7 for Sunday

Holding on to a lot of ideas takes a great deal of time and energy. If, like me, you’re a systems person you can make things much worse. I can build personal knowledge systems, slipboxes, databases, custom software and bend all sorts of technology into new shapes. It turns out—as I hope you’ve already guessed—that if you have too…

Because it’s crazy. It’s insane. It will never work. You’ll hear this a lot if you have a lot of far-out ideas. “Moonshots” is the term I prefer for such ideas, or a really big swing. And then in an instant he realised that rather than building a cable through the wildernesses of Newfoundland and Nova…

Preparation—getting everything just so, the right desk, the right software and computer, the right room, the right beverage, the right time, the right mindset—is really simply a form of hiding. Sometimes it’s only a few moments, sometimes it’s days, but I always hide before writing every single one of these blog posts. I definitely don’t…

The Whole Earth Catalog. Now there’s someone who poured their time, energy, money and personal brand of sanity into a project, and it succeeded. Then the Internet came along and supplanted the entire project. Yet for years, access to the Whole Earth Catalog itself has been difficult. 55 years on from the first publication of…

One rule is: Anything I find, which ticks two (or more!) boxes from my list of decadent favorite pastimes, I must include herein. For example: Something that bashes on social media platforms and makes me chuckle out loud? Oh, that’s getting included. Another rule, written but almost impossible to enforce, is: Don’t over think it. The humble…

Today, 7 rhetorical questions for Sunday… What is necessary for something to continue existing?Is autonomy necessary?Is physical integrity (as opposed to “physical dispersion”) necessary?Does dignity require privacy, which requires autonomy and physical integrity? Privacy is the key that unlocks the aspects of yourself that are most intimate and personal, that make you most you, and…

I write a lot about “looking back”. (A lot: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 21 more posts, plus “look_ing_ back” has another 17 posts.) I clearly believe—I really do—that looking back is best for assessing things. And yet… stress, unhappiness. (Important: Words left unsaid.) By all objective metrics, I’m as successful today as I could hope to be a decade ago. I’m happily married, well inside…

Aeon has been one of the better things I’ve recently found scattered upon the Internet. It’s not new; It’s new to me. One of my super-powers isn’t actually a super-power. It’s a piece of software that I wrote. Take a look at Aeon and imagine if, somehow, every day you were offered a couple of…

I like Carl Sagan’s point about humans being able to work magic. (I’ll pause here while you read the quote.) Writing enables us to transmit ideas across time and space directly into others’ minds; It’s a natural and obvious development once we had language and storytelling. I am so far, endlessly fascinated by that. My soul…

No, this isn’t about AI. I mean the work that we want to do. That’s why only we can do it. I want to sift through a certain amount of things. (For example, I like to sift through all dogs.) I want to find things that are interesting and surprising. And I want to have way more books than I can ever read.…