" — literally translated, the feeling of having "already lived through" something. The cases seemed to match Pat's condition, and Susan sent Moulin an e-mail message asking for help.

Chris Moulin's office is located on the top floor of the psychology department at Leeds, in an oddly asymmetrical brick building at the center of campus. The room is cramped but spare, with a small collection of books in one corner, a pair of soccer cleats stashed under a chair and a set of framed Tintin cartoons on the wall. Moulin is 32 years old, with red, close-cropped hair, a matching beard and glasses and a penchant for jeans and sneakers. Today he's one of only a handful of scientists studying déjà vu-like illusions, but like most of us, he once thought of déjà vu as just an occasional, odd event in his own life. Translated literally from the French as "already seen," déjà vu can be, for some people, a strange and unsettling experience; for others, thrilling or even spiritual. Occurring at seemingly random times, lasting from a few seconds to a few minutes, it often comes with a feeling of approaching premonition. Not only does the situation feel familiar, but a vision of the future also seems just beyond the searchlights of your conscious mind.

The accepted scientific definition of déjà vu, put forth in 1983 by a Seattle-based psychiatrist named Vernon Neppe, is "any subjectively inappropriate impression of familiarity of the present experience with an undefined past." Beyond the definition, however, the scientific understanding of this "inappropriate familiarity" remains murky. Religion and parapsychology have offered their own explanations, citing déjà vu as evidence for everything from clairvoyance to past lives. Because the phenomenon is difficult if not impossible to reproduce in a laboratory, though, researchers like Moulin have traditionally had limited means to dispel the conventional wisdom. At the beginning of his career, he says, "I didn't know anything about déjà vu, and it didn't really interest me."

In December 2000, Moulin was a postdoctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Bristol, working at a memory clinic in a hospital nearby in Bath, when he received a strange referral letter from a local doctor. It described an 80-year-old Polish immigrant whose wife said that he was suffering from "frequent sensations of déjà vu." The doctor had suggested to the man — a former engineer identified by his initials, A.K.P. — that he set up an initial appointment at the memory clinic. A.K.P. responded that he had already gone and didn't see the point of going back. The problem was, as the doctor knew, he hadn't actually ever been there.

Intrigued, Moulin started visiting A.K.P. and his wife at home. "He was very witty and articulate, able to look after himself," Moulin recalls. But A.K.P.'s wife was frustrated by his déjà vu, and he experienced other mental problems, including memory loss and confabulation, the use of subconsciously invented stories to cover memory deficits. His déjà vu episodes seemed to be "practically constant," as Moulin and colleagues outlined in a 2005 paper in the journal Neuropsychologia:

He refused to read the newspaper or watch television because he said he had seen it before. However, A.K.P. remained insightful about his difficulties: when he said he had seen a program before and his wife asked him what happened next, he replied, "How should I know, I have a memory problem!" The sensation. . .was extremely prominent when he went for a walk — A.K.P. complained that it was the same bird in the same tree singing the same song.. . .When shopping, A.K.P. would say that it was unnecessary to purchase certain items, because he had bought the item the day before.

Searching the modern scientific literature, Moulin found one case that echoed A.K.P.'s, that of an 87-year-old woman, who, according to a brief journal article from 2001, "reported that she was continuously reliving the past and felt that a significant part of her daily experiences had happened before." Moulin's mentor, Martin Conway, a pioneer in the understanding of episodic memory, also recalled a paper by the Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter in the mid-1990's. Schacter had described B.G., a man in his 60's, who claimed to recognize people and situations he'd never encountered.

Those cases persuaded Moulin that A.K.P. was more than an anomaly, and the clinic began sending him any patients with conditions that sounded similar. A month later, a referral letter arrived for M.A., a 70-year-old woman with what the doctor described as pervasive déjà vu. M.A. also found newspapers and television overwhelmingly familiar, and had even quit playing tennis, claiming that she knew the outcome of every rally. Moulin quickly discovered that in contrast to ordinary déjà vu experiences, in which the sensation instantly seems misplaced, neither A.K.P. nor M.A. recognized that something odd was happening. To them, the experiences simply felt like memories. "When we have déjà vu, we don't act on it," Moulin says. "But these people refused to watch television, they stopped reading the newspaper." The patients were what cognitive scientists call "anosagnosic" — unaware of their condition. They also found situations to be more than just familiar; they believed that they were really recalling them, so much so that they invented memories to justify that belief. They were, to use Tulving's phrase, time traveling to a reality that had never existed.

The history of déjà vu is as much a literary tale as it is a scientific one. Writers and poets have long proved more astute observers of it than scientists, and mentions of déjà vu-like sensations date to St. Augustine, who wrote of "falsae memoriae" in A.D. 400. Sir Walter Scott described it as "a sense of pre-existence," and Dickens, Tolstoy and Proust each explored it in prose.

Among scientists, déjà vu has traveled under a variety of names, including "paramnesia" and "phantasms of memory." The first flurry of research on the topic occurred in France in the 1890's, when prominent psychologists debated fine distinctions between various paramnesias. At a scientific meeting in 1896, the neurologist F. L. Arnaud proposed that scientists unify their descriptions under a single term, "déjà vu." He also recounted the unusual case of Louis, a 34-year-old who had recovered from cerebral malaria. Louis, as the Cambridge psychiatrist German Berrios wrote in a summary of Arnaud's work, "showed 'the first symptoms characteristic of déjà vu' when he started claiming that he could recognize certain newspaper articles that he said he had read previously." Louis felt that he "recognized" nearly every experience, a sensation he described as "I am living in two parallel years." Arnaud even took Louis to a funeral (Louis Pasteur's, as it happened) to see if he would claim to have remembered it. He did.

With the rise of behaviorism in the 20th century, déjà vu research largely faded into obscurity. Freud postulated that the sensation was caused by the similarity of a present situation to a suppressed fantasy but declared the phenomenon too confusing to investigate. What studies have been done rely on questionnaires about past déjà vu experiences. Such surveys show that between 30 and 90 percent of people experience déjà vu at some point in their lifetime. Alan Brown, a psychologist at Southern Methodist University and the author of "The Déjà Vu Experience," the most comprehensive book on the topic, pegs the proportion at about two-thirds of the population.

Researchers suggest that déjà vu isn't experienced until the age of 8 or 9 at the earliest, indicating that the phenomenon may require a certain level of brain development to either experience or describe. But once déjà vu begins, it becomes more frequent through our teens and 20's, and is more likely to happen when we are tired or stressed. Surveys show that the episodes then decline with age, although scientists are uncertain why — and the experience of Moulin's patients demonstrates that sometimes the condition actually increases in old age.

In his book, Brown identifies as many as 30 plausible scientific explanations for the phenomenon, divided into "dual processing," "neurological," "memory" and "double perception" theories. Dual-processing explanations assert, essentially, that two normally separate brain processes are activated at wrong times. Imagine two heads of a tape player, one recording memory and the other playing it back. If the brain begins playing back while it's recording, the present might feel like a memory. Neurological explanations involve small electrical signals gone awry. If two signals carry information from the senses to the brain, the theory goes, a delay in the second signal might cause it to feel like a memory.

So-called memory explanations involve the brain's misunderstanding a similarity between the present situation and an actual, true memory. Encountering a chair that resembles one from your grandmother's living room, for example, could trigger a feeling that a new place is somehow familiar. Under "double perception" explanations, finally, the brain is momentarily distracted after it has already taken in part of a scene. When its attention returns to the scene fractions of a second later, it suddenly feels like a memory.

There's no guarantee that all déjà vu episodes have a single cause, and several of Brown's categories overlap. He says that, as with a condition like a stomachache, he "could easily be comfortable with four or five mechanisms." The essential feature in any déjà vu theory, though, is explaining the sensation. After all, déjà vu is much more than just familiarity. "You probably came into my office and thought, I've seen a desk lamp a bit like that," Moulin told me. "But it doesn't give you anything like déjà vu. You just think, Ah, yes, that's familiar. There's no startling sensation."

It was precisely that startling sensation that A.K.P. and M.A. seemed to lack during their déjà vu-like experiences. Moulin and Conway concluded that the patients must not be experiencing ordinary sensations of déjà vu, but what the researchers termed persistent déjà vécu. Their hypothesis rested on the understanding, established in the wake of Tulving's research, that episodic memories consist of two aspects: the information content, or "memory trace," and an accompanying experience of recollection. It's that experience, a little bit of consciousness attached to a memory, that lets us know that we are calling up something from the past. If someone experienced that feeling constantly, without any memory trace attached, they would feel — as Conway describes it — as if they were "remembering the present." In other words, déjà vécu.

Moulin set up a series of experiments to test the theory. In one, A.K.P., M.A. and 19 control subjects were shown a series of photos, some of random people and others of well-known celebrities. Later they were shown another series, containing a mixture of the old photos and new ones, and asked if each photo pictured either a famous person or someone they had been shown before. In another, subjects were read a series of words, followed by a mixture of those same words and new ones, and then asked which they had heard previously. The results were what Moulin had expected: compared with the control subjects, M.A. and A.K.P.'s false-positive rates were off the charts. They nearly always claimed to recognize faces and words they hadn't seen or heard. More important, they claimed not only to find the pictures and words familiar but also to actually remember seeing them. Often they even confabulated stories to justify those recollections. A.K.P. claimed that one random face was that of a local painter. "I know," he said, "because his tie is lower than it should be."

Brain scans of A.K.P. and M.A. revealed abnormal levels of atrophy, or cell death, in their temporal lobes. Moulin knew that epileptics whose seizures are centered in their temporal lobes often experience a minutes-long "dreamy state" similar to déjà vu prior to their seizures. Moulin and Conway concluded that their patients' déjà vécu was similarly located in the temporal lobes, in a "recollective experience circuit" that regulates the process of remembering. If the circuit was "continuously active," it would keep feeding the brain that feeling of recollection, without any real memory attached.

Could ordinary déjà vu be a minor version of the same thing, a brief misfire in a temporal-lobe circuit that sets off the feeling of remembering? "Somebody like A.K.P. shows that there is this sensation that is separate from memory," Moulin told me. "If his can go chronically wrong, ours can go momentarily wrong."

After hearing Pat Shapiro's story from Susan, I visited the Shapiros at their home in Dover. Pat warmly ushered me inside, and we sat in the couple's formal living room. She told me that her déjà vécu-like experiences started in the last two years, coming and going with no apparent pattern. Once, a nurse had come to the house to conduct a physical for insurance purposes. "The first thing I said," Pat told me, "was: 'So nice to see you! I haven't seen you in a long time!' " She laughed — as she did following a half-dozen other such tales — recalling that only later did she realize she'd never met the woman before. Generally, she said, such episodes didn't bother her.

I heard markedly similar accounts from a college counselor in Glasgow, Scotland, named Pam. Two years ago, Pam's 82-year-old mother began saying that the BBC was repeating television programs. She even called a repairman to examine her set. Soon she was complaining about the newspaper and eventually all kinds of situations. The week before I met with Pam at her office in Glasgow, she and her mother had been sitting in a cafe when a child began crying. "Mum said, 'She's always here, and always crying,' " Pam said. "I let it go, because I know it's not the case, and we go to the same place every week."

Like Pat, Pam's mother is in otherwise good health. "It's sad and frustrating, because I can't do anything for her," Pam said. "The only thing that I can do is research it and tell her that she is not the only one." Like Pat's daughter Susan, Pam found Moulin's papers and corresponded with him. Both women said that talking to their mothers about the research seemed to reduce both mother's and daughter's anxiety.

Moulin regularly receives e-mail messages from people experiencing something like déjà vécu, or from their relatives. The stories themselves begin to take on a familiar ring: the woman who turned in her library card because she felt she'd read everything on the shelves, the man on his first trip to Paris who felt he'd been to every part of the city. Moulin says there may be many other persistent déjà vécu sufferers, afraid to tell their doctors for fear of sounding crazy. The Bath clinic alone has found six new patients for a continuing study.

When it comes to linking those patients to run-of-the-mill déjà vu, however, Moulin's work is not without objections from the small community of researchers with an enduring interest in the subject. The psychiatrist Vernon Neppe, founder of the Pacific Neuropsychiatric Institute, says that he believes that Moulin's patients are not actually experiencing déjà vécu, claiming that they don't conform with the definition of déjà vu, of which déjà vécu is a subset. "The Moulin research is difficult because there is so much confabulation," he told me. "It's a different type of inappropriate familiarity."

Moulin says that he now regrets initially using the term déjà vu to describe the patients, as opposed to déjà vécu, the "ongoing" and "chronic" sensation. Still, he says, "That's what people come to their doctor and say: their husband or wife has got permanent déjà vu." Firmly establishing the experience of recollection that his patients exhibit, he says, will provide the theoretical underpinning for explanations of déjà vu — regardless of whether it is a real fragment of memory or a purely neurological glitch that sets it off.

Another objection comes from Art Funkhouser, a psychologist based in Switzerland who conducts déjà vu research and from whom Moulin and Conway borrowed the term déjà vécu. Funkhouser, who is currently analyzing data from a thousand respondents to an online déjà vu questionnaire, has complained to Moulin that using the word "chronic" will stigmatize déjà vu as a disease rather than a quirk of the human mind. "The people he is dealing with are being affected by various forms of dementia," he says. "I just wish that he would be a bit careful in how he talks about it, so that he doesn't give the impression that anybody who has this must be sick."

Moulin and Conway say that the sensation of memory that déjà vécu so aptly illustrates is just one of many "cognitive feelings," sensations that help us prioritize and act on our own thoughts. When those feelings go awry, they produce strange sensations. His latest experiments are designed to induce jamais vu — translated literally as "never seen" — the feeling that something familiar seems alien. Or take the aha! moment, a feeling you get upon solving a complicated problem. Aha! moments, which a team of researchers recently traced to activity in the temporal and frontal lobes of the brain, help us recognize a flash of insight. When we get the same feeling of insight without actually solving anything, we experience what's called presque vu, or "almost seen" — a misplaced sensation that everything makes sense. "I remember having it for cleaning my teeth," Moulin recalls, "thinking, Ah, yes, at the end of every day I clean my teeth! That just seems to have import. Like all life is cleaning teeth."

Trivial as they may sound, such cognitive feelings often guide our behavior, and glitches in them can have profound consequences. In his 2001 book, "The Seven Sins of Memory," the Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter explores the phenomenon of "misattributed memory," in which you remember some aspect of an event correctly but mistakenly recall the origin of the memory. Misattributions, says Schacter, "have been involved in a number of cases of wrongful conviction of individuals based on eyewitness testimony." The same subjective feeling of memory that led A.K.P. to believe his déjà vécu was real can trick eyewitnesses into believing flawed identifications, or fool research subjects into believing induced memories.

Conway also studies PTSD, in which patients are tortured by traumatic memories that may be laced with distortions that can serve to compound feelings of guilt and helplessness. Accident victims might distinctly remember a moment in which they could have turned the car just to the left and avoided a collision, even if such a moment never occurred. "The recollective experience is the glue that sticks this all together," Moulin says. "People don't think they are making up these images. They think they are remembering them." Cognitive therapists, by understanding the recollective experience evidenced by déjà vécu, may be able to help persuade such patients that many of their negative images aren't real. The same is true for obsessive-compulsive disorder. "In order to cure those people, you have to train them about their memory," Moulin says. "They keep going back and checking the door, for instance, because they don't remember well enough having locked it. You have to say: 'Well, your memory isn't like that. It's just not that good.' " In other words, there's a limit to what you can expect from your memory.

All of which naturally raises the question: Why are humans cursed with such imperfect memories? "Human cognition is incredibly, incredibly complicated," Conway says, "and you are bound to get glitches along the way. The question really is, How costly are those glitches? In terms of survival, having experiences of déjà vu now and again probably isn't such a big deal. But if you have a déjà vu all the time, then, like A.K.P., you can't operate effectively in the world."

Such small glitches might even have proved evolutionarily valuable, giving us insight into our own minds. "One of the things about déjà vu in your daily life," Conway says, "is it does leave you wondering for about three weeks afterward what happened." Ordinary déjà vu is so striking precisely because our intellect is fighting against the feeling of recollection. "It's an immutable feeling," Moulin says, "but it's not immune to reason."

Salman Rushdie once observed that memory has its "own special kind" of truth. "It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies and vilifies also," he wrote in "Midnight's Children," "but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own." To what extent persistent déjà vécu itself constitutes a challenge to a person's sanity, or even counts as a disorder, seems to vary. A.K.P. and M.A. eventually withdrew from the world, stopped watching television or even leaving their homes. But they also suffered from other age-related cognitive disorders. Moulin is still seeking an effective treatment for such patients, as both anti-Alzheimer's and antipsychotic drugs have shown no effect. But he suspects that the condition could be helped by therapeutic techniques. Preparing déjà vécu patients for novel situations they are about to encounter, he says, could actually help reduce the feeling that they've already experienced them.

Ordinary déjà vu, of course, isn't a disease, and even déjà vécu-like conditions seem to vary in severity. "I think the persistent or continuous déjà vu that Moulin is looking at is found in people with normal function who are not disturbed or out of mainstream," Alan Brown says.

Pat Shapiro, to all appearances, is such a person. She lives a rich life, her mind intact, and she claims to be mostly unbothered by her condition. Her daughter Susan worries that the episodes tire her mother out, as she tries to puzzle out when she has been somewhere or met someone in the past. Mostly, the family tries to laugh about the incidents. "We're lucky that she can have a sense of humor about it," Susan says.

One afternoon in Dover, in the midst of relating her déjà vu experiences, Pat Shapiro paused and took off her glasses, looking at me intently. "I have to say, you look so much like my grandson," she said. "He has a little bit longer hair, but you look so similar. When I saw you get out of the car I just thought, Oh!"

"But wait," I asked, "couldn't that have just been a déjà vu?"

"No, it was just that you looked so much like him," she said. My face must have betrayed a hint of skepticism, and she quickly moved on.

Don came in a few minutes later, and soon he, too, paused. "I have to tell you one other thing," he said. "You look so much like our grandson, it's amazing." I looked at Pat, who smiled knowingly. Later, at Susan's house, she showed me a photo of the grandson in question. It was like seeing an image of myself, from a time that never happened.

Evan Ratliff is a writer in San Francisco and the co-author of "Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World." This is his first article for the magazine.

Correction: July 16, 2006

An article on July 2 about déjà vécu, a syndrome that causes a feeling similar to déjà vu, misstated the location of the city where one woman who suffers from it lives. Dover, Mass., is southwest of Boston, not east.

Hmm...

2006-08-11T10:37:00.000-04:00

10.4: Fix PowerPC apps that fail to launch on Intel Macs- NOTE TO SELF

2006-08-09T23:18:00.000-04:00

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060609174903641

10.4: Fix PowerPC apps that fail to launch on Intel Macs

Mon, Jun 12 '06 at 7:30AM PDT • Submitted by gdbjr

I recently picked up a new MacBook, and while most of the applications I use have gone Universal, some have not. Most notable among the "not yet" entries is Microsoft Office. Most of the time it runs fine, but occasionally, the Office applications will refuse to start. I get a few bounces in the dock, and the then the application quits.

I had been rebooting my MacBook to solve get around this problem, but that is a huge pain. I have found that if my PowerPC application won't run, I simply force quit the translated process from the Activity Monitor, and then launch the offending application again. The application will start up, and the translated process restarts automatically.

Killing this process seems to have no effect on any currently-running PowerPC applications -- so it seems the translated process is not needed to use a PowerPC app that is already running.

[robg adds: I haven't had any "won't start" issues, but I did try killing the translated process with Word running, and didn't notice any ill effects.]

Check out this article from Wired, that came out just after the Apple/NeXT merger was announced.

2006-08-07T01:55:00.000-04:00

Wow.

Advice for Apple from 1997

http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple.html

Fun, huh?

Penn & Teller Call Bullshit on Creationism

2006-08-07T01:15:00.000-04:00

http://www.vsocial.com/v/44f451323fe64bd5223c00c1eb412d7f

Life After Earth: Imagining Survival Beyond This Terra Firma - from NYT

2006-08-02T22:26:00.000-04:00

When the dust settles after World War III, or World War IX, humanity will still want to grow pineapples, rice, coffee and other crops. That is why in June on the island of Svalbard in the Norwegian Arctic, all five Scandinavian prime ministers met to break ground on a $4.8-million “doomsday vault” that will stockpile crop seeds in case of global catastrophe.

While it boasts the extra safety of Arctic temperatures, the seed bank is just the latest life-preservation plan to reach reality, joining genetic banks like the Frozen Ark, a British program that is storing DNA samples from endangered species like the scimitar-horned oryx, the Seychelles Frégate beetle and the British field cricket.

To a certain group preoccupied with doomsday, these projects are laudable but share a deep flaw: they are Earth-bound. A global catastrophe — like a collision with an asteroid or a nuclear winter — would have to be rather tame in order not to rattle the test tubes in the various ark-style labs around the world. What kind of feeble doomsday would leave London safe and sound?

Cue the Alliance to Rescue Civilization, a group that advocates a backup for humanity by way of a station on the Moon replete with DNA samples of all life on Earth, as well as a compendium of all human knowledge — the ultimate detached garage for a race of packrats. It would be run by people who, through fertility treatments and frozen human eggs and sperm, could serve as a new Adam and Eve in addition to their role as a new Noah.

Far from the lunatic fringe, the leaders of the alliance have serious careers: Robert Shapiro, the group’s founder, is a professor emeritus and senior research scientist in biochemistry at New York University; Ray Erikson runs an aerospace development firm in Boston and has been a NASA committee chair; Steven M. Wolfe, as a Congressional aide, drafted and helped pass the Space Settlement Act of 1988, which mandated that NASA plan a shift from space exploration to space colonization, and was executive director of the Congressional Space Caucus; William E. Burrows, an author of several books on space, is the director of the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program at N.Y.U.

President Bush has already proposed a Moon base. “He just needs to be told what it’s good for,” Dr. Shapiro said. Dr. Shapiro has written a number of books on the origins of life on Earth, as well as “Planetary Dreams: The Quest to Discover Life Beyond Earth,” where he unveiled the civilization rescue project.

In 1999, the same year the book came out, Dr. Shapiro wrote an essay with Mr. Burrows for Ad Astra, an astronomy journal. There, they formally laid out their plan for the rescue alliance, beginning by warning that “the most enduring pictures to come back from the Apollo missions were not of astronauts cavorting on the Sea of Tranquillity, nor even of the lunar landscape itself.”

“They were the haunting views of Earth, seen for the first time not as a boundless and resilient colossus of land and water,” they continued, “but as a startlingly vulnerable lifeboat precariously plying a vast and dangerous sea: a ‘blue marble’ in a black void.” A conversation shortly after the essay was published, Dr. Shapiro recalled, resounded with the earnest imagination of science fiction drama:

Dr. Shapiro: “We’ve got to use space to protect humanity!”

Mr. Burrows: “By God! Yes!”

The concept is not new, but there is some fresh momentum. Mr. Burrows’s new book, “The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth,” is due out this month. And the physicist Stephen W. Hawking, who is not part of the group, began arguing this summer that human survival depends on leaving Earth.

The mission of the Alliance to Rescue Civilization has also attracted the support of Col. Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, who now devotes much of his time to the idea of Martian colonization.

“It takes a big reason to go to the Moon, because, frankly, it’s a lousy place to be,” Colonel Aldrin said in a telephone interview. “But this is exactly the kind of planning as a human race we need to secure our future.

“But the A.R.C. idea isn’t ahead of its time because it’s needed right now. It’s a reasonable thing to do with our space technology, sending valuable stuff to a reliable off-site location. NASA is certainly not bending backwards to do it. It’s the private people like A.R.C.”

Born and raised within walking distance of the Bronx Zoo — and he walked that distance often — Dr. Shapiro developed an early interest in biodiversity. He frets over the frailty of civilization and the planet, but he is not a pessimist. He compares the Moon-base idea to a safe-deposit box.

“It makes sense to protect the things you value,” he said. “But we, as a civilization, we don’t have anything like that.” The trouble with doomsday, Dr. Shapiro argues, is that it is almost always rendered in popular culture as grandiose, though in reality, many minor incidents present substantial everyday threats.

In 1918, an influenza strain killed some 30 million people; a possible new bird flu strain spurs contemporary panic. In January 2003, a computer virus shut down airlines, banks and governments. That same year, a tree fell on power lines outside Cleveland, resulting in a blackout for much of the Northeast. Doomsday can be understated.

“But I’m not here to predict doomsday; I’m here for sanity,” Dr. Shapiro said. “When we’ve gained what we’ve gained, we should fight to keep it.

“And, worst-case scenario, if it’s all for nothing, we’ll have a nice museum.”

High school valedictorian's speech condemns U.S. education system

2006-07-06T01:35:00.000-04:00

SPEECH of the Student
Published: Thursday, June 22, 2006
Updated: Thursday, June 22, 2006

Four years ago, we gathered here for an education. Today marks a milestone in that pursuit, a culmination of four years of learning, growth and shared memories. At such times, it is appropriate to reflect on years past, to examine what we have done and what we have learned. Today I am charged with that difficult task, and I would like to thank the school for the opportunity to stand before my peers and reflect on our time together.

Education can be defined a number of different ways. For me, it is the product of human curiosity. Intellectual thought, as far as I can tell, is nothing but the asking and answering of questions. In my reflection, however, and I have reflected on this a great deal, I found that many of life’s most important questions are ignored here. What is the right way to live? What is the ideal society? What principles should guide my behavior? What is success, what is failure? Is there a creator, and if so, should we look to it for guidance? These are often dismissed as questions of religion, but religion is not something opposed to rationality, it simply seeks to answer such questions through faith. The separation of church and state is, of course, important, but it should never be a reason for intellectual submission or suppression of any kind. Ethics — it is what defines us — as individuals, as a society — and yet it is never discussed, never explained, never justified. Rousseau, Descartes, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Aquinas, nearly every major writer I’ve encountered devotes time to the subject. And it’s not as if these questions are without practical concern, that they are less immediately relevant than science for instance. Our laws, our institutions and all our actions are a reflection of our ethics. Our own society owes itself to the writers of the enlightenment, but we never probe their work — we fail to espouse the movement’s central principle, doubt — doubt everything. We study what is, never why, never what should be. For that reason, the education we have received here is not only incomplete, it is entirely hollow.

What’s more, this same lack of focus can be found in many of the subjects we do study. We approach history as though it were a story, endlessly cataloging every major character or event. But the details of that story are insignificant — what is significant is the progression of ideas. A study of history should get some sense of how the society he sees around him developed from those built thousands of years ago, what ideas changed and what changed them. When humanist scholars looked into ancient Rome during the Renaissance, they searched for moral examples, for ideas. They didn’t mull on every single daily event. They were inspired, and they transformed society. History is not an end in itself; it should act as a tool for greater thought.

But it’s not only history. I’ve taken a literature class nearly every year of my life, but never has a question so basic as “What is good writing?” come up. Literary technique, what should be the focus of the class, is never discussed. How does an author develop plot? How can an author control mood or tone in his writing? What is the advantage of one author’s methods over another’s? Such matters are never discussed. We read for the sake of reading, to talk about our interpretations in class as though we were in a book club. But no attention is paid to why we read the books we do, what makes them so special. And this pattern, grade for the sake of a grade, work for the sake of work, can be found everywhere.

Ladies and gentlemen, the spirit of intellectual thought is lost. I speak today not to rant, complain or cause trouble, and certainly not to draw attention to myself. I have accomplished nothing and I am nothing. I know that. Rather, I was moved by the countless hours wasted in those halls. Today, you should focus on your child or loved one. This is meant to be a day of celebration, and if I’ve taken away from that, I’m sorry. But I know how highly this community values learning, and I urge you all to re-evaluate what it means to be educated. I care deeply about everyone here, and it is only our fulfillment I desire. I will leave now so that the ceremony can go on. Again, my deepest apologies, God help me.

My first skydive! (6/11/06)

2006-06-15T22:53:00.000-04:00

The view over the jump site @ 14,000 ft.

And when the chute opened @ 6000 ft.

This is the northward view. I could see Mt. Washington in nothern New Hampshire!

Finally, the southward view was even more exicting. Yes, I could see the Atlantic Ocean on the other side of Long Island.

All told:
altitude = 14,000 feet = over 2.5 miles
±65 seconds in freefall
~125 mph avg
±160 mph max in the Superman dive
plus over five more minutes under the canopy.

13 things that do not make sense

2006-01-03T15:53:00.000-05:00

http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=mg18524911.600

How to rip DVD's

2005-12-29T22:53:00.000-05:00

The Mac process is rather painless if you don't mind spending $40 for
Roxio Popcorn (or Toast, for $60). An alternative way which is free
involves converting your VIDEO_TS folder into a disk image which can
be burned from the Finder. The conversion is handled by an
applescript available from here:
http://lonestar.utsa.edu/llee/applescript/dvdimager.html
They have very clear and simple instructions on how to use their
method and the steps to take to burn a DVD movie. You do need to use
MacTheRipper (see below) to create the VIDEO_TS folder before using
this method.

Back to the easiest way (Popcorn).
1. Download MacTheRipper (Google for it or go to macupdate.com...
it's a freebie.)
2. Insert your original DVD, and using MTR, choose "Main Feature
Extraction". Click Start. Wait until done.
3. Run Popcorn, choose VIDEO_TS Folder under Formats, and drag the
VIDEO_TS folder created by MTR into Popcorn's main window.
4. Insert a blank DVD and click Start button in Popcorn. Wait. If the
VIDEO_TS folder is too large to fit on one DVD, Popcorn will re-
encode it to fit.
5. Go play your movie.

Hmm... Hacking sleep from hackaday.com

2005-12-01T00:12:00.000-05:00

Apple Ad thinkdifferent.mov

2005-11-17T13:37:00.000-05:00

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/redlightrunner/thinkdifferent.mov

Brilliant! Mp3 experiment in Central Park

2005-11-09T01:27:00.000-05:00

http://www.improveverywhere.com/mp3ex2.mov

Was this Steph Oestreich?

2005-11-09T01:23:00.000-05:00

http://movies.collegehumor.com/items/2005/07/collegehumor.248340.mov

To Be Read: The Attention Economy & more articles following on bubblegeneration.com

2005-11-09T00:58:00.000-05:00

http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2005/11/attention-economy-across-
consumer.cfm

Job criteria = decent life criteria

2005-11-03T14:49:00.000-05:00

http://communicationnation.blogspot.com/2005/08/are-you-one-of-us.html

For Dad?

2005-11-03T13:43:00.000-05:00

<< http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001013.php >> Sun USX Recumbent Tricycle

Del.icio.us Tool Collection

2005-10-27T18:33:00.000-04:00

Quick Online Tips: Absolutely Del.icio.us - Complete Tool Collection

deeje.com/musings: "Tag This" for NetNewsWire

2005-10-27T18:32:00.000-04:00

deeje.com/musings: "Tag This" script for NetNewsWire

Backdoor & Trap Door References

2005-10-27T18:31:00.000-04:00

HOWTO Backup Your DVD Movies

2005-10-27T02:37:00.000-04:00

HOWTO Backup Your DVD Movies

great resume example

2005-10-27T01:52:00.000-04:00

Sing It, Brother (and spell it correctly!): Tips for applying to a job

2005-10-25T11:02:00.000-04:00

SCARY! - Majority of Americans Reject Theory of Evolution

2005-10-24T18:55:00.000-04:00

NEW YORK (Oct. 23) - Most Americans do not accept the theory of evolution. Instead, 51 percent of Americans say God created humans in their present form, and another three in 10 say that while humans evolved, God guided the process. Just 15 percent say humans evolved, and that God was not involved.
These views are similar to what they were in November 2004 shortly after the presidential election.
This question on the origin of human beings, asked both this month and in November 2004, offered the public three alternatives: 1. Human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, and God did not directly guide this process; 2. Human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, but God guided this process; or 3. God created human beings in their present form.
The results were not much different between the answers to that question and those given when a specific timeline was included in the final alternative: God created human beings in their present form within the last 10,000 years.
Americans most likely to believe in only evolution are liberals (36 percent), those who rarely or never attend religious services (25 percent), and those with a college degree or higher (24 percent).
White evangelicals (77 percent), weekly churchgoers (74 percent) and conservatives (64 percent), are mostly likely to say God created humans in their present form.
Still, most Americans think it is possible to believe in both God and evolution. Sixty-seven percent say this is possible, while 29 percent disagree. Most demographic groups say it is possible to believe in both God and evolution, but just over half of white evangelical Christians say it is not possible.
Opinions on this question are tied to one’s views on the origin of human beings. Those who believe in evolution, whether guided by God or not, overwhelmingly think it is possible to believe in both God and evolution – 90 percent say this. However, people who believe God created humans in their present form are more divided: 48 percent think it possible to believe in both God and evolution, but the same number disagrees.
This poll was conducted among a nationwide random sample of 808 adults, interviewed by telephone October 3-5, 2005. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus four percentage points.

25 Words That Can Hurt Your Resume- Career Advice Article

2005-10-20T11:16:00.000-04:00

MSN Careers - 25 Words That Can Hurt Your Resume- Career Advice Article

Instead of... "Experience working in a fast-paced environment"
Try... "Registered 120+ third-shift emergency patients per night"

Instead of... "Excellent written communication skills"
Try... "Wrote jargon-free User Guide for 11,000 users"

Instead of... "Team player with cross-functional awareness"
Try... "Collaborated with clients, A/R and Sales to increase speed of receivables and prevent interruption of service to clients."

Instead of... "Demonstrated success in analyzing client needs"
Try... "Created and implemented comprehensive needs assessment mechanism to help forecast demand for services and staffing."

The worst offenders
It’s good to be hard-working and ambitious, right? The hiring manager won't be convinced if you can't provide solid examples to back up your claims. Bennett suggests being extra-careful before putting these nice-sounding but empty words in your résumé.

∗ Aggressive
∗ Ambitious
∗ Competent
∗ Creative
∗ Detail-oriented
∗ Determined
∗ Efficient
∗ Experienced
∗ Flexible
∗ Goal-oriented
∗ Hard-working
∗ Independent
∗ Innovative
∗ Knowledgeable
∗ Logical
∗ Motivated
∗ Meticulous
∗ People person
∗ Professional
∗ Reliable
∗ Resourceful
∗ Self-motivated
∗ Successful
∗ Team player
∗ Well-organized

Nerve.com - I Did It For Science: Princess Reform School by Rev. Jen Miller

2005-10-20T10:52:00.000-04:00

Hmm...

HOWTO Rip DVD Movies To Your iPod

2005-10-20T10:51:00.000-04:00

Power Companies Enter the High-Speed Internet Market - New York Times

2005-10-18T10:00:00.000-04:00

This is going to be huge.

Great idea! www.thebubbleproject.com

2005-10-17T02:31:00.000-04:00

http://www.thebubbleproject.com

I love old maps, especially this ancient mystery, the Piri Reis Map

2005-10-17T01:22:00.000-04:00

World Mysteries - Strange Artifacts - Piri Reis Map

The MDI Air Car - the world's cleanest car.

2005-10-17T00:59:00.000-04:00

Brilliant! Management: The Daily Five Minutes

2005-10-16T04:34:00.000-04:00

Matsushita unveils chip for broadband link

2005-10-06T19:26:00.000-04:00

if only... won't hold my breath, but it is the grail...

2005-10-06T12:55:00.000-04:00

The Physics of Extra-Terrestrial Civilizations:
How advanced could they possibly be? By Michio Kaku

Interesting. Hopefully I'll read it through one day soon.

2005-09-30T19:03:00.000-04:00

One Blogger's Very Thorough Total Cost of Ownership Analysis of Switching to Apple's Platform (Hardware & Software)

Cluetrain Manifesto

2005-09-27T00:22:00.000-04:00

We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings — and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it.

95 Theses

1. Markets are conversations.

2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.

3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

8. In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.

9. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.

10. As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.

11. People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.

12. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

13. What's happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called "The Company" is the only thing standing between the two.

14. Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.

15. In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.

16. Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.

17. Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.

18. Companies that don't realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.

19. Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.

20. Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

21. Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.

22. Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.

23. Companies attempting to "position" themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their market actually cares about.

24. Bombastic boasts—"We are positioned to become the preeminent provider of XYZ"—do not constitute a position.

25. Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.

26. Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.

27. By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay.

28. Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market might see what's really going on inside the company.

29. Elvis said it best: "We can't go on together with suspicious minds."

30. Brand loyalty is the corporate version of going steady, but the breakup is inevitable—and coming fast. Because they are networked, smart markets are able to renegotiate relationships with blinding speed.

31. Networked markets can change suppliers overnight. Networked knowledge workers can change employers over lunch. Your own "downsizing initiatives" taught us to ask the question: "Loyalty? What's that?"

32. Smart markets will find suppliers who speak their own language.

33. Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. It can't be "picked up" at some tony conference.

34. To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.

35. But first, they must belong to a community.

36. Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.

37. If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.

38. Human communities are based on discourse—on human speech about human concerns.

39. The community of discourse is the market.

40. Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.

41. Companies make a religion of security, but this is largely a red herring. Most are protecting less against competitors than against their own market and workforce.

42. As with networked markets, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company—and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.

43. Such conversations are taking place today on corporate intranets. But only when the conditions are right.

44. Companies typically install intranets top-down to distribute HR policies and other corporate information that workers are doing their best to ignore.

45. Intranets naturally tend to route around boredom. The best are built bottom-up by engaged individuals cooperating to construct something far more valuable: an intranetworked corporate conversation.

46. A healthy intranet organizes workers in many meanings of the word. Its effect is more radical than the agenda of any union.

47. While this scares companies witless, they also depend heavily on open intranets to generate and share critical knowledge. They need to resist the urge to "improve" or control these networked conversations.

48. When corporate intranets are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like the conversation of the networked marketplace.

49. Org charts worked in an older economy where plans could be fully understood from atop steep management pyramids and detailed work orders could be handed down from on high.

50. Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.

51. Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.

52. Paranoia kills conversation. That's its point. But lack of open conversation kills companies.

53. There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One with the market.

54. In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Almost invariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete notions of command and control.

55. As policy, these notions are poisonous. As tools, they are broken. Command and control are met with hostility by intranetworked knowledge workers and generate distrust in internetworked markets.

56. These two conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other's voices.

57. Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.

58. If willingness to get out of the way is taken as a measure of IQ, then very few companies have yet wised up.

59. However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online perceive companies as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.

60. This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies.

61. Sadly, the part of the company a networked market wants to talk to is usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, of language that rings false—and often is.

62. Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.

63. De-cloaking, getting personal: We are those markets. We want to talk to you.

64. We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block with eye candy but lacking any substance.

65. We're also the workers who make your companies go. We want to talk to customers directly in our own voices, not in platitudes written into a script.

66. As markets, as workers, both of us are sick to death of getting our information by remote control. Why do we need faceless annual reports and third-hand market research studies to introduce us to each other?

67. As markets, as workers, we wonder why you're not listening. You seem to be speaking a different language.

68. The inflated self-important jargon you sling around—in the press, at your conferences—what's that got to do with us?

69. Maybe you're impressing your investors. Maybe you're impressing Wall Street. You're not impressing us.

70. If you don't impress us, your investors are going to take a bath. Don't they understand this? If they did, they wouldn't let you talk that way.

71. Your tired notions of "the market" make our eyes glaze over. We don't recognize ourselves in your projections—perhaps because we know we're already elsewhere.

72. We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.

73. You're invited, but it's our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!

74. We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.

75. If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.

76. We've got some ideas for you too: some new tools we need, some better service. Stuff we'd be willing to pay for. Got a minute?

77. You're too busy "doing business" to answer our email? Oh gosh, sorry, gee, we'll come back later. Maybe.

78. You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.

79. We want you to drop your trip, come out of your neurotic self-involvement, join the party.

80. Don't worry, you can still make money. That is, as long as it's not the only thing on your mind.

81. Have you noticed that, in itself, money is kind of one-dimensional and boring? What else can we talk about?

82. Your product broke. Why? We'd like to ask the guy who made it. Your corporate strategy makes no sense. We'd like to have a chat with your CEO. What do you mean she's not in?

83. We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.

84. We know some people from your company. They're pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you're hiding? Can they come out and play?

85. When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn't have such a tight rein on "your people" maybe they'd be among the people we'd turn to.

86. When we're not busy being your "target market," many of us are your people. We'd rather be talking to friends online than watching the clock. That would get your name around better than your entire million dollar web site. But you tell us speaking to the market is Marketing's job.

87. We'd like it if you got what's going on here. That'd be real nice. But it would be a big mistake to think we're holding our breath.

88. We have better things to do than worry about whether you'll change in time to get our business. Business is only a part of our lives. It seems to be all of yours. Think about it: who needs whom?

89. We have real power and we know it. If you don't quite see the light, some other outfit will come along that's more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with.

90. Even at its worst, our newfound conversation is more interesting than most trade shows, more entertaining than any TV sitcom, and certainly more true-to-life than the corporate web sites we've been seeing.

91. Our allegiance is to ourselves—our friends, our new allies and acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Companies that have no part in this world, also have no future.

92. Companies are spending billions of dollars on Y2K. Why can't they hear this market timebomb ticking? The stakes are even higher.

93. We're both inside companies and outside them. The boundaries that separate our conversations look like the Berlin Wall today, but they're really just an annoyance. We know they're coming down. We're going to work from both sides to take them down.

94. To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.

95. We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

2005-09-23T17:58:00.000-04:00

The 10 Secrets of a Master Networker
From: Inc. Magazine, Jan 2003 | By: Tahl Raz

Keith Ferrazzi needs two PalmPilots to keep track of all his contacts, people like Bill Clinton and Michael Milken. But there's far more to cracking the inner circle of the power elite than just taking names...

2005-09-23T17:54:00.000-04:00

Ya Gotta Read This: Does the Truth Lie Within? - New York Times

...It was also the Stone Age that informed his system of weight control. Over the years, he had tried a sushi diet, a tubular-pasta diet, a five-liters-of-water-a-day diet and various others. They all proved ineffective or too hard or too boring to sustain. He had by now come to embrace the theory that our bodies are regulated by a "set point," a sort of Stone Age thermostat that sets an optimal weight for each person. This thermostat, however, works the opposite of the one in your home. When your home gets cold, the thermostat turns on the furnace. But according to Roberts's interpretation of the set-point theory, when food is scarcer, you become less hungry; and you get hungrier when there's a lot of food around.
This may sound backward, like telling your home's furnace to run only in the summer. But there is a key difference between home heat and calories: while there is no good way to store the warm air in your home for the next winter, there is a way to store today's calories for future use. It's called fat. In this regard, fat is like money: you can earn it today, put it in the bank and withdraw it later when needed.
During an era of scarcity - an era when the next meal depended on a successful hunt, not a successful phone call to Hunan Garden - this set-point system was vital. It allowed you to spend down your fat savings when food was scarce and make deposits when food was plentiful. Roberts was convinced that this system was accompanied by a powerful signaling mechanism: whenever you ate a food that was flavorful (which correlated with a time of abundance) and familiar (which indicated that you had eaten this food before and benefited from it), your body demanded that you bank as many of those calories as possible.

Roberts understood that these signals were learned associations - as dependable as Pavlov's bell - that once upon a time served humankind well. Today, however, at least in places with constant opportunities to eat, these signals can lead to a big, fat problem: rampant overeating.

So Roberts tried to game this Stone Age system. What if he could keep his thermostat low by sending fewer flavor signals? One obvious solution was a bland diet, but that didn't interest Roberts. (He is, in fact, a serious foodie.) After a great deal of experimenting, he discovered two agents capable of tricking the set-point system. A few tablespoons of unflavored oil (he used canola or extra light olive oil), swallowed a few times a day between mealtimes, gave his body some calories but didn't trip the signal to stock up on more. Several ounces of sugar water (he used granulated fructose, which has a lower glycemic index than table sugar) produced the same effect. (Sweetness does not seem to act as a "flavor" in the body's caloric-signaling system.)

The results were astounding. Roberts lost 40 pounds and never gained it back. He could eat pretty much whenever and whatever he wanted, but he was far less hungry than he had ever been. Friends and colleagues tried his diet, usually with similar results. His regimen seems to satisfy a set of requirements that many commercial diets do not: it was easy, built on a scientific theory and, most important, it did not leave Roberts hungry.

(Via http://www.freakonomics.com/blog.php.)

2005-09-23T17:17:00.000-04:00

lifehack.org » Permission to Suck:

Anguish, frustration, I’m so blocked. I’m not sure why writer’s block is so notorious. Is the profession filled with vociferous whiners? Do they get creative block more than others, more than musicians, artists, web designers, research scientists, strategic planners, or Fortune 500 Marketing Directors?

No one’s immune to losing their creative mojo. What about those titanic talents that we all admire but occasionally sneer at under our breath in a jealous tremor? Even they can sink; they’re just slightly more buoyant than the rest of us. Talent rises to the surface, but everyone can learn to swim. Although I have met some creative floaters who perform as asthmatics adorned with a 100 pound weight belt, but that’s rare enough to dismiss.

Imaginative creativity is an individual thing. Everyone’s method for reaching creative “flow” is proprietary. Without realizing it, companies that try to enforce creative processes can better succeed at fostering resentment than nurturing creativity. Being in a room with a dozen co-workers standing in circumference while holding hands, as they play “pass the story line” in an attempt to carve out a creative “space”, can feel more like corporate Hokey Pokey. I’ve never rushed to my office in a fit of imaginative ecstasy after compulsory creativity building sessions – have you?

Interview one hundred creative professionals [those who get paid to innovate for example] and methods will begin to distill to some invariant form. This is where all those “creative techniques” are born. Blocked? Go to the gym. Want to be creative? Meditate. Running dry on the ol’ inspiration? Start a journal.

Techniques can be highly effective. I have a tool box full of pattern breaking activities that where collected over a 25 year career. Yet, following prescribed techniques is similar to knowing a phone number for great take-out and being pleased with the food you serve; needs are filled, but what if they don’t like Italian? Got another number I can call?

Let’s back up a step. Creativity is the act of bringing something new into being. That new thing has form. Before it had form it was imagined. If I build a chair from a pile of mahogany, am I being imaginative? It’s not a given is it? I’m creative by putting my stylish spin on the chair idea, but it doesn’t guarantee an imaginative solution. The pattern needs to be broken in the imagination. When we say, “be creative”, we generally mean – be imaginative.

Being blocked is symptomatic of predictable patterns. The brain remembers everything as a pattern; random thoughts are imaginary, only patterns survive. In an odd twist, being blocked can hint at an ego that has been stroked by too much reverence. That’s why being touted as a world-class master or reputing great accomplishments with your special “style” can solidify a pattern cast in marble. You become a victim of your own brand, fearful of experimentation or disappointed with approval loss that often comes with new directions.

It takes courage to express imagination – as it takes courage to act out or walk naked onto a stage – and it takes skill to filter the imagination in a meaningful way. Imagination is so deeply personal it’s easily ignored except in dreams like so many vestigial insights pushed down making room for life’s challenges. It may not be a societal compliment to say, “he has an active imagination” but that is exactly from where true creativity stems. We all know how to imagine but the creatively skilled know how to harness imagination; they give it space, practice filtering and create new patterns.

So am I saying that this creative stuff takes work? You betcha. Maybe even a lifestyle change. Stress causes us to seek known patterns: bring your “A” game. Our “A” game is what we know works well; it’s proven and, therefore, doesn’t stretch our imagination. The trick is to combine your “A” game with your active imagination in just the right proportion to satisfy yourself and your challenge. Still, the more permission you have to suck, the easier it is to express your imagination. Here’s a rhetorical brain teaser: Is it possible for a talented musician to suck in an unimaginative way?

Corporate “Hokey Pokey” creative exercises as support for profit driven deadlines and performance incentives aren’t the best creativity stimulants. What’s needed is a culture change or – sans change – outsourcing. I’m confident hat’s one reason Volkswagen hired Crispin Porter + Bogusky as their advertising agency of record. VW needs a company whose culture is steeped in imagination or at least one that is really great at leaching every last drop of creative blood from its stable of youngsters yet to hone their creative archetypes. While I’m not an insider, I’m certain the culture at CP+B is far less about reactive judgments and far more about proactive risks.

What happens to those pre-marbleized young talents? Do they get burned out and routinely patterned? Some do, but the best learn how to stay curious and open while resisting reactive judgments even under the most unsympathetic pressure. Nothing kills creativity quite like quick judgment – we fear it. Our imagination shrinks like – well, you know – and “I was in the pool” is no excuse for this kind of shrinkage. Taking an invulnerable stance is equivalent to moving away from imaginative solutions.

If you learn to endure fear, the imagination still needs fuel. Creative curiosity is a passionate muse search without an agenda. Vertical experience is helpful but broad horizontal experiences are crucial. Vertical knowledge is quickly assimilated; horizontal knowledge takes a lifetime of dedication. Without the open mind of a landscape thinker, companies are doomed to repeat what’s been done with little variation; the silo gets taller until it falls.

Want a technique? Try this: do. Find your passion for doing, and then climb on for the ride. Passion gives you courage to suck. Ever hear, “there’s no such thing as a bad question”? Of course you have. Yet, there are humiliating ones. A passionate question gets asked no matter how humiliating. It can’t, not be asked, just like creative talent can’t not do. Blocked? Plunge forth with ghastly ideas, dreadful songs, appalling paintings or unspeakable prose. Give yourself permission to suck. I’d be surprised if the great didn’t find its way out of that pitiful pile of poor.

Author: Bruce DeBoer

(Via http://brucedeboer.typepad.com)

This is why we should buy Google stock.

2005-09-23T16:24:00.000-04:00

http://marketwatch-cnet.com.com/Google+builds+an+empire+to+rival+Microsoft/2100-1032_3-5875433.html?tag=st.pop

2005-09-23T01:30:00.000-04:00

Spray-on Skin Cells

The first controlled clinical study to examine the effectiveness of sprayed cultured skin cells to close the wounds of burns victims is being undertaken at the Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (QVH), East Grinstead. ‘We have seen what I can only describe as miraculous results using spray on skin with patients surviving 90% burns who otherwise had very little chance of survival.’ [press release]

via MedGadget | BBC

2005-09-23T01:16:00.000-04:00

How to throw playing cards

Why M$, like Quark, is failing.

2005-09-22T19:26:00.000-04:00

(via RoughlyDrafted)

2005-09-22T11:47:00.000-04:00

Synthesis: What makes me creative?:

by: Bruce DeBoer

'My 8 year old son is so creative he's going to be an artist.' How many times have you heard that? Naïve art – young children are natural at it. It's the first rain in the desert, new run-off paths are spontaneously created; the water forges streams where there were none. An 8 year old discovers crayons uninhibited by life experience, ego, and deadlines. Nearly every connection is a new one. She hasn't yet learned how not to be creative.

When we say that art is immature, what do we mean? We don't necessarily mean that the artist lacks originality; more likely, we mean that its originality is born by an artist who doesn't yet know enough to be interesting, or deliver emotion in a compelling way. The moment a child realizes their art is immature, the crayons stand a good chance of being surrendered.

Information and experience are like food for the creative process. It's raw substance. Information needs to be digested to brain-fat so it can re-immerge as mature creative energy. It's as if it needs to be inculcated into our souls before we are free to randomize it into original creative expression. If we don't digest it, a creative product – art, innovation, music, etc. – is sure to be more derivative that original. Creativity is using our unique inner selves to rearrange the raw material.

Society teaches the creativity out of our students. If X, then Y is easy to teach. If X, then Y gets results. It generates tangible and immediate ROI. Do this and get that result. Take an alternative path and risk failure or – even worse – ridicule. Research creative history and learn what got rewarded and what was ignored. Teach high craft and call it high art. Creativity is too soft and round; there is nothing to grab onto. There are often no clean results to judge. Creativity is messy but we all crave the rewards.

When do we begin to fear our own creativity? I believe it is the point at which we began to market ourselves. True creativity is deeply personal because we have to create new streams – new run-off paths in our souls. Risking creative rejection is terrifying. It's rejection that cuts so deep it's worse than a High School crush laughing when you finally get the nerve to ask her to the movies (I digress, forgive me). Creativity takes courage. Being vulnerable takes guts. Needed is a willingness to be rejected for what is among the most personal of expressions. The stakes are high.

Taking a less risky path is more about fine craft than innovation. I'm reminded of advice from an emerging professional as I left college: he told me, "On the outside, there is no room for 'b" quality work." In other words: it is the end of experimentation without consequences. Experiment all you want on your own, but come to work with your "A" game: bring what you know will meet approval.

Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void fame uses the Sex and Cash theory to explain how creativity and business relate. Re: Sex and Cash, "This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended." Creativity is sexy. The more you get paid for your creativity, the less sexy it is. I believe there are laws governing sex and cash, are there not? Do we dare go counter culture?

The occasional and often publicized young creative genius can lull us into the false impression that creativity is only for the immensely and naturally talented. "I can't do that, I've never been creative." The truth is creativity is hard work. Creative people are talented because they put in the hours. There is a passion for the doing; they can't not-do, and the results are secondary to the act but no less important than their original idea. Does this confuse you?

Whether you're an artistic temperament seeking structure or a rational temperament seeking imagination, creativity is constructive only when related to others. If you've heard improvisational abstract Jazz you know what I mean. An artist's passion can be intensely creative but the results can fail to inspire others – it's self indulgent.

Ever try to talk through your raw creative ideas with another? Sounded dim, didn't it? People often reject another's raw creativity; it's simply too intimate until it takes a form prone to mutual acceptance. Raw creative ideas aren't ready for prime time – they need at least minimal crafting. Like a beautifully written song sung out of key – poor craft masks the emotion or defeats the function.

For those of you in need of concrete illustration, the DeBoer creativity equation will keep you busy:

Imagination x Craft x Emotion = Art
Imagination x Craft x Function = Innovation

[This should help with the test at the end, so pay attention.]

However flawed you may find these equations; my point is that emotion and function are the human relational elements to art and innovation. Without emotion, art appears dry and mechanical. Without function, innovation is pure Rube Goldberg. Craft is the vehicle of creativity. Crafting the creativity allows the emotion and function to "sing".

The good news: Creativity is portable. The bad news: fine Craftsmanship is not. When people say I'm a great photographer, most are telling me that I've honed the craft of photography beyond the ordinary. I can't move my honed skills from photography to writing, to music, to business, but I can take my creativity with me. It's fluid that way. We begin to recognize talent when an accomplishment tipping point is reached in the three elements of our creativity equation.

Talent doesn't need a creative process per se. Talent finds formulaic process stifling: a canvas and a deadline, however, is a different story. Talent will surface no matter what; it won't be denied. Talent doesn't need the best camera to make great imagery. Just as money can't buy contentment, the best guitar, camera, or paints can't aid creativity, only help polish the craft.

Process helps companies hide their poor creative talent. "We have a great creative process" that we use to get our accountants to think "out of the box". Ugh! Isn't that what Enron boasted? Remember what I said about putting in the hours? Either a company hires those with creative passion and nurtures it with a catalytic culture or it doesn't. Usually it doesn't. Reflecting on the process undermines the ability, it takes us back to "if X then Y" and the crayons stay in the box.

Watching creativity is like watching a cow lactate – all day long nothing is witnessed, then, WHAM, milk. Once you have your milk, only then should you send it through the process. Make sure it solves the problem. Make sure the Function and the Craft in the Innovation equation is honed to a fine edge. Bad milk? Keep moving.

Somewhere around puberty we accumulate enough junk in our minds that we need to organize it: make it linear. Random thought is no longer an efficient way to make it through the day and stay sane. Most of us lay down our crayons. Those who don't surrender, usually become artists, musicians, fashion designers or advertising art directors who wander through the desert waiting for rain."

(Via .)

2005-09-16T00:43:00.000-04:00

Hey Nick!

Lynda.com

Lynda.com is a great resource for digital-video tutorials of some of the more advanced design tools. You can buy discs or subscribe for $25 a month for Quicktime online access (a real deal). I find the tutorials quite useful--it's fun to see how much more I have to learn even in the programs I have used for a long time (Photoshop for example). It's also instructive to see how others accomplish the same tasks and do it from a completely different angle.

-- Chuck Green

I tried some of the free sample classes streamed on Lynda.com and found that I remembered much more from these movie tutorials than I did from the many guidebooks I usually use. Must be how my brain works. I retain the tip, shortcut, or method long afterwards, which is not true after I am done with most computer manuals. Normally I close the book, and then have to look it up months later when I forget again. If you think visually (and most of the software covered here has a visual basis) then you might find this style of learning superior, as I do. But it is harder to search/find a solution to a specific nagging problem with this online library, because they do not yet have a fine-grained index or search beyond section headings. For expanding your reach with software packages, their subscription deal for online tutorials is a fine bargain; for hunting down a needed fix, I'd use your standard software bible.

-- KK

Lynda.com

(Via Cool Tools.)

Another I want it: World Puzzle Globe - He`s got the whole world...

2005-09-13T12:11:00.000-04:00

Core

2005-09-13T11:47:00.001-04:00

riverfronttimes.com | News | Cocky to the Core | 2005-06-22

<http://www.riverfronttimes.com/issues/2005-06-22/news/feature_1.html>

The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People

2005-09-13T11:47:00.000-04:00

Amazon.com: Books: Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1581150784/ref=reg_hu-wl_mrai-recs/002-3763257-4214457?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance>

1) from consumers to people

2) from product to experience

3) from honesty to trust

4) from quality to preference

5) from notoriety to aspiration

6) from identity to personality

7) from function to feel

8) from ubiquity to presence

9) from communication to dialogue

10)from service to relationship

Do you think this could be real?

2005-09-13T11:44:00.000-04:00

David Swenson's electrostatic "invisible wall"

Neil French is my Hero! (swoon!)

2005-09-13T11:27:00.000-04:00

and Neil's CA Column

Aarrgggghhh!!! All I want is a video player for wmv, avi, everything!

2005-09-13T11:25:00.000-04:00

Microsoft Windows Media - Windows Media Player 9 for Mac OS X

To be read: 2 from Use A Stick: What I've Learned & Coastal Thinking

2005-09-13T11:23:00.000-04:00

Coastal Thinking

Demand Your Data! Exercise The Right To Your Travel Records Held By The TSA

2005-09-13T11:20:00.001-04:00

One day I might care enough to do this.

Communication Nation: From fog to focus

2005-09-13T11:20:00.000-04:00

Thanks NoahBrier.com :: Links Tagged with "lifehacks"

2005-09-13T11:18:00.000-04:00

30 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do on the Internet

2005-09-13T11:17:00.000-04:00

SiteTagger: Antisocial Bookmarking

2005-09-12T22:28:00.000-04:00

and anti-spam fun

Maybe I'll use this one day

2005-09-12T22:27:00.000-04:00

movabletype.org : A beginner's guide to TrackBack Explanation

Triple Nine Society

2005-09-12T22:24:00.000-04:00

and Getting into Mensa

Fully backing up Mail.app in OSX 10.4 Tiger (revised)

2005-09-12T17:28:00.000-04:00

1. Backing up mailboxes and address describes the files required to do a safe backup of Apple Mail and all its settings and of your address book.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=151500
2. How to remove unneeded files after importing mail from Panther into Tiger lists the redundant files that can be safely removed when Mail is up and running in Tiger. Mail folder can be reduced by almost 30% by this tip. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301315
3. Remove some extraneous Mail mailboxes. http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050629160328239
4. Fix Mail.app indexing issues. http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040729192248562

Best Practices for Time Travelers

2005-09-12T17:20:00.000-04:00

MIT engineers an anti-cancer smart bomb

2005-09-12T17:01:00.000-04:00

Things he and his girlfriend have argued about

2005-09-12T16:49:00.000-04:00

Free 3D Models of Great Buildings

2005-09-12T16:46:00.000-04:00

Hundreds of free 3D walkthough architectural computer models are included here at the Great Buildings Online web site, linked with free DesignWorkshop Lite architectural 3D walkthrough software for both Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000 and Power Macintosh.
The models range in detail from very simple formal massing models of just a few blocks, through basic interior/exterior spatial walkthrough models, up to detailed interior/exterior models complete with furnishings and landscaping.
It's all free for your own personal architectural enjoyment, experience, and understanding.

This is what a reporter should be.

2005-09-12T15:22:00.000-04:00

An Anchor Who Reports Disaster News With a Heart on His Sleeve - New York Times

September 12, 2005
An Anchor Who Reports Disaster News With a Heart on His Sleeve

By ELIZABETH JENSEN
The CNN anchor Anderson Cooper strikes a pose in the September issue of the men's magazine Maxim, modeling a sharp black suit set off by his prematurely gray hair. A stylized jumble of broken television sets is piled high beside him.

It is a very different Mr. Cooper who has captivated CNN viewers in the two weeks since Hurricane Katrina crashed ashore. The jumble of broken stuff is there, but it is real remnants of homes and lives washed away. Mr. Cooper's heart-on-his-sleeve demeanor has been anything but slick and packaged.

The 38-year-old anchor has dressed down officials in interviews with polite righteous indignation in behalf of hurricane victims. At least twice he choked up on air, once abruptly stopping his commentary about lost homes and waving away the camera as he looked about to burst into tears. CNN's camera occasionally has caught him playing with stray dogs. He says he has no intention of returning to his hip New York existence any time soon.

"Life is funny like that," Mr. Cooper said of the fashion spreads (he is also in Esquire this month) as he took a break on Friday in Baton Rouge, La.

Mr. Cooper's Sept. 1 interview with Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, marked a turning point in the tone of hurricane coverage as he snapped when she began thanking federal officials for their recovery efforts.

"Excuse me, Senator, I'm sorry for interrupting," Mr. Cooper interjected. "I haven't heard that, because, for the last four days, I've been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated.

"And when they hear politicians slap - you know, thanking one another, it just, you know, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now, because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours."

His comments pushed right up to the line between tough questioning and confrontational advocacy journalism, but viewers responded.

CNN last week expanded Mr. Cooper's prime-time role, teaming him for two hours with Aaron Brown, in addition to his 7 p.m. weeknight show, "Anderson Cooper 360°." "He is the anchorperson of the future," Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN/U.S., said in an interview. He is "an anti-anchorperson," he said, adding: "He's all human. He's not putting it on."

"I don't feel like I'm doing anything different," Mr. Cooper said of his work on the hurricane, comparing it to 1992 reports he did from Somalia for the Channel One classroom news broadcast.

Mr. Cooper said that he did not believe in taking sides and did not think he had done so. "I am listening to people's questions and getting answers," he said. "I am least of all interested in any TV anchor's opinion, and least of all my own."

"This is life and death," he added. "This is not some blow-dried pundit standing outraged for some ratings, which is what cable news often boils down to."

As for his emotional moments: "It's absolutely not true; it's lies, lies, spread by that conservative or liberal agenda, whatever it is," Mr. Cooper quipped, before conceding: "I have been tearing up on this story more than any story I've worked on. I can't really explain why that is." He has tried not to do it on camera, he said, because "who wants to see that?" But, he added: "It's hard not to be moved. The fact that it is in the United States, for me, added a layer and dimension to the story."

The producer David Perozzi worked with Mr. Cooper at ABC News, where he reported for "20/20 Downtown" and was anchor of the overnight newscast. Mr. Perozzi said that his friend "has shown a certain amount of heart and compassion," adding: "He does care about people deeply."

When no major news organization hired him after his graduation from Yale in 1989, Mr. Cooper said he had a friend make a fake press pass and he headed overseas on his own, sending Channel One stories he taped with a small home-video camera.

His bare-bones training in Somalia was a precursor for his current assignment.

"When you travel with him, he's no joke," Mr. Perozzi said. "He's really intense. He could care less how he looks, his hair and makeup. If there's no cameraperson, he grabs the camera."

For all that drive, this is the same person who quit ABC News in 2000 to be the host of ABC's reality show "The Mole" when the news division told him to choose between the two jobs. One executive publicly predicted that Mr. Cooper would never work in news again.

"I think at that time he was sort of at a crossroads in his life and wasn't sure about TV news," Mr. Perozzi said. "But it doesn't seem to have hurt him."

CNN hired him in December 2001, giving him his show in 2003. He often heads to disaster zones, and has reported on the December 2004 tsunami and the Niger famine.

"It sometimes feels as if we need to bungee-cord him to the anchor chair," Mr. Klein said, adding that he is happy to have Mr. Cooper stay in the South indefinitely. "He's young and healthy, he can go forever."

Mr. Cooper said that his mother, the socialite Gloria Vanderbilt, "is a little concerned and freaked out" about his nonstop work, but that he has no plans to return home.

"I can't imagine going back," Mr. Cooper said. "I'm going to have to at some point, but I don't know what I'm going to do, I don't know," he repeated, his voice trailing away.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

I want one!

2005-09-12T13:26:00.000-04:00

Endless Pools and Fastlane Swim Spa, Year-round Swim Spas

How To Get A Job In Advertising (or any other industry).

2005-09-09T16:39:00.000-04:00

I truly believe in the maxim "Don't take diet advice from a fat man." But since I've been asked a couple of times, and I think it's valuable, here's what's worked for me.

People want to help. Really. Even in New York. I've found that just calling people works wonders. Get a name from somewhere (anywhere, even just from the receptionist), call them, and say the following:

"Hi, I'm [name], and I'm a freelance [copywriter, or whichever position you want]. Now, I know you probably get calls all the time, and you probably don't have an open position. But that's okay. Really, I'd love to buy you a cappucino in exchange for the priviledge of picking your brain for 10 minutes (15 minutes tops) on what you *do* have, the expertise on how you got your job, and the skills you've built to do what you do. So, whadaya say? I'm a nice person, and I promise not to bother you again afterwards."

Okay, don't read that script exactly. But communicate the gist of it articulately, while still being you.

What I found is, everyone jumps at the opportunity to talk about themselves. Everyone. Particularly to someone who's not only interested and listens well, but who's also intelligent & articulate. Do you have any idea how many stupid, uninterested, going-thru-the-motions people they have to deal with every day at work? Especially disappointing are the kids they deal with who are there supposedly to learn from them, the interns. 99.99% of the time those kids are pathetic. I know I was when I was an intern.

People in advertising usually work in groups (or will when they at some point work in larger agencies). All you have to be is someone they'd like to work with someday.

Schedule the meeting, show up on time. Then just listen. They'll be flattered and floored. Particularly if you take notes.

(Oh yeah, bring a business card of your own. Give yourself the title of [Copywriter]. Doesn't matter if you're not employed at the moment. Step into the role, and the salary will come.)

Then comes the easy part. At the end of the talk (before you start getting up/packing up!) ask: "All of this has been fantastic, just great, thank you! You've been so insightful. My last question is, could you give me a name or two or three of other [copywriters] who may be at a similar point or at different points in their careers, but who might have just a bit different perspective or experience than you on how they got into the field?" (Again, don't be the script. Be you.)

Then meet those people, and do exactly the same thing.

The thing is, everyone knows you're looking for a job. But no one wants to have to turn someone down. So meet all of these people (send thank-you notes!) and sooner or later when they hear of a job opening they're going to think of that brilliant, beautiful/handsome person who was a really good listener. You.

One more thing. The meetings never last 10-15 minutes. Almost always they're around a half hour. I'm telling you, people love to talk about themselves. It's not just me. ;)

Hope this helps.

But before you do anything else, if it's advertising you want, read these books:

How to Put Your Book Together and Get a Job in Advertising: 21st Century Edition (Paperback) by Maxine Paetro

Pick Me : Breaking Into Advertising and Staying There (Paperback) by Nancy Vonk & Janet Kestin

These people are much smarter and more experienced than I am.

Global Perspective. Really interesting.

2005-09-09T13:31:00.000-04:00

http://worldprocessor.com/catalog/world/

design I love.

2005-09-09T12:54:00.000-04:00

eleventwentyfive | tree pillows
http://eleventwentyfive.com/noflash/treepillows.html

Fully backing up Mail.app in OSX 10.4 Tiger

2005-09-09T12:46:00.000-04:00

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301315

Free templates for Blogger

2005-09-09T00:16:00.000-04:00

http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/

Mantra Generator

2005-09-08T16:06:00.000-04:00

by Dilbert:

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/games/career/bin/ms.cgi

How-To Almost Anything

2005-09-08T16:04:00.000-04:00

http://www.soyouwanna.com/index.html

Fun thing.

2005-09-08T16:03:00.002-04:00

ThinkGeek :: Lazer Trip Wire

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/security/78df/

Language Corner

2005-09-08T16:03:00.001-04:00

http://www.cjr.org/tools/lc/index.asp

One step in keeping it all "Work-Safe"

2005-09-08T16:03:00.000-04:00

Ghostzilla - the invisible browser

http://www.ghostzilla.com/index.html

Another wish.

2005-09-08T16:01:00.000-04:00

As you can see, I'm using this blog more for my keeping stuff than for sharing it. I doubt many people will be interested in the various stuff/crap I find.

How To Spin A Pen

http://www.pentrix.com/pentix/tricks/360ThumbNormal.html

Partial text of draft Iraqi constitution

2005-09-08T15:59:00.000-04:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1554716,00.html

Fun, wish I could do this.

2005-09-08T15:58:00.000-04:00

Rubik's Cube Solver

http://wrongway.org/cube/solve.html

How to give and receive criticism

2005-09-08T15:56:00.000-04:00

http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/essay35.htm