msg:

I wish there was an autoreblog feature for anything jayparkinsonmd posts:

Making health simple:

Living in such a complicated world can seem so complex. But we’re creatures of habit. Ninety-three percent of our behavior is predictable.

And everyday the media reports on new research that suggests certain things are good or bad for you. It’s all quite confusing. We get so lost and so paralyzed by complicated details, we lose sight of making health simple. Don’t worry about whether or not coffee is good or bad for you. If the “science” of analyzing one substance and its effect on health hasn’t figured it out by now, the implications of that substance is mostly unknown for you as an individual. In fact, even the number one selling drug in America, Lipitor, designed to reduce your cholesterol has very little evidence to suggest it prolongs your life. In reality, our longevity is limited by our genes and our everyday behaviors.

All I ask is that you stop and think about your life today.

We’re all expected to live 82 years or so in the developed world. What do we want out of those years? Do you want to prolong your life at the end? Do you want to live to be 92 instead of 82? Or do you want to feel your best prior to getting old and limited by age? What do you think will give you the most happiness out of life? Living your life optimally as a young person? Or stretching your life out at the end for another decade of life as a slow-moving senior citizen?

Now, think about your everyday. Spend a few minutes and write down how you spend your day. What are you doing? What are you doing that’s probably good for you? What are you doing that’s probably not that great for you? What are you doing too much of? Not enough of? Make a list. It’s actually pretty simple. For everything you identify that’s not so great for you, write a simple way you can change that behavior.

Think about just three things– sleep, food, activity. Changes should be very, very simple. It’s things like taking the stairs instead of the elevator. It could be eating less meat. It could be sleeping 7 hours instead of six. It could be drinking with friends 3 nights a week instead of four. It could be one less hour of sitting in front of your computer.

Life really isn’t about your health. It’s about happiness. Health is just one component of happiness. So take a break every once in a while and sit down and think about a few small everyday things that have huge impact on your happiness.

video portrait of Drew Anderson by jayparkinsonmd

Yeah, this is good.  I’m going to do this today.

dpstyles:

Panic Blog » The Panic Status Board

A dashboard for how much your startup is ON FIRE.  aka: Want.

I’m not sure what exactly this says that’s of interest to a startup, but it sure is pretty.  I think I might have to make one of these but have it be about diapers and tantrums.  Shit, am I already thinking about baby metrics?  Uh oh.

I have found a couple cases of people who wrote entries yesterday that were then somehow lost in the transfer of the site.  I was told that this would not happen, but apparently it has.  The good news is that I have the entries, but the bad news is that I’m not sure exactly how difficult it will be to add them back to the database, as I’m sure some people probably wrote two entries.

I’m gonna think about it and try to come up with a solution that’s not too crazy to implement.  Sigh.  Sorry everyone!

I believe my web host is moving the site to a new bigger server.  I was told it would be seamless, but it appears that the site is actually down.  Seamless… hm.  Well, hopefully not for long and then we’ll be one step closer to actually being able to support the traffic to the site.  So that’s a good thing!

nevver:

Viva la Rock

Wow, 3D!

hud:

The site’s idea is a spin on something called morning pages in The Artist’s Way. That exercise is supposed to get thoughts out of your head, uncensored and unedited and everyday, to focus on whatever’s important to you. A guy named Buster created 750words.com as a way to iterate on this idea through tech application and game dynamics.

What I use the site for mostly is to write a daily To Do brainstorm. It may seem weird taking 20 minutes to write 750 words when a to do list would take 2 minutes. But there are some useful benefits of “To Do prose,” written with whatever else comes to mind along the way. Rather than just listing actions quickly and somewhat mindlessly, To Do prose gets you to think though the gaps, the questions and issues surrounding what you’re thinking you want and need to do. On several occasions I discovered a solution to problem, a better use of my time, or I re-examined a goal. To Do lists, and list-making applications, are all the rage, but writing it out “long hand” like this for me was a very useful experiment.

I think Hudson’s on to something here.  I like the phrase “to-do prose”, as opposed to the the popular to-do list, because it’s true that figuring out what to do is as much of a discovery process as it is a simple list of goals.  It’s not easy to know what you should do, it takes a little exploration, brainstorming, and thought.

My daily writing has been going in this general direction too.  That’s part of the reason why I think it’s best to do in the morning rather than the evening, because it helps spin your brain around and get all the things working in the right direction.  At night, it’s more of a reflection tool on what I did, how I felt, etc.

jacob:

Yoko Ono (hitrecordjoe, lapetitecoccinelle)

Genius or insanity?

spangley:

sciencevsromance:

Friends, I’m pretty sure that this is when I fell for ChatRoulette. I was super terrified of it (for non-murder witnessing reasons) for weeks, but then my friends were using it in the bar and I thought that it would be funny if, after leaving them, I went home and found them on it. But it’s kind of hard to randomly find someone among 20,000 people.

And then I guess I thought it would be funny to let ChatRoulette watch me cook dinner while I listened to new albums, which turned out to be very addictive. Later, I let it watch me read, and some guy who was also reading helped me remember that the Tableaux part of Infinite Jest is in the main text and not the endnotes. It’s all very, Old Internet all over again.

You have to wonder just how much this must be killing Josh Harris that he came up with We Live In Public so far ahead of everyone having webcams and broadband.

i am still afraid of - and don’t quite totally know - what chatroulette is. it’s like how i stopped reading perez because i felt like celebrity gossip was taking up way to much important space in my brain. i’m not sure i want to devote more than three brain cells to understanding this. uh, math is hard?

but i would pose this question to Stranger: what kind of publicist ISN’T all coked up?! please. department of redundancy department alert!

I’ve been waiting for all million billion webcams that have been propogated around the world to become useful… and I knew it wasn’t for video conferencing.  As soon as we can have a ChatRoulette constrained to our social network, I think we’ll really have something, cause hopping around from friends house to friends house and nearby bar to nearby bar while we cook our mac and cheese seems like the future, the beautiful future.  Right?

“We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don’t think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you’re hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time.”

-

Art Buchwald (via fatalistichues) (via kimberleecline) (via secondverse) (via rickwebb)

Nostalgia, where the past is preferred over the present, and not just fond memories of the fuzzy past, is usually just a neurosis.  On the other hand, thinking that we’re going through more nostalgia now than before is sort of the reverse, I think.

bluishorange:

unstoppable:

(via withmintfrosting)

Wow.

There’s no point in customizing your Tumblr theme, right?  It’s all about the Dashboard, right?

750 Words:

dkeithrobinson:

If you follow me on Twitter you might have seen me mention 750 Words; a web application by Buster Benson that, for me anyway, facilitates writing, thought and learning.

The idea is simple yet unbelievably compelling: each day you sit down and write at least 750 words. That’s it. You can write about whatever you want, the primary goal here is simply that you devote some time (in my case it looks like 15-20 mintues) to write every day.

Beyond that, the sky really is the limit. When I first looked at it, I simply started writing. My topic was easy: thoughts and impressions of Bayonetta, a video game I’d recently played.

When I was done, I thought, “hey, that was fun” and decided to stick with it. Here I am a week later, my streak still intact, and I’ve written about work, game design, my life, learning and lots of other subjects. All within this non-public realm that really enables creativity and freedom. It’s magical! :)

Anyway, if that weren’t enough, there are some simple semi-competive game mechanics to help keep you motivated. I was too late for the monthly challenge, but that seems like a great one. AND there are all sorts of stats being gathered about your writing. So far they seem more fun than useful, but I can’t say their not interesting and they certainly do get you thinking about what you write.

Today I noticed you could also write up a quick blurb about your day, or what you wrote about, giving a bit of context to the stats. I love that idea and plan to use it well.

Anyway, go check it out. I’ve also made my stats public, in case you’re curious about what I’ve been doing with my 750 words.

I don’t know why, but I’m still surprised whenever someone else says that the site is useful to them as well.  And, I respect your opinion Keith so that makes it doubly satisfying!  I’m actually curious about your take on making the game element both more compelling and less obtrusive to the original purpose of the site (to write something every day).  I’m interested in finding that strange hybrid between game and non-game where you’re motivated to play, but don’t even think much about the game itself.

It looks like Tumblr has added “replies” which only works for people who the author follows.  And only from the Dashboard.  The universe has exploded!  The real question: why did they add this now, after being against it for so long?

UPDATE: Yes, Josh, they appear without needing approval, but strangely, I can’t reply to my own posts and must therefore update it this way.  I also don’t get a notification that a reply has been made, but the Dashboard has a little notice in the stream.

In that manner Phoebe slid under the radar for the next million years (bouncing off a small rock at the 15% mark, effectively increasing her odds of hitting Earth through accidental course correction) until finally being spotted by recreational astronomers who happened to be using a grid of ridiculously complex computers to comb immense expanses of black for subtle signs of white. Their hope: to find a new white speck (it didn’’t matter if it was a rock, planet, star, or alien space ship…—all would do) that would carry their collective name into the history books and lead to better funding and recognition from a world government that had long since ceased to care about the cosmic attribution of its own luck, skill, and success, much less its destruction.

There were no physical markers in Phoebe’’s path to help us recall the moment when the hundreds of small tribes began forming in several parts of the world simultaneously. These new, innovative, organizations were successfully pulling uninterested and unfriendly savages together like condensing droplets of water into increasingly complex and dependant relationships. In the Mediterranean, of course, they were gaining a strong hold, but this was also happening in China, parts of Africa and Asia like Cyrania Minor, Doljchoyvec Valley, Rimtalec Nook, etc, and the idea of hunting and gathering became the biggest idea to grip the world since organized violence (though that was still pretty popular as well, and would only be trumped by organized war in a few hundred thousand years). These people began to understand the universe they lived in, mapping patterns in the sky with the success of their tribes, relationships, and personal destinies. Trial and error led to complex algorithms involving the placement of the sun and the stars, which, within a certain margin of error, could pinpoint the causes of events that had devastated them, or which led them to times of incredible plenty. Through pictorial and verbal communication, this information had a higher chance of survival over time by being stored outside of the human brain: on walls, tablets, and crypts, and eventually books, audiocassettes, and DVDs.