Eric Blue's Blog

Leo at Zen Habits has posted another great article on productivity. The following is an excerpt from the article on Emerson's thoughts on creativity and productivity.

Write Everything Down

"Men are born to write… Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it. Nothing so broad, so subtle, or so dear, but comes therefore commended to his pen, and he will write. In his eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A problem that Emerson faced his entire life was the possession of an unmanageable mind. His thoughts leaped quickly from one idea to another. He had moments in life where insights sprang from his mind like water from a broken dam. During these times, Emerson had trouble organizing his thoughts effectively. Yet these deluges were gone in a flash and he was then beset with an intellectual dry spell. He compared the challenge of managing his mind to that of harnessing thunderbolts.

In order to manage these fluctuations, Emerson kept a journal. Every day he collected even the smallest thought, idea, or dream that crossed his mind. This enabled Emerson to better organize his thoughts when they flowed freely and to spur new ideas when he hit a dry spell. Writing helped Emerson make sense of the world. He would revisit the ideas he had recorded and add to them as he gained new insights. Thanks to Emerson’s journaling habit, we are blessed today with his great essays on simplicity and self-reliance.

I can relate to this post on a few different levels, and can certainly relate to the feeling of the ebb and flow of creative maelstroms. The value of journaling is clear, and the ability to collect and organize your thoughts and ideas in a single place is a fantastic way to channel your creative output (think Memex).

Source: http://zenhabits.net/2008/06/lessons-in-productivity-from-ralph-waldo-emerson/

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Psychology Today recently posted the last known interview with George Carlin (interviewed on 6/13/2008). Whether or not your a fan of George's comedy is beside the point. This interview is hands down one of the best I've read in a while, and gives some great insights into Carlin's history, personality, and creative process.

From the article:

"Ten days ago, on Friday, June 13th, 2008, I had the extraordinary privilege of talking to George Carlin. As far as I know it was the last in-depth interview he gave before he passed away yesterday at age 71. Originally it was slated to run as a 350-word Q&A on the back page of Psychology Today. But I was so excited to talk to him—and he was so generous with his time—that I just kept on going. By the end I had over 14,000 words.

On stage, George Carlin came across as a grouch, often vulgar and sometimes misanthropic. But with me he was patient and warm, happy to talk through the minutiae of his creative process and eager to share stories about his childhood, his evolution as a comic, and his influence. What struck me most was the joy in his voice as he talked about the wonderful feeling he got in his gut while writing. I was also moved by the gratitude he expressed for his mother, who he said “saved” him and his brother—leaving her bullying, alcoholic husband when George was just two months old, getting a job during the worst years of the Depression, and raising two boys on her own."

One particular Q&A that stuck out to me was Arthur Koestler's influence on Carlin's work. I'm only partially familiar with Koestler's works, but I'm assuming the book he's referring to is The Act of Creation (now officially on my reading list).

"You asked me to remind you to tell me about Arthur Koestler.

That was another impact. I was doing nightclub comedy down in the Village. I was down there in ’63, ’64, and my friend told me about Arthur Koestler’s book about the act of creation and it had a section on humor.

He was talking about the creative process. There was an illustration on the panel that showed a triptych. On the left panel, there were these names of artistic pursuits. There were poets, painter, composer. And one of them was jester. I was only interested in the jester. What he said about each of these, he said these individuals on the left hand side can transcend the panels of the triptych by creative growth.

The jester makes jokes, he’s funny, he makes fun, he ridicules. But if his ridicules are based on sound ideas and thinking, then he can proceed to the second panel, which is the thinker—he called it the philosopher. The jester becomes the philosopher, and if he does these things with dazzling language that we marvel at, then he becomes a poet too. Then the jester can be a thinking jester who thinks poetically.

I didn’t see that and say, “That’s what I am going to do,” but I guess it made an impression on me. I was never afraid to grow and change. I never was afraid of reversing my field on people, and I just think I’ve become a touch of each of those second and third descriptions and I definitely have a gift for language that is rhythmic and attractive to the ear, and I have interesting imagery which I guess is a poetic touch. And I like the fact that most of my things are based on solid ideas, things I’ve thought about in a new way for me, things for which I have said “Well, what about this? Suppose you look at it this way? How about that?” And then you heighten and exaggerate that, because comedy’s all about heightening and exaggerating. And anyways I guess I was impressed that there was another thing from my early life that probably at least influenced me to some level."

On a parting note, I think George's thoughts on death are appropriate:

"The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating …and you finish off as an orgasm."

—

George Carlin

R.I.P.

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Every 6 months or so I mix things up and alternate my primary area of focus between studying philosophy and pursuing my creative technical interests (e.g. my multitude of pet/geek projects). I decided to switch gears a couple weeks ago and have been back into academic mode. My primary focus has been studying the history of philosophy; notable figures, major schools of thought, etc. I've also been creating a series of detailed mindmaps based on this research and hope to share those sometime next month.

Over the last 6 months much of my time and writing has been focusing on learning and personal knowledge management. So, it occurred to me that this might be a good opportunity to blend my interests in learning, technology, and philosophy. I've been using the Semantic MediaWiki for the past few months as my Personal Knowledge Manager and just recently started adding my own semantic data for major philosophers (date of birth, place of birth, influences, influenced by, school of thought).

I figured it would be uber cool (and geeky) to be able to query this type of metadata and aggregate it in the hopes of seeing new patterns. At a high level, here is what I'd like to do:

* View all philosophers on a timeline broken down by date and time period (Ancient Greek, Early Christian, Dark Ages, Modern, Post Modern, etc). Something like http://radicalacademy.com/diahistphil.htm.

* Map of philosophers based on place of birth, origin of school, or place of death.

* Graphical representation of lineage of influences by philosophers. This is somewhat similar to The Genealogy of Influence I posted about last year.

* Faceted Browsing on various metadata. Make something similar to the amazingly cool Elastic Lists?

In theory, this sounds very cool but could get complicated pretty fast. Luckily there are some great projects like Simile at MIT that solve some interesting problem domains. One particular subproject called Exhibit offers many of these features. I would just need to find a way to export my philosophy wiki data as RDF (which I believe it currently does) and reformat to JSON. This will definitely get some priority on my existing Pet Project Queue ;) More to follow later......

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A little bit of philosophy from Alan Watts...

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I'm sometimes amazed at the sites that make the del.icio.us popular list. I enjoyed the following entry on Wikipedia: the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon whereby people who have little knowledge systematically think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge.

The phenomenon was rigorously demonstrated in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, then both of Cornell University. Their results were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in December, 1999.[1]

Kruger and Dunning noted a number of previous studies which tend to suggest that in skills as diverse as reading comprehension, playing chess or tennis or operating a motor vehicle, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" (as Charles Darwin put it). Specifically, they hypothesized that with regard to a typical skill which humans may possess in greater or lesser degree,

1. incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill,
2. incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others,
3. incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy,
4. if they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

This, of course, is directly related to the commonly recognized 4 stages of competence.

In psychology, the four stages of competence relate to the psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence in a skill:

1. Unconscious incompetence
The individual neither understands or knows how to do something, nor recognizes the deficit or has a desire to address it.
See also : Dunning-Kruger effect

2. Conscious incompetence
Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, without yet addressing it.

3. Conscious competence
The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires a great deal of consciousness or concentration.

4. Unconscious competence
The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it becomes "second nature" and can be performed easily (often without concentrating too deeply). He or she can also teach it to others.

I'd also recommend a great article I came across last year:

Why smart people defend bad ideas

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Apparently, I haven't been busy enough on this blog. So, I decided to create a second blog (Inspire's Blog on Zaadz)! I've been following Zaadz for some time and decided that I need to join the community, and start collaborating. For those of you who haven't discovered Zaadz yet, here is the quick description:

".... (Zaadz is in) the process of building THE most inspired community of people in the world…social networking with a purpose, a community of seekers and conscious entrepreneurs circulating wisdom and inspiration and wealth and all that good stuff. We're passionate about inspiring and empowering people to bring their dreams to life, learning and growing and getting paid to do what they love, using their greatest gifts in the greatest service to the world. (And having fun in the process!)"

I plan on keeping this blog format (if you can call it a format) the same. My main topics will continue to be on technology, personal development, organization, philosophy (nothing too deep), information visualization, mind mapping, software development, and whatever else is my interest du jour.

I have interests in a lot of diverse areas, so I've decided to focus my more "philosophically inclined" topics on my Zaadz blog. This includes topics on Integral philosophy/Ken Wilber, lucid dreaming, brainwave entrainment, biofeedback, eastern philosophies, consciousness, and sharing my own in depth thoughts on a range of issues.

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There's a great post on Neatoramo listing the 9 Bad Boys of Philosophy.

1. Socrates
2. Diogenes
3. Abelard
4. Marx
5. Schopenhauer
6. Nietzsche
7. Heidegger
8. Bertrand Russell
9. Michel Foucault

Bonus
Thales of Miletus

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Thanks to MindHacks.com, I discovered that the Boston Globe recently interviewed John Searle, renowned philospher most famously known for his Chinese Room thought experiment.

Link to the Q&A session is here.

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George Dvorsky, a blogger who writes about Transhumanism, has published an updated list of must know terms for today's intelligentsia. George describes the list as follows:

First, I am trying to come up with a list of the most fundamental and crucial terms that are coming to define and will soon re-define the human condition, and that subsequently should be known by anyone who thinks of themselves as an intellectual. I admit that there's an elitist and even pompous aspect to this exercise, but the fact of the matter is that the zeitgeist is quickly changing. It's not enough anymore to be able to quote Dostoevsky, Freud and Darwin. This said, while my list of terms is 'required' knowledge, I am not suggesting that it is sufficient.

http://sentientdevelopments.blogspot.com/2007/01/must-know-terms-for-21st-century_11.html

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I've spent the last few months digging deeper into the works of Ken Wilber. I really enjoyed Kosmic Consciousness, and figured the next logical progression in reading Ken's work would be to read "A Brief History of Everything".

While going through the book, I've also been referencing and reading various articles from IntegralWorld. I just discovered a great article on the history of holons at:

http://www.integralworld.net/index.html?edwards13x.html

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Conversation with God on morality, sin, suffering, good and evil, and the scheme of things.

http://www.newbanner.com/SecHumSCM/IsGodTaoist.html

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An interesting collection of important quotes from famous philosophers....

http://www.neatorama.com/2007/02/06/11-most-important-philosophical-quotations/

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The other day I posted about an intriguing project by Mike Love called The Genealogy of Influence. You can check out his blog here. Since I also recently blogged about the Many Eyes project by IBM, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could take Mike's original data and upload for visualization.

I took the source GraphML file here, and *very* quickly parsed it to generate a tab-delimited file. I simply parsed each EDGE entry using Perl and created a hash for each person. This hash listed the individuals that person influenced, the people they were influenced by, and a tally for each of those data sets. This data is obviously not normalized since I planned to try out a few different visualization types using the same source data.

e.g.

The upload data set was posted here.

Here are some of the visualization types I experimented with.

Network Diagram
URL: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/S2fqLEsOtha6QIEzkheOE2-
This is somewhat similar to the graph on the Geneaology of Influence site. However, it's not a directed graph, and it's not interactive like TouchGraph.

Treemap
URL: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/S2fqLEsOtha6XIUr1qeOE2-
I think the treemap is probably the most interesting alternative to the network/graph diagram. You can easily switch between the people that were most influential, and also who had the most influences.

Bubble Chart
URL: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/S2fqLEsOtha6eI-caxeOE2-
I tried this last visualization method just for kicks. The bubble chart isn't the most effective visualization, but it does allow you to easily see influence by bubble size.

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I discovered an interesting project today on del.icio.us. The Genealogy of Influence project is an effort to document and visualize the creative influences of great thinkers and artists. The is of great interest to me, since I've had a similar idea that's been on my "pet project" list for some time now.

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I discovered a comprehensive collection of diagrams related to Integral Philosophy
and Ken Wilber.

Flickr Integral Diagrams Set

Integral Diagrams Blog

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I just finished reading an awesome post and discussion on Brian's Blog on Zaadz. Brian posted a link to Dan Millman's thoughts on The Secret. I'd like to first comment on Dan's article, then on the comments that followed on Brian's blog.

Dan Millman, author of numerous self-help books such as Way of the Peaceful Warrior, recently provided a refreshing perspective on the uber cool DVD The Secret. His overall feedback on the The Secret was positive, but he offers some (I believe) well deserved constructive criticism on some of the magical thinking that surrounds the Law of Attraction and Manifestation. In a nutshell, wishful thinking by itself is not enough. There needs to be real action behind thoughts, desires, and wishes. Dan ended his post with a truly great, and applicable, quote from Henry David Thoreau:

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. Now put foundations under them.”

I briefly alluded to this on my recent post on Malcolm's Cohen's excellent Vision Statement meme that is hopefully going to get mass attention. Effective visualization brings about 3 key things:

1. Clarification - Know what you *really* want to do.
2. Focus - Repetition helps you narrow in on exactly what you need to do.
3. Passion - Adding emotion to your goals gives you the passion and energy to make things happen.

There were also a number of great comments on both Brian and Dan's blogs. A few in particular really stuck out at me. The first (which inspired the title of this post) was from Nancy Shuford:

"Action + Visualizing = Actualizing"

What a great formula! And, Obi (Uberman) pointed out James Ray's formula that he discussed on Larry King.

"You've gotta go 3-for-3!"

"... Your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions all need to be firing simultaneously in alignment."

Definitely something to "think" about. ;)

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Back in October, I read an article from Seed Magazine titled Beauty is in the Processing Time of the Beholder. The article discussed how studies have indicated that people find prototypical faces (those with average features) to be the most attractive. A paper published in Psychological Science proposes that these prototypical faces are found attractive since it is easier for our brains to process. The photo in the article was a computer-generated composite of 15 female faces voted to be attractive, and was created by the Face Research Lab. I've been spending a lot more time lately reading up on aesthetics and art, as it pertains to information visualization. This jump started my thinking about how we perceive beauty, and how subjective it really is. Is it a matter of opinion, or are we truly hard-wired to universally perceive beauty in the same fashion? I remember coming across a web-based face transformer a while back (courtesy of the Perception Laboratory, School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, Scotland), and thought it would be interesting to see how this photo would look transformed by age and race.

I decided to take the original photo of a young adult, and transform based on age (baby, child, teenager, and elder). Then transform based on race (Caucasian, East-Asian, Afro-Caribbean, and West-Asian). Taking it one step further, I downloaded a morphing application (MorphMan 4.0) to transition between each of the transformed photos. Once I had the video, I added some background music. I was experimenting with GarageBand a few months ago, and created a couple songs (original post here), so I used iMovie HD to make some edits and add the music. Wala, a spiffy video in less than an hour.

Original YouTube link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uENxJAlN1wM

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Looks like this video has hit the del.icio.us popular list. This guy definitely has some good wisdom. It's a shame the interviewers are a bit too immature to appreciate it.

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The guys at 37 Signals have posted a great article on the topic of Flow. I first heard about Flow in the mid-nineties and have always kept this book (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience) on my ever growing read/wish list. After reading this article I think it's about time I start digging into this book (I need to deprioritize the other 290+ books on my list!).

Although I haven't yet read the book, I understand what Flow is about since I've been fortunate to have experienced it on a somewhat frequent basis. Having had a music and software development background, on many occasions I've experienced (a sometimes magical) feeling of completely being in the moment, where time seems to melt away, and whatever I'm currently working on (work is a strong word) just seems to all click. I think this feeling of Effortless Effort is the main reason why I enjoy what I do for a living.

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For the past week, I've been spending a very short amount of time per day reading The Republic and Beyond Good and Evil. What's unique about this is the fact that I'm getting this content via email. A new website called DailyLit is now offering access to over 200+ public domain ebooks (complete list here).

Whenever you visit their website you can select which book(s) you want to read, setup your delivery options (frequency and time of day), and provide your email. I was a little bit skeptical of the books via email approach at first. But, I think the real power of a service like this is the fact that it takes less than 5 minutes per day to read each email. This is certainly a refreshing alternative to wading through dozens of spam messages (even with gmail's excellent filtering), and chatty mailing lists that I plow through each morning. And, within a few months I'll have read a couple more books than I normally would have.

Hopefully, new features will be forthcoming and DailyLit will add an RSS delivery option.

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I found a great post on del.icio.us today. This blog post,
Online Videos of Philosophical Lectures, has a great collection of videos and lectures focusing on cognitive computing, consciousness, ethics, and evolution.

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I'm in the middle of reading Turning Numbers into Knowledge: Mastering the Art of Problem Solving. At the end of each chapter is a relevant quote, and I found one that is definitely worth sharing.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. --- RALPH WALDO EMERSON

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