Python owns us

Haven't thought about it exactly this way before, but it seems to me that executive function, that is, "working memory" and "inhibitory control," are ultimately more important in almost any task than any other attribute, including intelligence and experience.

So, faced with a difficult problem, instead of saying "I'm not smart enough to solve this" you should say "I don't have the inhibitory control to make myself solve this".

This seems relevant:

Planning Fallacy.

Funniest example of a paradoxical status transaction is Paul Graham's essay Why Nerds are Unpopular. Think of the essay itself as a status transaction and reflect this viewpoint to the content of the essay and you'll see what I mean.

Successful (that is, popular) writers are good at manipulating status. Playing low and high status at just the right moments, making us feel good without even knowing why. The greatest pleasure comes when a person's status lowers in a way that we don't have to feel sympathy for him. It's cruel, in a sense. But it comes so natural to us that we don't mind.

Funniest example of a paradoxical status transaction is Paul Graham's essay Why Nerds are Unpopular. Think of the essay itself as a status transaction and reflect this viewpoint to the content of the essay and you'll see what I mean.

Successful (that is, popular) writers are good at manipulating status. Playing low and high status at just the right moments, making us feel good without even knowing why. The greatest pleasure comes when a person's status lowers in a way that we don't have to feel sympathy for him. It's cruel, in a sense. But it comes so natural to us that we don't mind.

Status transactions are also evident even in simple sentences, like this one. My natural inclination was to start the previous sentence with "I think" which would have been an obvious move to lower status as a defence. Guides like Strunk & White teach, in some sense, how to write in high status, at the word and sentence level.

It should be obvious that most of the blog authors play low-status in their blog. And if a writer playing high-status, say a real journalist, comes critisizing the whole blogging phenomenon, then the most natural way to defend is to either to try lower the attacker's status (by insulting in a subtle way, for example) or by lowering one's own status even more.

Opening with a statement after months of silence, entangles my thoughts so thoroughly that it's almost painful. I discard every thought as irrelevant and so I have to begin with a meta-thought. Better than nothing, I guess.

Another life-changing book: Keith Johnstone's Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre.

Don't be afraid of the title. It's a book about life in general more than anything else.

David Shenk's book project and the corresponding weblog, The Genius in All of Us, explores research I've lately been most interested of.

That title, "The genius in all of us", sure sounds pretty touchy-feely, but I can assure you that mostly just rock solid science.

Good stuff. Important stuff.

It almost seems like I've forgotten about my blog.

Yup, that's what it was. Now I remembered it again.

Not that I had anything to say.

It seems our ISP had some sort of a disk breakage and not everything was recovered from the backup. But that doesn't matter. We'll just keep on going as if nothing happened.