It’s hard to doubt a grown man’s sincerity when you see tears running down his cheeks. These men were hardened criminals, most of them serving life sentences for murder, who rediscovered perspective and humanity simply by spending focused time with themselves.
Meditation is a powerful tool. There are two types of knowledge: intellectual and visceral. You can read books until you’re cross-eyed and you will never connect with the fundamental, animal, visceral side of living. We like to think of ourselves as rational, conscious beings. It’s reassuring to us. We’re in control of our minds and therefore our lives. But that’s more illusion than reality.
On Meditation
July 3rd, 2008 ·
New Shiz! Quickerly.com
June 28th, 2008 ·
About two weeks ago I threw together a quick prototype of the kind of thing you can build with tinydb.org. I was going to wait and polish it a bit more before letting people use it, but I kept wanting to send people songs so I just had to start using it myself and put it out there. Guess I need to pay more attention to my own “release early, release often” mantra.
The app is called quickerly.com and it’s just a quick way to send someone a song that you want them to listen to. I use it to tweet about songs that I’m enjoying. What’s cool about the app is not really the app itself, but the way it uses tinydb. The entire app is written in javascript. It’s served off a plain html page and uses a little swf to play mp3s. Quickerly uses the seeqpod API to search for tracks and yahoo pipes as a proxy. When you click the share button, javascript writes song data and handling instructions to tinydb. Tinydb holds data about the song location, artist and track names, and instructions on where to redirect and what javascript method to call after redirecting.
Since tinydb uses json and circumvents crossdomain, quickerly can both read and write to the datastore without having to proxy or open new windows. I’ve already found quickerly pretty useful, but by no means is it a great app. I just hope people can take a look at the source code and realize the kinds of cool stuff you can do with tinydb, without having to worry about deploying any server side code. You can literally host a tinydb app on tumblr or blogger. I hope to see way cooler things built on tinydb in the future.
If you encounter any bugs (IE, ahem..), or have comments or suggestions, please put them in the comments of this post. Enjoy. As always, props to my colleagues at labs.laan.com with whom I built tinydb.
Here are a few jams:
http://tinydb.org/1bZ - Stevie Wonder - Master Blaster (Jammin’) (partial, but badass)
http://tinydb.org/1c1 - Oasis - Married With Children
http://tinydb.org/1c2 - Al Green - Love And Happiness
http://tinydb.org/1c3 - Bob Marley - Redemption Song
http://tinydb.org/1c5 - The Jackson Five - ABC
That last one always makes me smile.
Wow, I use a lot of Google Stuff
June 27th, 2008 ·
My friend Debbie asked me in an email recently what are the 10 websites I visit the most. I was kind of surprised by the results:
gmail
google
google reader
twitter
google docs
google calendar
facebook
amazon
wikipedia
ted
Half of them are Google properties, and about half are apps. I guess this is kind of skewed, because I do read a lot of content sites on the web, but that happens through Google Reader mostly. Some of my current favs in Reader are:
http://laserlike.com/
http://blog.navajeet.com/
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/
Also worthy of mention in this post are a few webservices that I use quite a lot but are not exactly “sites that I frequent.” These include delicious and what is probably my favorite web service at the moment, disqus.
What are the top 10 sites you frequent? Are they primarily applications or content sites?
Tags: survey
Couchsurfing is Beta Testing a City
June 27th, 2008 ·
Couchsurfing is my new favorite social net. I checked it out this week prior to my trip to Palo Alto, and now CC and I have connected with 2 people in the real world and have gained two new friends. Our hosts showed us around the area, gave us a feel for what life was like in Palo Alto, and told us about the cool stuff they’re doing. We got a tour of Stanford Campus, went hiking, went to a cool place for dinner, got a homemade pancake breakfast, got some free rides, and had great conversations.
Although I’ve been to the Bay Area before, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a feel for what it would be like to live there until this past visit. It’s tough to assess a city when you’re just a visitor staying in hotels. Spending time in homes and apartments of people that actually live there and joining them in their nightly excursions is probably the best way to actually experience the city like a local. Thanks to Sasha and Vanae for hosting–good times, for sure.
I must admit, that Twitter & Facebook also came through. I tweeted about heading out to Cali, which got imported into my Facebook feed. My college buddy Wes saw this and mentioned that he had recently moved to San Fran and had some couches we could crash on. We spent two nights with Wes, ate fantastic Mexican food, and discovered two of the coolest bars I’ve been to in some time. Wes also introduced me to a pretty cool new band, Ghostland Observatory. Here’s a good track: Vibrate.
I love using the internet to connect with people in the physical world.
Tags: fun
Numenta HTM Workshop
June 26th, 2008 ·
At the HTM workshop earlier this week, Numenta demoed their nupic 1.6 release and showed some pretty impressive advancements in the learning algorithms they have been developing. Their prototype HTM is a vision system that does recognition on objects like cows, ducks, and cell phones–they’ve trained it extensively and it can recognize these objects from pretty much any angle, and it recognizes objects both in photos and in crayon type sketches. This system should be commercial grade within a year, I expect.
Qualia labs presented some motion capture demos were astounding–their HTM was able to distinguish between 4 distinct action performed by lab actors with 98% accuracy. One of my main goals in attending the event was to assess the state of the current nupic platform; I was expecting to see a tool ready for experimentation, but I think now that within the next year the platform will be solving some real problems.
Some of the most interesting demos to me were those involving “unsupervised training.” In unsupervised training, you feed data into an HTM and tell it to identify n states. The HTM then identifies patterns in the data and categorizes the data into n-groups. A motion capture demo, for example, instructed an HTM to identify the motions of actors into 4 states: the HTM ended up dividing movements into walking, sitting, jumping, and running. Although this is a somewhat trivial example, one can imagine how unsupervised training could reveal interesting patterns in large data sets–for example, feed in data about people’s blood sugar levels or some piece of information about their genetic sequence. Tell an HTM to split the subjects into a few groups, and then correlate the results with data like presence of certain diseases.
When I arrived in Palo Alto, I had quite a casual interest in Numenta and expected that nupic would be a technology to incorporate into whatever else I’m working on in about two years. Perhaps because of the impressive demos, perhaps because of the energy you get just from going to an event like this where there are a bunch of people excited about something, or, perhaps by chance, I am definitely now considering diving more fully into nupic sooner than later.
My Motivatr is Fun
June 18th, 2008 ·
Just tried out mymotivatr.com, @shalerjump’s latest endeavor:
My sis was just telling me I should make an app like this. Now I don’t have to. Thanks, Shaler!
Tags: fun
Inspiration: Exhausted and Smiling
June 17th, 2008 ·
Just watched an awesome clip of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band performing live in NYC. He spends about 3 minutes handling the crowd, like a general commanding his army. It’s not an easy task, and he takes a minute to wring his shirt, which is drenched with sweat. He’s exhausted, but still smiling. I’ve never seen anyone work harder to entertain a crowd than the Boss. He’s by far the best live performer I have seen.
[ vid doesn't seem to load in safari. here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCvbAllJNR8 ]
You can tell everyone on stage loves what they’re doing–watch Bruce dance around the stage and everyone in the band smiling at each other. It’s a beautiful thing. Just watch the video (and feel free to leave a video comment).
Tags: inspiration · work
Activator X
June 17th, 2008 ·
Another excellent post from Whole Health source about dental health.
Excerpts:
Weston Price was a dentist and scientist in the early part of the 20th century. Practicing dentistry in Cleveland, he was amazed at the poor state of his patients’ teeth and the suffering it inflicted. At the time, dental health was even worse than it is today, with some children in their teens already being fitted for dentures. Being a religious man, he could not bring himself to believe that ‘physical degeneration’ was what God intended for mankind. He traveled throughout the world looking for cultures that did not have crooked teeth or dental decay, and that also exhibited general health and well-being. And he found them. A lot of them.
These cultures were all considered ‘primitive’ at the time, and were not subject to the lifestyles or food choices of the Western world. He documented, numerically and with photographs, the near-absence of dental cavities and crooked teeth in a number of different cultures throughout the world. He showed that like all animals, humans are healthy and robust when occupying the right ecological niche. Price had a deep respect for the nutritional knowledge these cultures curated.
He also documented the result when these same cultures were exposed to Western diets of white flour, sugar and other industrially processed foods: they developed rampant cavities, their children grew with crooked teeth due to narrow dental arches, as well as a number of other strikingly familiar health problems.
Tags: nutrition
Paul Graham on Ambition
June 17th, 2008 ·
I was just giving this Paul Graham essay another read while waiting for my sister to join me for dinner and found a quote I really dig:
Some people know at 16 what sort of work they’re going to do, but in most ambitious kids, ambition seems to precede anything specific to be ambitious about. They know they want to do something great. They just haven’t decided yet whether they’re going to be a rock star or a brain surgeon.
Typically, I don’t agree with a lot of Paul Graham has to say (eg, NYC owns Cambridge imo), but his quote on ambition was quite a gem. His full essay is worth a read.
The Future of News
June 16th, 2008 ·
I just saw three twitter posts in a row about Tiger Woods and the phrase “The Future of News” sprang to mind. I think I first heard the phrase in John Borthwick’s essay with that title, but there have been several times since I’ve started using twitter that I’ve seen this phenomenon in action.
It happened twice this weekend: just now regarding Tiger and earlier regarding Tim Russert. It’s interesting how much seeing the same topic repeated 2-3 times in a row makes you notice it and pay attention.
Idea for a twitter app: use some linguistics tools to parse incoming tweets from my friends into phrases, people, events, and places. Group tweets by theme, showing me hot themes, and bubble up stuff I should care about because lots of my friends are talking about it. Since I only have a small group of people I’m following, I don’t require this filtered view, but I can imagine how it would be quite useful if I had a huge group I was following on twitter. Perhaps more useful to me would be something that consumes all content published by all my friends (twitter, facebook, blogs, tumblogs, etc) and creates a nice filter view on that.
Tags: desultory
