General

Free books for the Kindle

A while back I broke down and bought the Amazon Kindle, which I love. I have been waiting for a perfect ebook reader since I would like to get rid of any material possessions that are not necessary. Let’s face it, books are pretty useless unless you’re actively reading them. Books are an inefficient medium in that they are heavy and take up a lot of space.

One of my goals is to reduce my material possessions to the absolute minimum. Like many people I no longer own CD’s for music (having sold them several years ago), but I have also been scanning in all paper records and photos and have sold a lot of furniture and junk on Craigslist. I would eventually like to get to the point where my possessions consist of: a car, some clothing, computing tools, and a few personal effects.

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Cool Tools / General / Software / Internet — 6 Comments

Out of the live oaks at twilight

In the past I have speculated on other animals that have adapted to the human environment. Here in the Hill Country north of San Antonio, deer should be included in that group. In the absence of wolves and mountain lions, they have no natural predators and, unlike in rural areas, people will not hunt them near homes.

Deer are perfectly suited to the wooded, exurban enclaves where they can melt away into the shade of nearby live oak groves. They breed in prodigious numbers and are the subject of countless vehicle collisions. With their crepuscular lifestyle and effective dull camouflage, they live beneath our notice. Unless they eat up your flower beds or run into the road in front of you, you have little reason to notice them, which is odd given their ubiquity. Around here they keep the buzzards busy and fat. Buzzards are another animal that do well near humans. They clear up roadkill and tend to keep their distance. Although, when I was down on Broadway Avenue a few weeks ago I saw a pair of Black Vultures roosting in the courtyard of Sterling Bank, so they can be a nuisance.

The deer around here come up to the house in the evenings to see if we will throw out any corn, which we do on occasion. They are both tentative and bold. I have noticed something interesting. With respect to getting a handful of corn, does are more bold than bucks. The does and fawns will come close, but the bucks always stay farther out and sniff the air, interested but dubious. What accounts for this difference in behavior? Territorial-ness? Aggressiveness? In humans, do we find something similar?

General — Comments Off

Later borns and provocation

Birth order theories are interesting, especially with regard to first borns and later borns. Here’s an article from Time Magazine, The Power of Birth Order

Even more impressive is how early younger siblings develop what’s known as the theory of mind. Very small children have a hard time distinguishing the things they know from the things they assume other people know. A toddler who watches an adult hide a toy will expect that anyone who walks into the room afterward will also know where to find it, reckoning that all knowledge is universal knowledge. It usually takes a child until age 3 to learn that that’s not so. For children who have at least one elder sibling, however, the realization typically comes earlier. “When you’re less powerful, it’s advantageous to be able to anticipate what’s going on in someone else’s mind,” says Sulloway.

Later-borns, however, don’t try merely to please other people; they also try to provoke them. Richard Zweigenhaft, a professor of psychology at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., who revealed the overrepresentation of firstborns in Congress, conducted a similar study of picketers at labor demonstrations. On the occasions that the events grew unruly enough to lead to arrests, he would interview the people the police rounded up. Again and again, he found, the majority were later- or last-borns. “It was a statistically significant pattern,” says Zweigenhaft. “A disproportionate number of them were choosing to be arrested.”

Psychology — 3 Comments

Creativity and sensitivity

Ran across this in a recent NY Times article on memory:

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.

This phenomenon, Dr. Carson said, is often linked to a decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Studies have found that people who suffered an injury or disease that lowered activity in that region became more interested in creative pursuits.

Pardon the disjointed thoughts here.

Pronounced sensitivity to external and internal stimulus is a hallmark of what we regard as classical creativity or “original thinking”, but which might be better called creative aestheticism. Creative aestheticism is really only one type of creativity.

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Arts / Psychology — Comments Off

Generational Conflict

Funny article on the brewing conflict between the so-called “Generation X”, of which I am a member, and the Millennials, ie. anyone born after 1981 or so.

That’s why the time has come for Generation X to unite. We need to call bullshit on these naive, self-important crybabies trying to rob us of what is rightly our own. Remember how the Baby Boomers all turned into self-serving, narcissistic assholes who deified Michael Douglas in the ’80s? The time has come for us to turn into assholes, too, minus the Michael Douglas part.

I suppose it’s natural for people who regard themselves as “young” to experience anxiety when they realize that they are actually progressing through the next arc on the wheel of life; that someone else moving up to take their place. When you’re a child you’re excited about the freedom of adulthood and you’re relatively naive. When you become a young adult, you exult in the richness of new experiences and novelty. Later adulthood seems to be a period of improvement and optimization. You’re learning more about yourself and coming to terms with Life in general.

Generational anxiety is understandable. As you get older, there’s definitely a feeling that you no longer belong in the world of your younger colleagues. I suppose this feeling happens to some degree to every person as they move through the stages of their life; 70-somethings wistful at the sight of a hard-charging 50-year-old. The main consolation seems to be that Life reveals new treasure with every passing year. Like the rings of a tree, we grow in experience and wisdom layer upon layer, stronger and stronger with every season of life.

Religion/philosophy / Society — Comments Off

No more Exchange: MilkSync for Blackberry

Remember the Milk!A while back I ditched Microsoft Exchange to save some money, which made it more difficult to sync my PIM between my desktop and handheld. Even though I liked having everything synced through Exchange, the cost was annoying for something so simple. With basic Blackberry service you get your email quickly, so it seemed like overkill to pay $20 extra a month just to sync tasks, calendars, contacts, etc. Shortly thereafter, Google released a nice Blackberry app to sync Google Calendar to the Blackberry Calendar, which replaced the Exchange calendar syncing for free. After that, the only thing missing from Exchange was synced contacts and synced tasks.

A few weeks ago, the folks at Remember the Milk were nice enough to build a new Blackberry app to sync your RtM tasks with your Blackberry. MilkSync effectively costs $25 a year since you have to have a pro membership to use the app. It’s worth it.

Now the only thing missing is Exchange-less over-the-air syncing of your Blackberry contacts. You can get contact data if your contacts are in Gmail using the Gmail mobile app, but it doesn’t sync with the Blackberry Address Book. Hopefully, Google will release a tool to do this.

Google will sell a lot of phones if they release similar tools for the Android platform.

Cool Tools / Software / Internet — Comments Off

If you only watch one octopus video today, watch this one

Pretty amazing evolutionary adaptation. The blanket octopus releases a blanket-like webbing when threatened.

Science — Comments Off

Søren Kierkegaard’s view on the aesthetic life

A while back, I heard a good podcast from BBC’s In Our Time, on Søren Kierkegaard’s view on the aesthetic life leading ultimately to despair. I spent a little time googling up some information as I know very little about Kierkegaard. This seemed interesting:

In the aesthetic life, one is ruled by passion. In the ethical life, one is ruled by societal regulations. In the religious life, one is ruled by total faith in God. One can never be truly free, and this causes boredom, anxiety, and despair. True faith doesn’t lead to freedom, but it relieves the psychological effects of human existence. Kierkegaard claims that the only way to make life worthwhile is to embrace faith in God, and that faith necessarily involves embracing the absurd. One has faith in God, but one cannot believe in God. We believe in things that we can prove, but we can only have faith in things that are beyond our understanding. For example, we believe in gravity: we feel its effects constantly, which we recognize as proof of gravity’s existence. It makes no sense, though, to say we have faith in gravity, since that would require the possibility that, someday, gravity would fail to materialize. Faith requires uncertainty, and thus we can have faith in God because God is beyond logic, beyond proof, and beyond reason. There’s no rational evidence for God, but this is exactly what allows people to have faith in him.

As an agnostic, this is the problem I have with staunch atheists. To deny even the possibility of a God is to make a leap of faith. Just like to believe in God requires a leap of faith. In this sense, both atheists and theists lack a healthy sense of doubt, even though we’re dealing with ideas that are beyond proof. The existence of God is essentially unknowable as he presumably stands outside natural law and physical reality. In my experience, both extreme theists and atheists have more in common with each other than they do agnostics. They seem to be reacting to some bad experience by moving toward one pole or the other, in search of certainty.

Religion/philosophy — 10 Comments

Knowing what to do

This thing with my Dad being in the hospital. I haven’t talked about it much, mostly because I didn’t want to jinx anything. The further we get toward survival, the better I feel.

Knowing what to do has been the hardest part. Since my brother and I are my father’s next of kin, we have had to navigate a sea of problems, ranging from the medical and legal to the personal and financial. I think we’ve done okay, all things considered.

It’s weird how difficult experiences can be valuable. On the one hand, you wouldn’t voluntarily experience something painful, but while going through it you get a sense of the gravity and meaning that seems to exist under the surface of daily life. When you see a daily parade of shattered families walk through the ICU with fear in their eyes or crying in huddled groups, it makes an impression. The message is: every day that you go about your normal routine, someone somewhere is having their heart ripped out. Suffering is universal, so stop being such a jerk.

The other thing you learn is that everyone needs access to medical care. I don’t advocate any particular plan, but most people don’t plan on being hospitalized. So, if employers are not forced to offer health insurance and people are not required to have health insurance, it stands to reason that many people are taking the risk of serious injury and the subsequent crushing medical debt. Even people with health insurance are often insufficiently covered. How can healthcare be optional in this country? We’re ignoring the problem.

Society — 6 Comments

Fast Food Afficianado

Since I’ve been back in San Antonio for about three weeks, I’ve gotten to know the surrounding restaurants very well. Too well. In between visiting hours, I normally walk across the street to Chik-fil-A, so I don’t have to pay twice for parking. As far as fast food goes, Chik-fil-A is top of the heap. You can actually tell what kind of animal the sandwich came from. They also do things a little differently:

  1. The employees at Chik-fil-A always say “My pleasure” when I say, “Thank you”. Even if it is part of some cynical marketing ploy, I like it.
  2. There are fresh flowers on each table. The other day they were yellow daisy-like flowers. Today they were purple daisy-like flowers.
  3. Little Texas Pete hot sauce packets! I am all for condiment selection. Hot sauce is essential. (Don’t miss the Texas Pete Wikipedia article wherein someone gets a little free with the truth: “In late 2003, Chick-Fil-A opted to carry Texas Pete sauce (packet-form) in its restaurants nationwide. Same-store sales catapulted over 45% in 2004. Many analysts close to the firm heralded the decision to carry the sauce, largely attributing the company’s success to the sauce itself. In several third party surveys, Chick-Fil-A customers have exclaimed, “Texas Pete doesn’t go on the chicken sandwich, the chicken sandwich goes on the Texas Pete,” and “Best thing since the chicken sandwich.”)
  4. They play Christian music as background music. I don’t really have a problem with this except it’s generally bland and I don’t know any of the songs. That’s okay. Background music is not supposed to be good.
  5. Real lemonade. Tart and sweet. ‘Nuff said.
  6. At the entrance to the playscape, they provide the kids with little alcohol towelettes so they can clean their grubby hands.

Business / Personal / Society — 1 Comment
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