Mar 11, 2009
Our product just launched: MeeHive, your personalized news paper.
Press coverage.
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Mar 3, 2009
“Yossef Gutfreund, a wrestling referee, saw the door begin to open and masked men with guns
on the other side. He shouted a warning to his sleeping roommates and threw his weight against
the door. Gutfreund's actions gave his roommate, weightlifting coach Tuvia Sokolovsky, enough
time to smash a window and escape.
Wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg fought back against the intruders, who shot him through his cheek and then forced him to help them find more hostages. Weinberg lied to the kidnappers by telling them that the residents of the neighboring apartment were not Israelis. Wounded, Weinberg later again attacked the kidnappers, allowing one of his wrestlers to escape before himself being shot to death. Weightlifter Yossef Romano also attacked and wounded one of the intruders before being shot and killed.
The Germans offered an unlimited amount of money as well as the substitution of high-ranking Germans. The kidnappers refused both offers."
—Wikipedia on the Munich massacre. I'm reading about it in the wake of the attack on cricketers in Pakistan. Things could have been much worse.
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Feb 18, 2009
“If I get in five or six hours of writing, the other stuff [routine chores] feels
satisfying, like a kind of grace. But if I have to do that stuff when I haven’t
written—that’s a terrible thing."
—Jonathan Lethemi via
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Feb 13, 2009
Resolutions
Most new years resolutions have failed by this point.
By definition, a new habit doesn't fit in with the mindset and lifestyle you currently have. You care about more than the resolution. You're really asking for the new mindset that enables it.
When you make a change its implications ripple through your life. For it to take hold, the rest of your life must make room for it. Reorganize, repack. Resolutions are simplistic. They encourage us to focus on one aspect of life, and to ignore implications for the rest.
Don't fix the action too quickly. Don't fixate on individual resolutions. You have somewhere to get to, and you must change in myriad ways to get there. Change requires practice. Make it a habit, a constant process of improvement. Keep sketching [1,2]. Iterate. What's so special about January first anyway?
paraphrasing myself from two years ago after reading TJ
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Feb 7, 2009
The superior civilization: Ants
comments
- Kartik Agaram, 2010-03-18: E O Wilson, "Anthill": http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23763
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Feb 6, 2009
I am thinking about the tragedy of the commons
We neglect what we collectively own.
More than a theory of economics, it is a cognitive phenomenon. Humans have trouble with small numbers. One millionth of this subway gets rounded down to zero. (This is one of the reasons gambling has allure.)
'Cognitive rounding' applies also to shared responsibility. This financial crisis has no single culprit because we all reacted to a situation, and by our reactions made it worse.
Kevin Kelly suggests we'll just go past ownership as an incentive. Is the free movement realistic in this expectation? I think it under-estimates human nature.
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Jan 31, 2009
“The propensity to play is situated in very ancient regions of the brain.
Rats that have had their neocortex removed still engage in normal play."
— Jaak Panksepp on the importance of unstructured play early in life
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