I’ve often said that one of the best ways to find out what you really want is to start with what you don’t want. I’d like to explore this theme a little further in this posting.

There is something about asking for what we want that attracts a lot of negativity in our present-day culture. Many of us remember childhood sayings like “Those that ask don’t get”, or we remember that we were made to feel selfish when we expressed our wants. So it is not too surprising perhaps that for many people it is incredibly difficult to come to a satisfactory answer to the question “What do you really want?” When we do succeed in answering the question clearly and without reservation it has the effect of bringing a much greater focus to our energy.

However the effect of this childhood and cultural conditioning is that most of us find it much easier to identify what we don’t want than what we do want. The secret is to take what we don’t want and then turn it into the positive opposite.

So, to take an example, at work you might find yourself saying: “I am always getting interrupted when I am trying to concentrate on my work.” And sometimes we can go on saying that for years without doing anything about it!

The first step is to identify what you don’t want. This is pretty obvious: “I don’t want to be constantly interrupted when I am trying to concentrate on my work.” However note that this is a much more powerful statement than “I am always getting interrupted.” Once you have identified it as something you don’t want, as opposed to something you are merely complaining about, there is a much greater likelihood of your doing something about it.

Step two is to identify the positive opposite. What is the positive opposite for you of being constantly interrupted? Note that I said “for you” — we are not looking for the exact grammatical opposite but what it would mean for you. So you might say “to have a uninterrupted couple of hours every day during which I can really concentrate on my work.”

Compare the effect that each of the following statements is likely to have:

“I’m always getting interrupted when I’m trying to concentrate on my work”

“I don’t want to be constantly interrupted when I am trying to concentrate on my work.”

“I want an uninterrupted couple of hours every day during which I can really concentrate on my work”.

Which statement is most likely to result in your being able to concentrate on your work without interruptions?

By David Markson, fun, fun, fun.  Excerpt:

Curiously impressed by the fact that Auden paid everyone of his bills – electric, phone, whatever – on the same day that it arrived.

Or:

We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention.
Said Richard Serra.

Is this a novel or a book of aphorisms?  Could it be a set of blog posts spread out over 190 pp.?  Who cares, I finished it.  Or:

A woman’s body is not a mass of flesh in a state of decomposition, on which the green and purplish spots denote a complete of cadaveric putrefaction.
An early critics presumed to inform Renoir.

Designer name to come

Fans of comics and graphic novels will have to tell the rest of us if vertical text is commonly used in those media – I just don’t know.


The use of primary colors plus black and white works very nicely here, and the eye on the left is a great addition – it underscores the graphic nature of the subject and it breaks the symmetry of the overall design. Nice.

Buy this book at Amazon.com
Reading Comics

The other day when I wrote a post about free software, Charles left in the comment section a link to a list of programs for academics which he wrote. Charles’s list is even better than the aforementioned wiki, and contains references to audio, reference, RSS readers, …well the list goes on and on. Check it out, Bookmark it, and pass onto your colleagues.

What are critics good for anyway?

I look for one main piece of information from a review: is the name of the product or artist worth Googling?  Yes or no.  That is a binary decision.

Once I have the answer to that question I usually stop reading the review.

I look for one main piece of information from Google: is the product worth buying, on Amazon or elsewhere?

Once I have the answer to that question I usually stop pawing through Google.  That’s another binary decision.

Imagine that.  The critic as the handmaiden of Google, and Google as the handmaiden of Amazon.

To me, the most valuable critics are those who can be disposed of most quickly.  Is it any wonder that so many critics do not like the Internet and bloggers?

Sometimes I think it is enough to simply list how many of the book’s pages I bothered to read.

Latest Update: I’ve attached the original OpenOffice Draw file to the bottom of the page now, too, so people can modify it for different paper sizes and such like.

This is a template for nowMaps - quick visual overviews of what’s on your mind. To find out what a nowMap is, and how to use the main section of this form, see the nowMap Introduction, which also lists other nowMap templates available.

This Form

(This is just a pic to let you see what the form looks like - keep scrolling for the PDF file if you want to print one out to use it. If you’re really stuck, and can’t use the PDF, click the picture, then click on “view original”, then right click the picture and save it - it’ll look pretty poor printed, but it should work ok.)

This is actually the first nowMap form I made, and although I find it handy, it might be a bit small if you’re reasonably busy. The reason I’ve called it “Half-A4”, not A5, is that it’s actually a full sheet of A4 (should work just fine printed on US Letter paper, just let Adobe Reader scale it to fit), but only the bottom half is a nowMap.

Here’s a colour-coded version, so I can refer to the areas by colour further down - don’t worry, the PDF version isn’t like this…

Bottom Half

A nowMap, as described in the introduction, with squared main area (pink), lined left hand side (yellow), and spaces marked on the right for start and end dates (blue).

Top Half

The top half consists of two columns for notes, and one for wins…

• Notes: (red) - just areas for keeping general notes - not actions or references that belong to the side of the nowMap, but maybe a space to jot down things when you’re on the phone, to scribble new ideas, or pretty much anything else. Very rough notes can, of course, go on the back of the sheet.
• Wins: (green) - an area to note down your achievements. Doesn’t have to be anything big, but anything you feel good about having done. The idea is that this gives you a bit of a record of what you’re actually getting done, and might make you feel a bit better when you glance up at it. Pure feel-good stuff. You don’t have to fill it in, but why not feel good at least occasionally?

The PDF Download

Should be below, along with the OpenOffice Draw file that generated it, to allow for modifications…

Latest Update: I’ve attached the original OpenOffice Draw files to the bottom of the page now, too, so people can modify these for different paper sizes and such like.

This is a template for nowMaps - quick visual overviews of what’s on your mind. To find out what a nowMap is, and how to use the main section of this form, see the nowMap Introduction, which also lists other nowMap templates available.

This Form

(This is just a pic to let you see what the form looks like - keep scrolling for the PDF file if you want to print one out to use it. If you’re really stuck, and can’t use the PDF, click the picture, then click on “view original”, then right click the picture and save it - it’ll look pretty poor printed, but it should work ok.)

This is probably the one most of you will want - a full A4 sized nowMap, with no trimmings.

There are two versions - one where the main nowMap area is plain, and one where it’s squared. Pick whichever you prefer - plain for the free-form free spirit in you, squared to let your inner geek shine.

The PDF Download

Should be below, along with the OpenOffice Draw (.odg) files…

If you were happy to find that the new Office 2007 equation editor is a lot more like LaTeX, and that equations didn’t look as bad in Word as before, think again.

Microsoft is pushing a proprietary markup language (OOXML) that clashes with what Nature and Science own typesetters use, so they will simply reject the paper. This might be a good time to read Dario’s own ode to the beauty of LaTeX.

• Leading journals reject Word 2007 files - ZDNet UK
• Wikipedia: OOXML

Technorati tags: typesetting, latex, math, markup, OOXML

I’ve spend quite a bit of time over the years talking about the importance of making decisions, and how to keep to them. And today I want to return to the subject.

One of the problems most of us face is that we are so busy dealing with everyday decisions that we never take the time to make the strategic decisions that are really going to make a difference. Well here’s a little exercise in two parts to look at those decisions. Set aside a few minutes to do it.

** First Part

Think back to what you were doing five years ago 2002 and imagine that you had the power to go back and make all the decisions that you didn’t make then. What would you chose to change?

What you may realise is that the decisions you were making five years ago (or failing to make) have had a profound effect on the way you live now. They might have been decisions to sort out a relationship, or to change jobs, or to have a medical checkup, or to lose weight, or to give up smoking, or to learn a new skill, or to get fit. With any of these, if you had put them into effect five years ago you would now be reaping the benefits. How might yourlife be different now?

Second Part **

Imagine that you’re five years in the future in 2012 and you are looking back doing the same exercise. What are the decisions that you wished you had made in 2007?

Well, this time you CAN go back and make those decisions… you can make them right now!

The underused caret (shift + 6) is an excellent tool for managing file versions. If you’ve got several versions of a file to track and no full-blown version control system to use, just append the caret and a version number to the file name. Tech site WorldStart.com explains that this method of versioning makes it easy to locate file revisions by entering the caret as criteria into your search app du jour. How do you manage the various versions of your important documents? Share in the comments.
More On Carets [WorldStart.com]

Version Control: Use the caret (^) to manage file versions

The least heard phrase in the english language? “That’s the banjo player’s Porsche.”

posted by Thorzdad at 10:36 AM on October 20

Teppo

Alexandre Petrov has created a short film of Shmelev’s My Love (1927).

Here’s the trailer; visually rather stunning, oil painted on glass.  Here’s a review.  Here’s an interview, from last week.  Here’s the wiki entry.

Conan the Barbarian #10
Conan the Barbarian #10

I recently had to make a presentation at work on ontologies–the basics, really, of what they are, how they’re used, and what the heck is OWL? I found the following links and sites helpful in creating my presentation, and thought I’d share them here.

The Basics

• Synonym Rings and Authority Files - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
• XML.com: Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools
• XML.com: Ontology Tools Survey, Revisited
• Are the terms ontology, taxonomy, and folksonomy interchangeable? | Ask MetaFilter
• Guided Tour of Ontology

Advanced Material

• Video: How to Build a Scientific Ontology
• Developing and Creatively Leveraging Hierarchical Metadata and Taxonomy - Boxes and Arrows
• Ontology Development 101 (Protege user documentation)
• Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps!
• Ontologies Come of Age

Wikipedia

• Ontology (computer science)
• Web Ontology Language

Controversy

• Shirky: Ontology is Overrated – Categories, Links, and Tags

Images

• ontology - Google Image Search

OWL, Protege

• OWL Web Ontology Language Overview
• The Protege Ontology Editor and Knowledge Acquisition System

Davy et Dorothy

The Bank of America’s Keep the Change program freaks me out.   Every time you make a charge with your B of A debit card it rounds the figure up to the nearest whole amount and transfers the change to your checking account.  Commercials for this service are all over the television and radio - tagline: “you don’t even have to think about saving” - and every time I see one I feel the gulf between me and the rest of humanity widening (MR readers excepted of course).

Look, I can understand Ulysses tying himself to the mast, I can understand locking the refrigerator and I can understand Christmas accounts but I will never understand how anyone can increase their savings by taking money from one account and putting it into another.  I think I will write a book, I will call it Mental Accounting for Dummies:

The secret to saving more money is simple.  In your right hand is money for spending.  In your left hand is money for savings.  Now take some money from your right hand and put it into your left hand.  Tada!  Wasn’t that easy?

Millions have signed up for Keep the Change and the program has been written up by Business Week as “a radically different product that broke the paradigm."  Sigh.

n.b. It is true that B of A tops up the amount transferred but this part of the program, the only part that makes any sense, is hardly advertised at all.

Many people have been clamoring for this topic over at the secret blog.

My views are simple: we have too few cats in the world, relative to dogs.  Dogs, for reasons of temperament, can in essence precommit to being our slaves.  (As long as they are not Irish Setters.)  That makes us more willing to create or support an additional dog.  The quantity of dogs is nearly Pareto optimal, although their emotional slavery to us raises ethical questions about the distribution of power in the relationship.

A cat cannot “promise,” genetically or otherwise, that her kittens will become your slaves, if only you don’t neuter her.  The kittens never come about, or they meet a cruel fate rather quickly.

If you must support the life of either a cat or a dog, choose the undervalued cat.  This argument requires only that the cat gets some value out of being alive, and that value should carry some weight in our all-things-considered moral calculations.

More generally, you should go around helping the (undervalued) people who insult you, or the people who otherwise signal their independence from you.  The craven are already being helped quite a bit.

Windows only: Freeware app WinTabber can add tabs to any program for easy grouping. Not only can WinTabber group multiple instances of the same program into tabs, but it can also group different programs together into tabs (as shown in the screenshot). Its possible uses abound, but grouping your applications based on purpose is one idea with a lot of potential. For example, you could create two groups of tabs: one group for work-related applications and one group of tabs for your non-work-related apps. WinTabber is a free download for Windows only.
WinTabber [via One Tip A Day]

Featured Windows Download: Add tabs to any program with WinTabber

From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journal, dated October 1848:

Every poem must be made up of lines that are poems.

via zhurnaly: Poetic Lines

(originally posted 2007-07-12, updated for micro.blog)

There’s a malady sweeping the nation that’s highly contagious to concertgoers.  It doesn’t have a name yet, so let’s call it Excessive Ovation Syndrome (EOS for short).  Those suffering from it stand and applaud at performances that aren’t good enough to deserve such enthusiasm. In extreme cases, they shout “Bravo!” during events that are best forgotten.

The more people pay for tickets, the more susceptible they are to EOS, because ovations confirm that their money was well spent.  Even those in bargain seats can easily catch it from their neighbors.  The urge to stand and cheer may be irresistible if everyone around you is doing it.

Here is more.  Is the fear that too much costly clapping goes on?  I believe most of these people enjoy the pretentious show of approval.  A more plausible worry is that audiences, if they approve all performances, can no longer signal quality to performers.  Given that other and arguably more accurate signals remain in place (critics, bloggers, the conductor, etc.), I am not sure we should be concerned by greater noise in the audience signal.  After all, the very complaint suggests that the audience cannot be trusted to judge quality, so why not neutralize them?

And if the excess clapping gives the less musically sophisticated attendees a better memory of the show, that is arguably a benefit.  Are we not, after all, committed egalitarians?

Against my better aesthetic judgment, I am on the verge of endorsing Excessive Ovation Syndrome.

Der Kommissar

Designer name to come

Today’s question: how would you design a jacket for a novel that desperately, aggressively, willfully tries not to be a novel – a book that “does away with most narrative conventions – plot, colorful characters, dramatic conflict,” using instead “a collage of very short anecdotes, apocryphal legends, aphorisms, (and) lurid gossip…run(ning) through (a) fragmented consciousness?” And one that begs comparison to Joyce, Beckett, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Shakespearean sonnets, just to name a few? (Read the wonderful NY Times review, from which the above quotes are taken.)

Here’s the answer:


The debate begins…now.
The Last Novel

In a previous post, I mentioned how I like to read about and study Hollywood because it makes my own industry look sane and rational. The people who create and run television shows and films cope with a level of chaos and randomness that would cause most high-tech entrepreneurs I know, myself included, to switch careers faster than you can say “the deal fell through”.

Writers in Hollywood are a particularly interesting species, in that they combine a primary creative role with practically no control over the finished product.

Three great books on the television and film business as seen through the eyes of writers are:

• Adventures in the Screen Trade by the great William Goldman who wrote such classic films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride. I think it’s the best book ever written about screenwriting. Probably the most memorable part is Goldman’s assertion that “nobody knows anything” – Goldman argues quite thoroughly that Hollywood, after 80 years of institutional experience creating movies and television shows,is still completely unable to predict which projects will succeed and which will fail.
• Billion-Dollar Kiss by Jeffrey Stepakoff, a professional television writer who worked extensively on Dawson’s Creek. This is probably the best book on the current state of the television industry – which has changed radically in the last several years, due in large part to the rise of reality programming – from the perspective of someone who writes for television for a living.
• Conversations with My Agent by Rob Long is one of the funniest books I have ever read. Long was a young writer on the hit series Cheers and on top of the world, until Ted Danson punched the eject button and the show shut down. He then embarked on the entrepreneurial adventure of creating his own television show from scratch. The straightforward narrative of life in the TV trenches in the 1990’s is interspersed with marvelous screenplay-like interchanges between Long, his agent, and various other Hollywood denizens.

Public computer surfaces are reservoirs for methicillin-resistant staphylococci.

The role of computer keyboards used by students of a metropolitan university as reservoirs of antibiotic-resistant staphylococci was determined. Putative methicillin (oxacillin)-resistant staphylococci isolates were identified from keyboard swabs following a combination of biochemical and genetic analyses. Of 24 keyboards surveyed, 17 were contaminated with staphylococci that grew in the presence of oxacillin (2 mg l^-1). Methicillin (oxacillin)-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), -S. epidermidis (MRSE) and -S. hominis (MRSH) were present on two, five and two keyboards, respectively, while all three staphylococci co-contaminated one keyboard. Furthermore, these were found to be part of a greater community of oxacillin-resistant bacteria. Combined with the broad user base common to public computers, the presence of antibiotic-resistant staphylococci on keyboard surfaces might impact the transmission and prevalence of pathogens throughout the community.

Thanks to Monique van Hoek for the pointer.

I began by exposing the myth that imprecision, slowness, and noisiness are liabilities of brain function, “bugs” in computers.

That is from Read Montague’s new and notable Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions, an in-depth look at neuroscience and the brain.