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It’s a Paul Graham post. Smart guy, smart ideas…
Paul Graham giving a talk at Startup School.
Paul Graham on What You’ll Wish You’d Known
Paul Graham on Ideas for Startups
Paul Graham on How to Start a Startup
[Bonus: The link for the Startup School site with loads of great video's other smart and eloquent thinkers]
What’s in fashion these days? How about open source musical hoodies or wi-fi detecting T-Shirts…
Soundie | Singularity Hub
Wi-Fi Detector T-Shirt | ThinkGeek
Tips for dealing with information overload. You don’t want to be a stupid, lazy, callous, annoying, gullible jerk. Neither do I. So consider these tips. None of them alone will banish the dark side of social media, but they can’t hurt.
Seven Ways Social Media Is Ruining Your Life–And How To Fix It | Regator Blog
“Past research indicates that self-control relies on some sort of limited energy source. This review suggests that blood glucose is one important part of the energy source of self-control. Acts of self-control deplete relatively large amounts of glucose. Self-control failures are more likely when glucose is low or cannot be mobilized effectively to the brain (i.e., when insulin is low or insensitive). Restoring glucose to a sufficient level typically improves self-control. Numerous self-control behaviors fit this pattern, including controlling attention, regulating emotions, quitting smoking, coping with stress, resisting impulsivity, and refraining from criminal and aggressive behavior. Alcohol reduces glucose throughout the brain and body and likewise impairs many forms of self-control. Furthermore, self-control failure is most likely during times of the day when glucose is used least effectively. Self-control thus appears highly susceptible to glucose. Self-control benefits numerous social and interpersonal processes. Glucose might therefore be related to a broad range of social behavior.”
The Physiology of Willpower | Gailliot and Baumeister
From the I wish they did more of this dept…
It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news.
[Authors and Poets Write the News | Forward.com]
Image [doseng]
This is an incredible essay…
In an old joke, two noblemen vie to name the bigger number. The first, after ruminating for hours, triumphantly announces “Eighty-three!” The second, mightily impressed, replies “You win.”
A biggest number contest is clearly pointless when the contestants take turns. But what if the contestants write down their numbers simultaneously, neither aware of the other’s? To introduce a talk on “Big Numbers,” I invite two audience volunteers to try exactly this. I tell them the rules:
You have fifteen seconds. Using standard math notation, English words, or both, name a single whole number—not an infinity—on a blank index card. Be precise enough for any reasonable modern mathematician to determine exactly what number you’ve named, by consulting only your card and, if necessary, the published literature.
So contestants can’t say “the number of sand grains in the Sahara,” because sand drifts in and out of the Sahara regularly. Nor can they say “my opponent’s number plus one,” or “the biggest number anyone’s ever thought of plus one”—again, these are ill-defined, given what our reasonable mathematician has available. Within the rules, the contestant who names the bigger number wins.
Are you ready? Get set. Go…
 Image [Loopable]
There is a nice loop of paradox here that I am reading this, posting this and you will also be reading this on the Internet…
After years of carefully avoiding classic time sinks like TV, games, and Usenet, I still managed to fall prey to distraction, because I didn’t realize that it evolves. Something that used to be safe, using the Internet, gradually became more and more dangerous. Some days I’d wake up, get a cup of tea and check the news, then check email, then check the news again, then answer a few emails, then suddenly notice it was almost lunchtime and I hadn’t gotten any real work done. And this started to happen more and more often.
It took me surprisingly long to realize how distracting the Internet had become, because the problem was intermittent. I ignored it the way you let yourself ignore a bug that only appears intermittently. When I was in the middle of a project, distractions weren’t really a problem. It was when I’d finished one project and was deciding what to do next that they always bit me.
Another reason it was hard to notice the danger of this new type of distraction was that social customs hadn’t yet caught up with it. If I’d spent a whole morning sitting on a sofa watching TV, I’d have noticed very quickly. That’s a known danger sign, like drinking alone. But using the Internet still looked and felt a lot like work.
Eventually, though, it became clear that the Internet had become so much more distracting that I had to start treating it differently. Basically, I had to add a new application to my list of known time sinks: Firefox.
[Read more | Disconnecting Distraction]
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Hello If you like all kinds of random ideas, quotes, questions and miscellaneous links you're in luck because this is where I tend to stash them.
Enjoy.
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