February 2011
17 posts
January 2011
22 posts
Recent Themes
I’m a month into my move. There have been a few themes that I’ve noticed. I’m here to report them to the masses.
1. Walking. I walk everywhere. My shoes’ deterioration can vouch for this. My new bike might make this a thing of the past.
2. Empty Charles Shaw bottles. I’m growing a collection. Don’t know how this happened. Damn you, Trader Joes.
3. Baguettes....
“…and Dr. Dog, what Dog the Bounty Hunter could easily become, if he merely...”
– The best description of a band I’ve ever heard.
Why silicon valley is so startupy.
Despite my use of “startupy,” I have put some thought into this. There has been a lot of argument on the tech nerd subject of why silicon valley is so successful at being the startup capitol of the world. New York is seemingly making inroads, but it is no where near the size of the startup industry in the Bay Area.
Some say that the Universities (Cal, Stanford) in the bay area make...
As Heidegger said, in Being and Time, “Forgetting is not nothing, nor is it just a failure to remember; it is rather a ‘positive’ ecstatic mode of one’s having been, a mode with a character of its own.” Proustian memory, not the palest ink, should be the ideal we are building into our technology; not what memory recalls, but what it evokes. The palest ink tells us what we’ve done or where we’ve...
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The End Goal
So, I’m a second week into my graduate program. Pretty remarkable stuff. Learning a lot. Meeting a lot of people who have very similar interests: Cities. No one else cares about cities like I do, except for the people who care about it as much as me in this program. Neat stuff.
Class is seminar style. Discussions all around. But there is a prominent question that wasn’t answered. To...
willpower
One of her main research projects looked at the relationship between self-control and grade-point average. She found that the ability to delay gratification—eighth graders were given a choice between a dollar right away or two dollars the following week—was a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q. She said that her study shows that “intelligence is really important, but it’s...
Mrs. Giffords
The interview on MSNBC came after her district office was vandalized the night that the health care legislation passed. She noted to hosts Savannah Guthrie and Chuck Todd that her office is listed on Sarah Palin’s targeted list for her support of the health care bill.
“We are on Sarah Palin’s targeted list,” Ms. Giffords said in the interview. “The way that she has...
Twice by Little Dragon … it’s...
“At the Q gathering in 2010, urbanologist Richard Florida observed that young...”
– Andy Crouch, Ten Most Significant Cultural Trends of the Last Decade (via stoweboyd)
Coming in on my second week
I’ve now been in Portland for over a week and am now entering into my second week here. Due to that momentus (hah!) occasion, I thought I’d write a bit of a run down of what my first was like and the pros and cons of being here.
The first couple of days were spent with my aunt. She took me to a couple of happy hours with her long time friends. It was actually pretty fun. I enjoyed...
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In response to the responses the quote received
Tumblr is a interesting social network, but it’s one biggest problems is not being able to reply to a reply. So, I’ll do that through another post.
Kyle said: “This is really interesting, I have never really liked the Harry Potter series but this puts it in a completely different perspective for me. Though I travel a lot it has always been tough for me to embrace change. Maybe I...
“Now consider the type of learning that has swept up an
entire generation of...”
– From the third chapter of “A New Culture of Learning” by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown. It happens to be a very interesting new book that comes out in two weeks. You can read the first 3 chapters online. I recommend it. I’ll definitely be reading the rest of this book once it...