484 entries for 2021

If something is boring after two minutes, try if for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.

[Attention is a state that assumes there is something new to be seen and that resists the tendency to declare observation finished.]

[What passes for sustained attention is actually a series of successive attempts to bring attention back to the same thing.]

[Watching your assumptions like waiting with a net to catch a dragonfly.]

"Ethical persuasion" means persuading the user to do something that is good for them, using "harmonious designs that continuously empower us instead of distracting and frustrating us"

[Most persuasive design, whether nefarious or 'empowering', assumes a shallow form of attention.]

[Experience is what we agree to attend to. At first I chose certain things to look at, and over time more and more actors appeared in my reality: after birds, there were trees, then different kinds of trees, then the bugs that lived in them. I began to notice animal communities, plant communities, animal-plant communities. I began to build a map of my attention that included more-than-human communities, noticing things that I had walked by past most of my life. This is bioregionalism.]

Once, seeing a child drinking from his hands, Diogenes threw away his cup and said, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living." Another time, he loudly admired a mouse for its economy of living.

[Rather than fleeing to the mountains or killing himself, he lived in the midst of a hypocritic society as the embodiment of refusal.]

[When life both inside and outside of society doesn't make sense, create the 'third space' as an alternate frame of reference, a non-answer.]

[In Bartleby's repetitions of 'I would prefer not to', there is no reason given, no reason given for why there is not reason given, and so on.]

[As fewer people find themselves with the margin of privilege to switch off from the attention economy, attention itself might be the last resource we can control.]

[Hyper-accelerated expression on social media produces value for the platform and is a form of communication driven by fear and anger as opposed to reflection and reason. They become like firecrackers that trigger other firecrackers, soon filling the room with smoke. Outrage drives engagement while publishers promote articles that fan the flames.]

[Standing apart is to take the view of an outsider without leaving, to know your enemy, to allow belief in another world while continuing to live in this one.]

Let's talk about how to teach or learn history....

[History books often focus on who, what, when, where, leaving out the why, which is the most interesting part.]

[Understand the whys of yesterday so that the motives of tomorrow make more sense.]

[Listening to everything there is to hear includes the sounds of daily life as well as your own thoughts.]

[Bird watching is the opposite of looking up something online because you cannot request anything: the best you can do is be silent and use your senses to understand where things are happening.]

[Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for everything else.]

…mind, body, spirit? How can we balance our time more to avoid over-emphasizing the mind?

[Faux-public spaces are scripted environments in which you consume the space.]

[The capitalist mindset wants every waking moment to be monetizable via employment or evaluatable via social media metrics, which makes it expensive to spend time on nothing as it provides no return on investment.]

[Noticing how some ravens live half-in and half-out the rose garden, I realize that there is no 'rose garden' to them.]

[We are not avatars, brands, or a set of preferences. We're inconsistent, lumpy, different each day, and we sense things in a world where others sense us.]

[Reimagine FOMO as NO(S)MO: Necessity of (sometimes) missing out.]

Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.

The Death Instinct: separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one's own path—do your own thing; dynamic change.

The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations, equilibrium.

[It's important to identify as citizens of bioregions even more than the state does, to consider the life-forms and the relationships between then including humans, to be commit to stewardship of the land.]

A System for Interleaving Discussion and Summarization in Online Collaboration

[Give everyone the tools to summarize, without needing to rely on a single person to 'take notes']

[Contract threads into summaries.]

[Summaries can include other summaries and can have their own threads.]

[Discussion grows with comments and shrink with summaries.]

Comprehensibility Index

[TV shows with subtitles and comic books use multiple channels which can maximize comprehension whereas 'pure' forms like radio, text, talk shows demand more comprehension to start.]

Comprehensibility Factors

[Shows that are understandable on mute have a strong visual context.]

[Comic books have visual cues that support the text.]

[Some stories have narratives that use predictable tropes, which are easier to grasp than improvised situations.]

[Certain shows are focused on a single domain whereas news can move freely between multiple.]

[Political dramas or technical lectures requires specific domain knowledge.]

[Overdubbed content can be simplified because things don't always translate.]

Domains

[Listening to a news broadcast has some shared language with conversation, but they require different skills and different vocabularies. Better to narrowly focus on one and move on after you master it.]

Islamic art

[There is a disputed theory that mistakes in geometric repetitions were intentionally made to show humility and how only God can produce perfection.]

Music

[The binary form of AABB provides enough variation to allow a dance to be extended indefinitely.]

[Recognize when nothing seems to be working and stop, wait, meditate, reboot. Don't force anything.]

The Dangers of Intellectualized Emotions

[Avoid using umbrella terms (like upset, overwhelmed, stressed, weird, okay) or metaphors (like soread too thin) and try to use plain language (sad, angry, frustrated, confused, scared, disappointed) to communicate emotions directly.]

[To eat healthy, it isn't enough to avoid unhealthy food, it is necessary to keep your home stocked with healthy alternatives. Make the right thing easy.]

Message from Beloved Osho on his Birthday

[Whatever exists is full of God. The green of the trees, the bark of a dog, a child laughing.]

[Asking 'where is God' is the wrong question because they cannot be indicated anywhere. Ask 'where God is not']

[God is reflected through you. If you are filled with love, then God is everywhere.]

[Use the things for which people pick on you as a base to rest into. Someone has an issue with your skin color? Relax into your skin. With your weirdness? Be boldly weird. With your insecurities? Be radically vulnerable.]

Five Things To Read Today About Female Sexuality

[The popular understanding of rape is a stranger in a dark alleyway, but in reality 90% of victims know their rapists.]

Self Partnering

[Self-partnering is learning to trust yourself and your body to guide you. Questioning our ability to make the right choices leaves the door open for others to disorient you (intentionally or not).]

[Go beyond consent, create a space where one can ask for what they want, move towards celebrating all requests and refusals.]