Category: clear thinking
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Your World is Not a Corridor
In Sept 2004 I had just moved out of a trendy neighbourhood apartment, and into a nightmare. The loft that I moved into was 3000 square feet, had huge windows across the entirety of two of the four walls. It was huge, it was a disaster area, and I had moved in willingly… because of […]
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The Importance of the Physical
If you do yoga, your body is relaxed, so your mind is relaxed too. If you push yourself through long, tough endurance races, you know that pushing past your mental barriers is just as essential as training through your physical ones. In a lot of ways, the body and the mind are connected; just not […]
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Young = Flexible = Growth = Life
Culture is liberated by delivery technology, but is restricted by business. The web is a delivery technology. So is the US Postal Service. So are text messages, and so is language. All of culture passes through these methods. It cannot exist without them. Culture is restricted by business models. The album is not the ideal […]
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I don’t wanna… I’m not used to it
This really got me thinking. I was telling an acquaintance of mine who wanted to lose weight about how a bunch of us had made a lifestyle change, eating paleo and working out using Crossfit and MovNat principles. They were interested in it but their response struck me as odd. I realized that I’ve heard […]
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The Perfect Watchtower
It occurred to me this morning that checking email often may be a feature, not a bug, of information culture. Productivity people talk all the time about how you have to stop checking email, you have to stop checking Twitter, in order to start doing real work. I’m not sure checking email is the problem. […]
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Sunscreen accelerates cancer (and other stuff you don’t know)
Almost every sunscreen on the market accelerates cancer, the public learned last week. What, you didn’t know? Guess what? Saturated fat is also not the culprit for heart-disease. Yet every article we see about health still calls it “artery-clogging saturated fat,” as if it were one word that can’t be separated. Did you know either […]
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All of Life is Sales
Montreal is the capital of the North American telemarketing industry. As the second-largest French-speaking city in the world, with a cheap labour force and low cost of living, Montreal is the ideal place for telemarketing companies. This means that many of us, the people you know that live here, have worked these kinds of jobs […]
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So finally…
… after years on the web, I’m actually starting to see a few themes in my work. There are actually quite a few, and it’s amazing I haven’t noticed it before. A blog allows you to drift along and write about anything, really, so it’s taken a lot of drifting before I figured anything out. […]
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The Filter Ladder
What is the filter ladder? I came up with this concept while talking to a Harvard professor I met at the airport the other day. He asked how I dealt with information overload and, as I explained it to him, I realized that his filters were higher than mine. In other words, I was willing […]
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Do You Read the Manual?
If you’re like me, you’ve been plagued with computer problems your whole life– just not yours. I bought my parents a Mac Mini a few years back. It was a stop-loss mechanism to help me spend more time with them. It worked. Now I hang out and have supper instead of fixing their computer problems– […]