Author Archives: Millie

A letter to Jackson Pollack from his father

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The secret of success is concentrating interest in life, interest in sports and good times, interest in your studies, interest in your fellow students, interest in the small things of nature, insects, birds, flowers, leaves, etc. In other words to be fully awake to everything about you & the more you learn the more you can appreciate & get a full measure of joy & happiness out of life. I do not think a young fellow should be too serious, he should be full of the Dickens some times to create a balance.

[Source]

On making things with your hands

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Two kind of related articles:

In fact, we have shown that when people create objects in the sweet spot of “difficult-enough-but-not-too-difficult,” they not only love those objects more, but also experience greater happiness; it really is fun to create. [Source]

But is it really the act of creating something that increases our sense of its worth? [Source]

The third class

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“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” —Albert Einstein

I’ve been meaning to write about teaching an evening introductory computer class for low-income residents with this awesome organization called Byte Back, but haven’t found the time just yet.

So last night, because we had skipped our internet lesson the last class due to connection problems (we did a lesson on copy and paste instead — that’s another story), we ended up focusing on using the internet to do basic searches and how the more “clues” or keywords you give the search engine, the better it can find what you’re looking for. Anyway, as it would happen, Google’s doodle yesterday wasn’t a doodle at all, but a black block, so I had to opportunity to explain to my class why and what Google was protesting by being blacked out. It was not on the lesson plan, but we spent about 20 minutes talking about what piracy is (not privacy, as they originally thought!), why it is indeed a problem, and whether SOPA/PIPA was the solution.

It was difficult not to espouse my own views, which made it more rewarding when, as a class, they decided that having a free internet was worth more than possible censorship by a blanket policy to block websites based on copyright infringement and that while piracy is still a big issue, the onus should not be on websites such as YouTube (they were all familiar with YouTube) to monitor and track everything that its users post because the Digital Millennium Copyright Act already forces something similar, except you’re innocent before proven guilty (i.e. if an artist tells you, the website, to remove something due to copyright infringement, you have to remove it).

Now, I don’t think I can explain all the intricacies and nuances of SOPA or PIPA, but it was nice to be forced to explain SOPA/PIPA in a simple way to an audience without the vocabulary to fully understand things such DNS, IP, or ISPs.

“Facebook is the new A1″ —MMY

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From this Intelligent Life article:

“Editors with an eye for such things, what Zuckerman calls “curators”, are being superseded by “friends”—people like you, who probably already share your interests and world view—delivered by Facebook. Twitter is better at leading us to the interests of people beyond our social circle, but our tendency to associate with others who think in similar ways—what sociologists call our “value homophily”—means most of us end up with a feed that feels like an extended dinner party.

To be continued but something about Facebook as a public thing to me, the fleeting nature of Twitter, slower pace of blogs/seemingly more permanent, longer analysis, using FB and Twitter in different ways while sharing similar things and where I think my blog fits in.
<– That should not make sense to anyone. I will revisit.

On Gmail configurations

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While talking on the phone with Nic, a very important question came up: What is the most optimized gmail configuration? Multiple inboxes or priority inboxes? Multiple + priority inboxes? Horizontal or vertical? Chat on left or right?

We’ve decided that the tendency to rearrange inboxes stems from the lack of real furniture and the lack of physical space — and sometimes you just need to rearrange something.

The rest of the world in 2012

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As I’m making my way through Andrew Sullivan’s latest piece in Newsweek (which, I think, will be a nice foil piece to Jonathan Chait’s article in NYMag awhile back about liberal discontent), I wanted to stop and share this useful roundup from Foreign Policy of all of the presidential elections in 2012 including China, France, Russia, Iran, Venezeula, and Libya.

Having studied global studies and being more interested in foreign affairs than domestic, it’s been quite a change to think of everything through a domestic/national framework because of my work at National Journal. Keeping up with domestic policy and politics is excruciatingly difficult sometimes — no thanks to the sports-style, minute-by-minute plays of things in Washington — but of course it’s important and essential to understand. The bulk of my reading for the past few months have been articles and things about the US with little time left for keeping up with the rest of the world. Speaking of keeping up, my subscription to the Economist just expired! Gah.

What’s on your mind?

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Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.* —Eleanor Roosevelt

What ideas are you thinking of right now? What are you reading?

Imagine if someone asked you these questions and genuinely wanted to know and engage you on your answers. How delightful and interesting conversations would be. Perhaps this is why I’m obsessed with Atlantic Wire’s Media Diet series. Take me out for a coffee and I’m sure we can talk for hours.

Anyway, I was listening to this piece on NPR earlier this afternoon about whether we should go on an ‘information diet.’ While I agreed with most of the speaker’s points, especially that we tend to read things that reinforce our own ideas, I would hesitate to suggest people to, for example, read the text of the ‘Stop Online Privacy Act’ to understand SOPA. I think an information diet should not only consist of straight up reading less crap, but that it should also consist of conscious consumption from credible (unintentional alliteration; I blame a lot of Maureen Dowd in my formative years) sources/editors/curators/whatever. Anyway, in the spirit of pithy bits, here is Clay Johnson’s Michael Pollan-style advice: “Seek. Not too much. Mostly facts. Eat low on the sort of ‘information food chain,’ and stick close to sources.”

In other, but related, news, I had a fantastic lunch with Derek as we made fun of ourselves for starting 80% of our conversations with “Have you read that article…?” and “I just read this article…”

*While on the food/consumption metaphor, I’d like to think of this quote as the outline for a conversation pyramid, as opposed to a hard and fast rule for being a great mind. We all need that piece of chocolate every now and then okay? Maybe some bread too. Plus, we’d all be boring philosophers (sorry, philosopher friends! Do I even have any of you?) if all we did were talk about ideas all day.

My Facebook as a public thing

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“Work in public. Reveal nothing.” —Robin Sloan

I recently started cross-posting on Twitter and Facebook. I figured if I was posting links and things on my public Twitter account, I could also post said links and things on my Facebook as public items. Some friends don’t do this because their followers on Twitter (formed presumably through similar interests) differ from their connections on Facebook (presumably personal friends and family). However, I realized that the majority of the things I post aren’t personal in nature and I would therefore not require some expectation of privacy.

That realization brought me back to that entry on public thinking and blogs as a public good I posted awhile back — not that I would even call half of the content I post useful and for the public good. But, it did remind me that these ideas and musings I toy with in my head (now, this kind of runs counter to the article in question that led me to even write this post) could only benefit from the transition between nonpublic and public because writing for a public, whether for two people — Hi Machiko & Mickael! — or two million people, forces a clarity in thought or at least thoughtful curation. Isn’t this a nice balance of private and public? To sit down and write privately, to think in solitude, then to share, exchange, discover and refine ideas with a public?

“When you let people inside your head, they come away smarter. When you work in public, you create an emissary (media cyborg style) that then walks the earth, teaching others to do your kind of work as well. And that is transcendently cool.”

Anyway, I was compelled to write this because today after I posted a link to a story I had just read about groupthink and creativity, I had two *complete strangers* comment on the post, which was kind of one of those paradigm-shifting moments where I started thinking about my Facebook as a public thing and wasn’t bothered by it. I still have privacy settings and most of my “private” things such as personal photos are only shared with friends and family. Twitter is much easier — everything is public.

I think this shift of thinking about my Facebook as a public thing to share ideas and just interesting things is the reasoning behind Google+ (which I am very slowly migrating to) — or at least what all of the Google+ enthusiasts praise about it.

Speaking of Google/+, I absolutely hate the personal search results.

Hot tea in tall glasses

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I’ve taken a liking to drinking hot tea in tall glasses. Sometimes I worry about the glass cracking, but after researching it a bit, it seems that there’s no consensus on which temperature of water will crack a glass because it depends on the thickness of the glass, the pace at which the glass is heated, etc. So, if you were curious, if you too have a preference for hot tea in tall glasses, pour slowly. You’re welcome.

If you need inspiration to blog/write again

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Read this piece on “public thinking.”

What is that style? It’s a delicate balance. The writers give you a glimpse into their thought processes — “they both conjure a sense that the piece is almost being written as you read it. It feels like they’re just a graf or two ahead, and if you picked up the pace, you could catch them— overtake their blinking cursors. It feels slightly chaotic and totally thrilling.” Yet, Robin points out, they don’t give away too much. They’re thinking out loud, but also privately; they’re using the public part to help catalyze their internal sense-making processes. Or as Robin sums it up in a lovely koan: “Work in public. Reveal nothing.”