Bruce Keener’s Lifestream

I wonder if his parents were religious, and whether he is: I cannot but imagine that routinely contemplating 11 dimensions and a constantly expanding universe (only 20% of the matter in which is currently understood, the rest being dark matter. And that's not to mention dark energy, or the multiverse) might induce a kind of existential vertigo, and thus nihilism, or belief, or total rejection. Some properly thought-through accommodation with the idea of divinity, at least. Dimensions, particularly, seem to me to require a certain leap of faith. He admits to regularly feeling awe, but the dimensions don't seem to trouble him much – mostly because, rather than trying to imagine them in space, they generally exist, for him, as letters and numbers in equations.

He doesn't believe in God. "My parents were very unreligious. Extremely. I presume they influenced me. I'm sort of jealous of people who do have faith. I suppose it depends on the sort of god you have faith in, but it gives you security, I guess.

"I get angry with people who are wildly atheist, because they sort of deny any humanity whatsoever. They deny the poetry – and they talk as if we understand everything, including love, and actually there are beautiful things which can move you in ways that presumably can be understood entirely in terms of complex pathways in the brain, but that's still not a useful way of thinking of them. So I get annoyed by ultra-atheists who aren't willing to tolerate anything – I suppose I'm less atheist than that."

Green's thoughts on religion are probably much more representative of the scientific community than are the thoughts of Dawkins or Stenger, et al.

Talent is God-given; be humble. Fame is man-given; be thankful. Conceit is self-given; be careful" -John Wooden

John Wooden was more than a coach (which is a hard enough job by itself) : he was a great leader, and one who could describe leadership skills (and pitfalls) in very understandable, and sometimes inspiring, terms.

Looks like this one is going to give the iPhone a real run for the money.

You didn’t clarify enough. If your mind thinks there is more planning or brainstorming to do about that, or what you captured as a next action is not the next physical, visible step, it will take it back.

You’re not reviewing enough. If your mind doesn’t trust you’re looking at that choice often enough (Are we doing anything about this??), it will take the job back.  The Weekly Review is gold.  It’s not just clean-up time, it’s reassurance time for your mind that you’re “on it,” even if that’s a decision to let it incubate some more on Someday.

Good Stuff from David Allen's GTD Team. I can certainly say that this has applied in my use of GTD ... typical mistakes are not clarifying enough and not reviewing enough. I'm not too shabby on the review aspect, but sometimes do not take the time to really clarify what I need to do.

2) Reduce those activities that, despite being important, must be performed under pressure.

These activities, by definition, must be performed at the highest level. Yet the time pressure — the urgency — has a negative impact on the quality of the outcome.

Teresa Amabile's research clearly demonstrates how pressure over time is not food for creativity at all — a necessary quality to perform high-impact activities in a great way. Creative ideas need some sort of incubation period which allows them to emerge. Oftentimes, pressure over time (especially if accompanied by frequent distractions) negatively influences such process of internalization and creation of new solutions.

A successful leader reduces "urgent and important" activities to a minimum, by monitoring:

1. How tasks are planned and delegated.
2. How "urgent and important" activities can be reduced.
3. How much free-of-distraction time people have for high-impact activities.

A very interesting article. I've quoted the piece that I found most interesting, and must say that it conforms to what I've observed over the years, even if I didn't grasp it at the time. Thanks to Tyler Ellis for putting this out on his shared Google Reader items list.

Although the average was 66 days, there was marked variation in how long habits took to form, anywhere from 18 days up to 254 days in the habits examined in this study. As you'd imagine, drinking a daily glass of water became automatic very quickly but doing 50 sit-ups before breakfast required more dedication (above, dotted lines). The researchers also noted that:

• Missing a single day did not reduce the chance of forming a habit.
• A sub-group took much longer than the others to form their habits, perhaps suggesting some people are 'habit-resistant'.
• Other types of habits may well take much longer.

Interesting study refuting the old wives' tale that it takes 21 days to form a habit.

Two minutes and seventeen seconds that changed the world...

Robert Sawyer's novel FlashForward is currently being transformed into a big budget ABC TV series. Sawyer's story follows a research team using the particle accelerator at CERN in pursuit of the elusive Higgs Boson, a theoretical subatomic particle. But instead of finding the Higgs, the consciousness of the entire human race is thrown ahead by twenty-one years.

Chapter excerpts:

• Chapters 1 and 2
• Chapter 12

Interesting stuff. I wasn't aware of the book FlashForward until I came across this. I'll for sure watch the first episode of it tonight.

Any of you read the book yet?

Update, 25 Sep 2009: I watched the season opener last night. Not very impressive. Perhaps because it had far too many commercials to keep me interested, but disappointed that no physics was discussed in the episode. 

Was even more disappointed in the season opener of Fringe. Again, far too many commercials. (I'll just DVR it in the future.) More disappointing, though, is that the plot was just stupid and not technically interesting. The series got into the concept of parallel universes in the season finale and has an opportunity to do something with that (the concept and possibility of parallel universes continue to get a lot of attention by physicists). But they instead had a lame story about cannibals. They could lose me real quickly if they don't get their act together. We need good science fiction on TV ,,,, not the kind of crap that we see in these season openers.

Simply beautiful