« To the past
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Nov 20, 2011
Time lapse video of HD photographs taken onboard the International Space Station
Nov 20, 2011
The goal of a blog is not to be the most popular of the popular kids nor is it to do what the blogging police tell you to do. The goal of a blog is to help you reach your goals. And I long ago gave up the goal of having everybody in the world read my stuff or everyone in the world like my stuff. And I’m not writing for those people. I’m writing for people who can accept what I can give them. I don’t write for strangers anymore.Seth Godin in an interview on the future of books
Nov 11, 2011
In mathematics, our freedom lies in the questions we ask — and in how we pursue them — but not in the answers awaiting us.
Perhaps the same could be said about life itself.
Nov 9, 2011
Sitting and Standing at Work
Ergonomic experts at Cornell don’t recommend standing desks, instead:
Sit to do computer work. Sit using a height-adjustable, downward titling keyboard tray for the best work posture, then every 20 minutes stand for 2 minutes AND MOVE. The absolute time isn’t critical but about every 20-30 minutes take a posture break and move for a couple of minutes. Simply standing is insufficient.
Nov 8, 2011
Sometimes I’d rather be a tree frog. I don’t think they fall asleep worried that they’ve been a bad tree frog that afternoon or envying kingfishers or resenting their own diet or habitat. They just seem to spend 100% of their time being magnificent at being a tree frog. We spend most of our time regardless of our religion or lack of it, disappointed in ourselves, ashamed of ourselves, envious of others — always becoming and rarely being.Stephen Fry at Quora
Oct 8, 2011
![Stephen Fry:
The use of [the] phrase “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme – the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before, Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance.
Steven Levy:
Once [Steve Jobs] recalled for me some of the long summers of his youth. “I’m a big believer in boredom,” he told me. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, he explained, and “out of curiosity comes everything.” The man who popularized personal computers and smartphones — machines that would draw our attention like a flame attracts gnats — worried about the future of boredom. “All the [technology] stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too.”
Malcolm Gladwell:
I’ll know it when I see it. That was Jobs’s credo, and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge.
Jack Cheng:
In the coming years, Steve Jobs’s life and work will be even more scrutinized, even more imitated than they are now. But to simply ask “what would Steve do?” would be to miss the point. It would be accepting the very dogma he warned us against, living with the results of his thinking, not our own. To be true to Steve, we must listen to the music playing within each of us, and tune our actions accordingly. To honor his life, we must honor our own, taking inspration not merely from his actions and beliefs, but their integrity.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lsryoe6XPx1qz57o3o1_500.png)
The use of [the] phrase “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme – the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before, Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance.
Once [Steve Jobs] recalled for me some of the long summers of his youth. “I’m a big believer in boredom,” he told me. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, he explained, and “out of curiosity comes everything.” The man who popularized personal computers and smartphones — machines that would draw our attention like a flame attracts gnats — worried about the future of boredom. “All the [technology] stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too.”
I’ll know it when I see it. That was Jobs’s credo, and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge.
In the coming years, Steve Jobs’s life and work will be even more scrutinized, even more imitated than they are now. But to simply ask “what would Steve do?” would be to miss the point. It would be accepting the very dogma he warned us against, living with the results of his thinking, not our own. To be true to Steve, we must listen to the music playing within each of us, and tune our actions accordingly. To honor his life, we must honor our own, taking inspration not merely from his actions and beliefs, but their integrity.
Aug 31, 2011
The creative act is primitive. Its principles are of birth and genesis. Babies are born in blood and chaos; stars and galaxies come into being amid the release of massive primordial cataclysms. Conception occurs at the primal level. [I]t is better to be primitive than to be sophisticated, and better to be stupid than to be smart. The most highly cultured mother gives birth sweating and dislocated and cursing like a sailor.Steven Pressfield in Do the Work
Aug 25, 2011
Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none. Tibetan meditation master Chogyam Trungpa coined the phrase “idiot compassion,” to explain that thing we do when we react to others from the Playbook of Nice rather than from an authentic arising of goodness, because our heart is simply open. An open heart is never certain, it is in open dialog with this world and thus can respond with sweetness when sweetness is due, or wrath or silence or dismissal or an endless embrace. Because it is genuine, it is sharp. You are on the razor’s edge, meaning right here, right now, playing for keeps, not for appearances.
Susan Piver in the new edition of Emerson’s Self-Reliance.
I’ll take an honest person over a “nice” person every time.
Aug 23, 2011
This might be my favorite success story ever. At age 25, Chris Sacca was 2 million dollars in debt. Now, he’s one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley.
The first 18 minutes changed my life.
Aug 23, 2011
Study Confirms Bisexuality Exists
New York Times:
In both studies, men watched videos of male and female same-sex intimacy while genital sensors monitored their erectile responses. While the [2005] study reported that the bisexuals generally resembled homosexuals in their responses, the new one finds that bisexual men responded to both the male and female videos, while gay and straight men in the study did not.
Bisexuals of the world, I’m sorry I doubted you.
Aug 16, 2011
Couchella > Coachella
Last April, instead of dropping serious coin on Coachella tickets, my friends and I threw a party, projected live streams of Coachella performances, and called it “Couchella”.
I made this music video with footage from my iPhone.
Aug 15, 2011
Who Is Washington's Most Effective Politician?
Andrew Sullivan thinks it’s a no-brainer — Obama:
Here are the political accomplishments: defeating the most heavily favored party machine in decades (the Clintons) while actually bringing his biggest rival into his cabinet, where she has performed extraordinarily well; helping to cement the GOP’s broad identity as extremists opposed to compromise; entrenching black and Hispanic loyalty to his party; retaining solid favorables and not-too-shabby approval ratings during the worst recession since the 1930s. 44 percent of the country still (rightly) blame Bush for this mess, only 15 percent blame Obama.
On policy: ending the US torture regime; prevention of a second Great Depression; enacting universal healthcare; taking the first serious steps toward reining in healthcare costs; two new female Supreme Court Justices; ending the gay ban in the military; ending the Iraq war; justifying his Afghan Surge by killing bin Laden and now disentangling with face saved; firming up alliances with India, Indonesia and Japan as counter-weights to China; bailing out the banks and auto companies without massive losses (and surging GM profits); advancing (slowly) balanced debt reduction without drastic cuts during the recession; and financial re-regulation.
Yes, there have been failures. The election of Scott Brown; the 2010 mid-terms; the surrender to Netanyahu and AIPAC; the botched and ill-conceived war in Libya; the failure to embrace Bowles Simpson up-front; the collapse of cap and trade (maybe not such a bad thing anyway). But notice what hasn’t happened. Where are all the scandals promised by Michelle Malkin? Where are his Katrinas and Monicas?
When I read commentaries expounding on the notion that this man is competely out of his depth, I just have to scratch my head. Given his inheritance, this has been the most substantive first term since Ronald Reagan’s. And given Obama’s long-game mentality, that is setting us up for a hell of a second one.
And if that’s not impressive enough.
Aug 15, 2011
An Era of Collaborative Possibility
Hua Hsu in Grantland on the Ye-Z collabo:
There is a broader context for Watch the Throne’s nonviolent collisions of highbrow and low, opulence and shame, artiste Kanye with “business, man” Jay. Ours is an era of collaborative possibility, when anything from Dockers to a cellular phone pouch can seem desirable with the right synergistic pairing. This is how the business of buying and selling things continues to renew itself, in the endless permutation of new and old. There is something fresh and democratic about it, as the market divides itself up into thousands of little inlets, all the capsule collections and collaborations with Target and down-market bridge lines allowing all segments of the populace to luxuriate every now and then. […]
Instead of competition, we now live in a culture that produces mutually beneficial agreements. Instead of rivals there are dream teams, talents taken around the globe in the name of common goals, brand visions, the quid pro quo backslap culture of “liking” and retweeting. Instead of a guy emerging from a bench-clearing brawl with his arm dislocated, we have the Miami Heat and their “Big Three.”
Aug 15, 2011
My brother showed me this last night. Hilarious commentary, and it’s surprisingly motivational. Plus, Greg Jennings reacts.
PUT DA TEAM ON YO BACK DO.
Aug 13, 2011
Finally, hi-res images of Apple’s stunning new campus design.
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About
I’m an inquisitive optimist, currently working for The Start-Up of You, the book by LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and authorpreneur Ben Casnocha. Aside from that, my life revolves around investing and my wonderful girlfriend.
