I’m a big fan of MilkandCookies.com. It presents a panoply of entertaining videos. I highly recommend it. Some of my friends are incessantly bombarded by IM hits from me containing urls such as the one below.
Tonight’s plug is for Conic Juggling, an exhibition of momentum and timing.
Getting Things Done, a.k.a. GTD, is a self-help book written by David Allen for people who want to get their lives (not professional or personal, but the whole shebang) under organizational control.
I confess that when Jenn first brought this book home I was skeptical. Well, “skeptical” might be a bit of an understatement. “Deriding” or “pooh-poohing” might be better terms. I’ve never been a big fan of the vast panoply of executive self-help books. I’ve read a few and listened to those lectures on tape you get concerning productivity and networking, etc., and generally found them to be, well, general. They are usually full of the “I’m freaking awesome at what I do, so I wrote a book about it because it must be the best way possible to do it!” kind of stuff, totally ignoring the fact that people who aren’t good at what they do rarely write books about it. Selection bias at its best. Suffice to say, I don’t buy very many of those books (or tapes).
However, GTD is not of the above genre of unhelpful self-help books. David Allen does fall into the category of person whom I feel does not relax nearly enough, but the book and it’s recommendations are implementable at home and at work by Non-Type-A people who seek to be organized but just need a system. This system, in my own experience, isn’t so crazy as a lot of different “organizational schemes” I’ve seen in the past. It is a logical extension of processes I was already using, but were not quite covering all the bases.
So, I recommend the book, and the GTD process. I didn’t have to make any additional investments in software or hardware to get things running. I followed some of David Allen’s recommendations regarding organizational stuff such as file folders (a lot) and a labelmaker (which I love, now), but my total outlay was only like $75 to get going (at home. Work obviously provided the materials I needed there).
4 June 06 22:05 edit. The first comment below reminded me that I forgot to link to what got me from pooh-poohing this book to actually reading it. Check out this organization!
There is news that Anne McCaffrey’s world of Pern will be brought to film sometime soon. We’ve heard this before, of course, but this one looks more positive. Ms. McCaffrey mentioned that there were negotiations ongoing when we saw her at Dragon*Con last September.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I love this series (with a couple exceptions) and it’s mythos. Seeing it on Film or TV would be great! On the other hand, I love this series and I’d hate to see it trashed by shitty filming, directing, acting, re-writing or whatever. I harken back to the first movie made out of Dune and shudder to think what could happen to Pern.
Hopefully, if it happens, they won’t screw it up too badly.
This link takes you to the google-hosted video of an exercise conducted by some students. They examined the effect on I-285 around Atlanta when everyone is forced to drive the legal speed limit (55 MPH).
Some background for anyone who doesn’t live or drive around Atlanta: I-285 encompasses the entirety of the downtown metropolitan area, plus all of the inner subburbs. It’s about sixty miles in circumference, and all of it is signed at 55 MPH (I think—not too familiar with the east side), by ordinance, I assume. 55 MPH on I-285 is rather slow in freeflow conditions. Generally the median speed is around 60 MPH and the 85th percentile speed is probably around 65 MPH (let me emphasize that these are personal estimates. I have not done any speed studies). So, 55 MPH is going to be, outside of congested conditions, around the 20th or 25th percentile; 80% of people will want to travel faster if given their druthers.
What does this all boil down to? Watch the video and see. It’s impressive.
Of course, if you do a Google search on this thing and read some of the comments, you will find a large number of people who think that this was just a stupid stupid dangerous prank that proved nothing. Others think that this shows the uselessness of a speed limit that is set too low and not enforced.
My opinion goes with the latter people. It is silly to have a speed limit which is artifically low and not enforced. Several studies (here, and here, there are others) demonstrate no increase in crashes or crash severity by increasing the speed limit to the 85th percentile speed. These same studies show that reducing the speed limit has no actual effect on drivers’ preferred travel speeds. Agressive enforcement will cause drivers to adhere to a low speed limit, but the effect has no lasting duration. As soon as the enforcement is gone, drivers will return to their previous practice.
Anyhow. The video is cool. Have a look.
Here’s to all those motivational posters we love to hate.
This video, discovered through the good offices of www.milkandcookies.com, was just a perfect end to the evening.
We saw Mission: Impossible III, last night, a serious waste of my precious time. This movie was so disjointed, such a strange mix of action and “feeling” that I still feel a bit whiplashed.
J.J. Abrams directed and helped to write this movie. It certainly shows. As you may be aware, I’ve expressed my opinion regarding another of Mr. Abrams’ creations, and I believe that the first two seasons of Alias continue to be his only worthwhile accomplishment.*
Tom Cruise’s scientology-inspired freakiness now permeates everything he does, to the product’s detriment, and was it me, or did his girlfriend in the movie look like Katie Holmes? I liked P.S. Hoffman in his sociopath role, and Laurence Fishburn also did a credible job as the head IMF bossman, although shades of Morpheus snuck through. There were plenty of explosions and lots of death-defying chases and the requisite baseball pitching machine that you see in every credible action flik. I have a list of questions the length of my leg that are similar to, “Why didn’t the sniper just SHOOT Ethan instead of having the drone come by and blow him up with missiles?” I suppose those sorts of questions happen in every action film, but True Lies still sets the bar—in my own very humble opinion—for plausible explosions and crazy shit (other than the flying-a-Harrier-with-one-hand thing).
Nevermind! I could go on for hours. Suffice to say, I won’t be seeing this movie ever again, and the only reason I would tell someone to see it is so we can complain about it together afterwards.
*Did you know that J.J. Abrams wrote Armageddon, a movie so bad in its science that I’ve been known to vomit profusely on the TV whenever it’s shown? Well, maybe not that bad, but it’s the worst space movie in a long time. Space Cowboys is a close second.
I’ve seen this before, but it still makes me laugh. Especially:
This relation between temperature and resistivity can be shown to be exponential in certain temperature regimes by waving your hands and chanting “to first order”.
Or as Non Sequitur would have it, “Obviousman!”
Today, one of the headlines in the Atlanta Journal Constitution reads “1 in 3 U.S. residents belong to minority.”
Read that a second time if you didn’t get it at first.
There is no knowing the Evil Eyebrow
Twenty Twenty-Five
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