Archive for the ‘ Uncategorized ’ Category
The day begun with a keynote by Dennis Meadows on his ‘Limits to Growth’ work. I came away the following ideas: There’s a distinction between global problems and universal problems. Global problems affect everyone and cannot be solved without cooperation from everyone, whereas universal problems affect everyone but can be solved by local groups. Some issues [ READ MORE ]
Sunday was the PhD colloquium. It was smaller than the full conference has been, but there were still about 50-100 people in attendance. In the morning, there were several presentations, 3 of which I unfortunately missed due to my late arrival the night before, followed by a luncheon. Then, in the afternoon, there was a [ READ MORE ]
So, I’m at the 27th International System Dynamics Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the moment and, like any wannabe writer with a blog, I’m going to make an attempt at live blogging it. My flights were nice and comfortable, though the second one, from Phoenix to Albuquerque was seriously delayed. At first, this was [ READ MORE ]
Yesterday was very strange. Do you ever have those days where you just can’t get anything done? Where all of the things you know are important just seem silly and pointless? Where a Herculean effort is required even to force yourself to put your laundry away? Of course you do. Everyone has bad days. If you don’t, [ READ MORE ]
Today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and if that’s not worth celebrating, I really don’t know what is. Lots of people are celebrating, of course. Here’s a few sites worth checking out: “Remembering Apollo 11“, a photo set from the Boston Globe’s Big Picture feature. NASA’s official 40th anniversary page, with photos, videos, [ READ MORE ]
This is the third in a series of posts about music appreciation. In previous posts, I argued that: Explaining our preferences with ‘taste’ doesn’t help a lot. All it really does is hide their complexities and protect us from the challenge of having to explain ourselves. Preferences are better explained using ‘facets’ of appreciation that each captures [ READ MORE ]
Don’t screw up the little things in life – they’re easy to achieve, and failure to do so can be expensive in time, effort, or stress. In life, there’s lots of little things you can easily do that avoid expensive annoyance later on. Take keys, for example: failing to check that you have them when you [ READ MORE ]
While brain stoming with Julian about the implications of ‘always-on augmented reality’* on human communication, I decided I needed a way of collaboratively drawing mind maps so that we’d have some sort of concrete record of the ideas coming out of our conversation. Normally, I make notes of my own, but they’re hard to share [ READ MORE ]
Playing with a new comments plugin called IntenseDebate. Apologies if anything weird starts happening.. [ READ MORE ]
I’ve been thinking a lot about music appreciation. It’s much more complicated than I think the words and concepts we use to talk about it really let on, and I think part of the confusion is that it’s not so much that each of us likes different things so much as that each of us [ READ MORE ]