randomWalks

The most fundamental thing about the experience of sound, that it is a vibration of air or other medium, that animals developed to sense goings-on in their environment, is now optional.

Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us.

[gallery]

Hiking (Taken with instagram)

Collective action is huge; people agreeing across time and space to do things that matter to them is a phenomenon that we’ve only glimpsed and imagined up to now. Peer-to-peer initiative is the next step past conversation and agreement. It’s true change, and it’s successful the first moment it occurs. Whether or not the banks care about it in this particular example is irrelevant. If people can unite to do one thing, they can and will organize to do something else. Again and again.

Protest is transformative precisely because people emerge, encounter one another face-to-face, and, in re-learning the habits of freedom, build new institutions, relationships and organisations.

When the rain has wet the kite and twine, so that it can conduct the electric fire freely, you will find it stream out plentifully from the key on the approach of your knuckle.

The great accomplishment of Jobs’s life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies—his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness—in the service of perfection.

If only we’d had the courage to respond to ter­ror­ism with a stead­fast unwill­ing­ness to be ter­ror­ized. If only we’d rec­og­nized the trap we were being led into. But we didn’t. Now Amer­ica is a par­ody of what it was that day 10 years ago.

My weblog is an old school blog, a public diary of things that personally interest me.

Your behavior is affecting the normal operations of the IKEA cafeteria. Frequent fights and arguments do serious harm to the image both of Shanghai residents and IKEA.

Actual human beings are not going to use this new Google Reader any more than they used the old version.

Imagine how great it would have been if they had a real cameraman. But instead you get all the bonehead mistakes of the amateur. There are no establishing shots, the camera is always jiggling, and none of them had a particularly good eye.

Plots from the unaired 8th season of Star Trek: The Next Generation

It’s as if whoever made the update did so without ever actually using the product to, you know, read something.

Leary and Alpert fancy themselves prophets of a psychic revolution designed to free Western man from the limitations of consciousness as we know it. They are contemptuous of all organized systems of action—of what they call the “roles” and “games” of society. They prefer mystical ecstasy to the fulfillment available through work, politics, religion, and creative art. Yet like true revolutionaries they will play these games to further their own ends.

A better way to put it is that we’re trying to eat foods that are whole and unprocessed, and avoid those that are inflammatory or metabolically damaging.

I’m going to call the paleo diet portrayed in the media the PaleoStrawman diet. It contains only lean meat and non-starchy vegetables. The meat comes from factory farms. The latest place it has showed up on is NPR, where anthropologist Barbara King contends that it is not the way to a healthy future for the world. She says she has interacted with paleo dieters online and has read Paleo magazine, but it doesn’t show at all.