"I Love Everything"

"Look Who FINALLY Decided to Show."

Deer Tick on Letterman

Lao-tzu Quote

Manifest plainness,
Embrace simplicity
Reduce selfishness,
Have few desires.
- Lao-tzu

How to Memorize Words

I put my tuition deposit down this week at the California School of Podiatric Medicine here in Oakland, California. I'm looking forward to going back to school again, but I definitely need to brush up on my study skills before I start tackling Anatomy and Physiology classes in the fall.

Fortunately, Psyblog wrote a useful entry about memorizing words this week. They suggest 4 tried-and-true methods:

1) IMAGERY -- Create an image of what you want to remember
2) ELABORATION -- Think of associations that help anchor the word in your mind
3) GENERATION -- Put some work in to generating the target (using fill-in-the-blanks or flash cards)
4) VOCALIZATION -- Speak the word aloud

I'll be mindful to include all of these methods in my studies this fall.

What Really Motivates Us

Dan Pink argues that money does NOT make people perform better. When people are financially driven, bad things happen -- people perform worse, they end up with inferior products and services, and they behave unethically.

Pink argues that people are truly motivated to perform by a sense of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Innovative ideas aren't generated by financial incentives; they are created when people are given the autonomy to work on their own ideas.

The Story of Cap and Trade

see also the Story of Bottled Water and the Story of Stuff.

The Secret Powers of Time

via kottke:

A fascinating 10-minute animated talk by Philip Zimbardo about the different "time zones" or "time perspectives" that people can have and how the different zones affect people's world views.

The six different time zones are:

- Past positive: focus is on the "good old days", past successes, nostalgia, etc.
- Past negative: focus on regret, failure, all the things that went wrong
- Present hedonistic: living in the moment for pleasure and avoiding pain, seek novelty and sensation
- Present fatalism: life is governed by outside forces, "it doesn't pay to plan"
- Future: focus is on learning to work rather than play
- Transcendental Future: life begins after the death of the mortal body

See more talks by Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo on TED.

Ask vs. Guess Culture

In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it's OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't even have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

All kinds of problems spring up around the edges. If you're a Guess Culture person then unwelcome requests from Ask Culture people seem presumptuous and out of line, and you're likely to feel angry, uncomfortable, and manipulated.

If you're an Ask Culture person, Guess Culture behavior can seem incomprehensible, inconsistent, and rife with passive aggression.

I'm a Guess. Let me tell you, it's great for, say, reading nuanced and subtle novels; not so great for, say, dating and getting raises.

Thing is, Guess behaviors only work among a subset of other Guess people -- ones who share a fairly specific set of expectations and signalling techniques. The farther you get from your own family and friends and subculture, the more you'll have to embrace Ask behavior. Otherwise you'll spend your life in a cloud of mild outrage at the Cluelessness of Everyone.

by Andrea Donderi from Ask Metafilter via The Guardian.

The New Lucys

Two of my friends in New York recently gave birth. I think they look eerily alike, given that they're both named Lucy...