August 2008

This is pretty wild: “Because most people possess positive associations about themselves, most people prefer things that are connected to the self…people are disproportionately likely to live in places whose names resemble their own first or last names (e.g., people named Louis are disproportionately likely to live in St. Louis)…people disproportionately choose careers whose labels […]

Notes from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Given my recent interest in the contemplative life and observing nature, a friend recommended I read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It chronicles the author’s adventures and observations while living and exploring the Tinker Creek area of Virginia’s Roanoake Valley, and won the Pulitzer Prize when published in 1974. Yet while my copy of […]

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Saul Griffith, “Energy Literacy” – fascinating talk on measuring and calculating the energy needed by individuals and all humanity, and what we need to do to meet it.

Notes from The Honourable Schoolboy

As part of an effort to read more fiction (to better appreciate the creative side of writing) and in honour of our trip to London, I read The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carre. It was fun to read it while in London, as I was simultaneously discovering the landmarks it mentioned in the storyline […]

IFTF’s Future Now: The case for human-future interaction – “At its core, human-future interaction would be the art and science of effectively and ethically communicating research, forecasts, and scenarios about trends and potential futures…[there is now] a growing view of the future as a medium that anyone can affect and co-create, and less as looming […]

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“People who write books, people who work in universities, who work on big projects for a long time, are on a diverging course from the rest of society. Slowly, the two cultures just get further and further apart.” – Neal Stephenson. So how do I get on that course? Stephenson, by the way, works for […]

“You can’t have art without resistance in the materials” – William Morris

Redesigning the piano keyboard