Technoccult

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Self-Education Tip: Build Small Skills in the Right Order

April 19, 2011 / Klint Finley

Lukeprog at Less Wrong talks about what he learned about interpersonal communication in a Scientology class, and what it taught him about learning:

Building small skills in the right order is an excellent way to create and maintain success spirals.

Trying to master a large skill set like salesmanship is a daunting task that will likely involve many demotivating failures before you ever taste success. The same goes for public speaking, writing research papers, and lots of other large skill sets involving a complex interaction of many small skills.

Anna Salamon uses math to explain this concept. You could tackle calculus immediately after Algebra I, and you might eventually pick it up after many frustrating failures if you read the calculus textbook enough times, but why would you do this? It’s much easier and more satisfying to learn more algebra piece by piece until the jump to calculus is not so great. That way, you can experience the pleasure and confidence-boost of mastering new concepts all along the way to calculus.

Less Wrong: Build Small Skills in the Right Order

(via Theoretick)

How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With?

April 18, 2011 / Klint Finley

Sleep

Almost everyone needs at least eight, and no you can’t train yourself to get by on less:

In what was the longest sleep-restriction study of its kind, Dinges and his lead author, Hans Van Dongen, assigned dozens of subjects to three different groups for their 2003 study: some slept four hours, others six hours and others, for the lucky control group, eight hours — for two weeks in the lab. […]

Not surprisingly, those who had eight hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the 14 days of the study. What was interesting was that those in the four- and six-hour groups had P.V.T. results that declined steadily with almost each passing day. Though the four-hour subjects performed far worse, the six-hour group also consistently fell off-task. By the sixth day, 25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at the computer. And at the end of the study, they were lapsing fives times as much as they did the first day.

New York Times: How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With?

(Via Barking Up the Wrong Tree)

There are a few people who get by on four or less hours per night, but they’re rare. There are a lot more people who think they need six or less, but actually need a full eight. This Wall Street Journal Article covers the “sleepless elite” and how rare they. Current research indicates that there’s no way to modify your sleep requirements – they’re genetic.

Coffee: The Original Smart Drug and Aphrodisiac

April 18, 2011 / Klint Finley

Coffee: Grounds for Debate, a title in the Philosophy for Everyone series, argues that coffee is a performance-enhancing drug for thinkers. “The appropriate analogy is that coffee and philosophy go together like foreplay and sex,” insist editors Scott F Parker and Michael W Austin. “You can have one without the other, but the latter is better with the former and the former often leads to the latter.” Philosopher Basam Romaya says: “With the use of coffee, critical thinking abilities are sharpened, attention to detail enhanced.” This is a venerable claim: in the 16th century, Sheik Abd-al-Kadir, an Arab scholar, said: “No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee’s frothy goodness.” […]

So what about impotence? That does seem to have been overstated. The Women’s Petition Against Coffee prompted a broadside from men who argued that it “makes the erection more Vigorous, the Ejaculation more full, adds spiritualescency to the Sperme”. Initially I wasn’t sure what “spiritualescency” means, either, until I read in this book that caffeine increases sperm motility. That said, some say coffee may harm the sperm while speeding it on its way, which makes a kind of sense.

The Guardian: Can coffee wreck your marriage?

(via James Governor)

William S. Burroughs and Gus Van Sant: The Discipline Of Do Easy

April 17, 2011 / Klint Finley

The Discipline Of DE, a 9 minute adaptation of the short story by William S. Burroughs, was Gus Van Sant’s first film outside of film school. It was filmed around 1977. The story first appeared in Exterminator! in 1973.

Here’s an excerpt from the story:

DE is a way of doing. DE simply means doing whatever you do in the easiest most relaxed way you can manage which is also the quickest and most efficient way, as you will find as you advance in DE.You can start right now tidying up your flat, moving furniture or books, washing dishes, making tea, sorting papers. Don’t fumble, jerk, grab an object. Drop cool possessive fingers onto it like a gentle old cop making a soft arrest.

(via Dangerous Minds)

Otomata – Flash-based Cellular Automata Music Sequencer

April 17, 2011 / Klint Finley

Otomata

Changing Perceptions of Science and Technology in the 19th Century

April 7, 2011 / Klint Finley

Jess Nevins shares an excerpt from Hawthorne’s Mad Scientists:

Earlier, “technology” had meant something more accessible to the average man. Elements of Technology, a book published in 1829 by Harvard professor Jacob Bigelow, was essentially a recipe book, more like the “do-it-yourself” manuals of modern counterculture than an MIT textbook. By most accounts, Bigelow, whose job at Harvard was to bridge the gap between Yankee inventors and collegiate research scientists, was the first to use “technology” in its modern sense….

Jess Nevins: Changing perceptions of science and technology in the 19th century

LOST Reality Bleed Through: Winged Oceanic craft placed in Marianas Trench by Unthinkably Wealthy Elderly Man with Distinguished Accent

April 7, 2011 / Klint Finley

Thanks to Trevor for the link and headline.

Video: 1991 Hard Copy Report on Suspected Nine Inch Nails Snuff Film

April 6, 2011 / Klint Finley

NIN “Down In It” report on “Hard Copy,” March 3rd 1991 from Nine Inch Nails on Vimeo.

(Thanks Justin)

I read about this incident in the NIN FAQ years ago, but I’d never seen this gem.

RIP Paul Bingman

April 5, 2011 / Klint Finley

Paul Bingman

Regular readers may have noticed a large number of links on this blog attributed to one Paul Bingman. I’m sorry to report that Paul passed away recently. There’s an obituary of him over at Silicon Florist.

He will be missed.

Here’s a small sampling of some of the links that Paul found over the past couple years:

Is Schizophrenia Caused by Retroviruses?

Frankincense: Could it be a cure for cancer?

On How to Write a Gospel Account

Researchers discover that stress isn’t a modern invention

Do blind people hallucinate on LSD?

Why is this anti-gay Leviticus tattoo extra absurd?

Study: women prefer men who already have partners

Interview with Klint on Media, Technology, PR and More

April 5, 2011 / Klint Finley

Matt Nagel from the PR firm Shift Communications did an interview with me for the firm’s blog Slice. Here’s me talking about technology and media trends:

In technology, I’ve been covering the consumerization of IT. But I’m also interested in the enterprization of personal life. It’s interesting to see families and groups of friends using “groupware” such as calendar sharing, wikis and Google Docs – or even something like Facebook Events – to coordinate. RIM is offering enterprise security tools to consumer BlackBerry users now. And this new crop of mobile messaging services is inspired by BlackBerry Messenger.

How might consumers take advantage of predictive analytics, mashups, data mining or real-time intelligence? We’re already seeing some of this happening with the “quantified self” movement – stuff like Mint.com, Rescue Time and RunKeeper. Stuff that gives people what they call in business “actionable insights.”

Last year Google released App Inventor, enabling people without programming experience to build Android applications. Adam Greenfield wrote a post about it, and I followed that up with some of my own thoughts about how consumers could start using the same sorts of visual programming and data mashup tools that BPM and business intelligence professionals are using.

In media, I think we’re going to see more evolution and refinement of how we present news and information online. List posts and infographics are often associated with fluff right now, but there’s no reason that serious journalism couldn’t be presented in an easier-to-digest format. If the Watergate scandal were to happen today, perhaps it could be presented as “5 Ways the Nixon Administration Broke the Law” or whatever. You could still tell the story and present all the information without dumbing it down. That said, there still needs to be a way of funding this sort of investigative journalism, as it will still be time-consuming to research and craft important stories. I’m a little cynical about funding models for journalism, but as the cliché goes, “where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Pressing the Press: Meet Klint Finley

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