EclecticLip

I’ve been using the ideas from David Allen’s Getting Things Done at work for about a year now, and despite my undeniable novicedom, have found it invaluable: I feel like a Stone Age artisan newly introduced to bronze!

Like so many transformative tools, the basics are delightfully simple — but like eastern martial-arts disciplines with which it shares… well, virtually nothing, the arresting simplicity takes years to master. 

Actually, I jest — the end-goal of GTD, as it’s known to its acolytes, is to allow the practitioner to engage in their life and work attentively, undistracted by other action-items and to-do’s that might otherwise clutter the mind.  Which means it’s basically the Zen ideal of mushin, or “no-mind”, dressed up in 21st-century American secular idiom.  And mushin plays a central role in every eastern martial-arts discipline I’ve chanced to read up on.  So GTD does in fact share a common fundament with karate, judo, aikido, and their cousins.
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For me, the biggest GTD learnings have been:

• discovering the exhiliaration of the empty inbox!
• the idea of separating items on my to-do lists based on timeframe (my prior attempts to make to-do lists failed because my short- and long-term items were jumbled together)

Most gratifyingly, the “outsourcing” of my memory to Outlook has let me clear my mental cache of those things-to-remember that always floated around in the back of my mind, depleting my concentration.  So now, instead of multitasking, I can monotask.  That is, I can direct 100% of my focus to various tasks-at-hand, instead of only offering 90% (because the other 10% needed to be held back to avoid forgetting other action items).

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With my quantum leap in workplace productivity, it was a rashworthy irritation that I couldn’t apply similar methods at home with Gmail, given its more limited architecture.

So discovering GTDInbox a few days ago was a real psychological emollient.    A Firefox extension, it layers a GTD-friendly interface onto the Gmail interface.
Within a few hours, I’d decluttered my Gmail Inbox from about 170 to under 50 items — one screen.  And there’ll be a few whoops (as in plural-of-the-celebratory-whoop, not as in gentle-expletive-indicating-accident) of joy in the living room when I attain the mythical state of “Inbox Zero“. 

A New Scientist article from a few years back suggests that vampire legends were how our ancestors tried to explain rabies. Interesting to think of vampire stories as educational tools. 

Nowadays, of course, kids learn about rabies through Old Yeller, that “sick doggy snuff film”, to quote Phoebe from Friends.

[Rabies/vampires] is then analogous to [Williams Syndrome/elves].  The latter is a genetic disorder which causes elfin features and a love of music, clearly the inspiration for elves in various fairy tales.

Briliant minds at the UK charts website decided to:

• use Twitter
• to advertise an iPhone app
• for Facebook
• which does the same thing as RSS

This is an advertising analogue of a Rube Goldberg machine — a ridiculously complicated way of getting iPhone users to download an app.
As an encore campaign, I suggest:

• a Twitter tweet
• asking people to use Remember The Milk
• in their Google Calendar
• so they don’t forget to Digg
• a LiveJournal blog entry
• whose video, hosted on YouTube,
• describes how to use a Facebook app
• for the iPhone

The possibilities are dizzying…!
(hat tip Popjustice)
How much more

Marc at the CCPA notes the BC carbon tax’s first birthday was Feb 18, with a rather depressing fairy tale.  Hopefully her second birthday will find her better-appreciated than she currently is, in her stunted state. (Ten bucks a tonne won’t drive any consumer behaviour.  Nor will fifteen bucks a tonne.)

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I suppose the appropriate analogy would be that this is the first anniversary of the conception of the carbon tax, July 1st being its actual “date of birth”.

Well, here’s to hoping that she has a dino-sized growth spurt from turkey-sized compsognathus to titanic T-Rex (or should that be tyrannosaurus regina?) with appropriate redirection of funds towards emissions-offsetting projects and infrastructure, and tax cuts veering strongly progressive.

The Tory government’s TFSA (tax-free savings account) is an example of a stunningly regressive tax benefit — its benefits skew disproportionately to the wealthy.  And it’s projected to be expensive too - roughly $50 million in lost tax revenue in ‘09, $150 million in ‘10… pretty soon, you’re talking about real money!

This New York Times article summarizes why I believe peak oil’s imminence doesn’t mean the end of first-world living-standards as we know it.

It turns out, the US is ridiculously unproductive when it comes to GDP-per-unit-CO2: at 93rd (of 137) it ranks below even Thailand and Mexico!  [corrected from 167 as per comment below]
Ah, but there’s more to that than meets the eye…

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This article in the Times is about James Lovelock.  Like many articles about the author of the Gaia hypothesis — which posits that the earth and life on it form a self-equilibriating system — it notes his pessimism for the future of humanity.  Heck, that’s evident even in the article’s title:

“It’s too late for planet earth, says James Lovelock.”

The article also notes Lovelock’s derision for renewable energy — he prefers nuclear (despite its myriad challenges including cost, lead time, uranium depletion, and that whole management-of-waste thing — tho thorium reactors might hold promise… many years from now).  Indeed, Lovelock evidently thinks renewable energy is an elaborate scam made possible by subsidies!  This neatly parallels my thoughts on nuclear energy. 

In this, Lovelock reminds me of Einstein.  As we all know, Einstein also contributed epochal insights to the scientific community.  Few realize though, that Albert was on the wrong side of the debate about quantum mechanics: he spent his later years in a futile attempt to disprove it.  As innumerable experiments have shown, Einstein was wrong.

This is in fact the subject of Einstein’s famously mangled quote “God does not play dice with the universe”, which started off as “I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice“.

Einstein could not accept the premise that at the microscopic, quantum level, reality exists as a field of probabilities, until interactions collapse all possible outcomes into one.  (See Schrodinger’s cat for a PETA-unfriendly example.)

It seems to me Lovelock is in the same position - he made a titanic contribution to science.  But as with Einstein, he’s been unable to keep up with the latest developments, and so is making an inferior argument (that is, nuclear over renewables).  As one of the article’s interviewees notes, Lovelock is:

“very knowledgeable about how Earth systems work, and he is right about the need to integrate science. But he does not apply the same intellectual rigour to his judgments about energy”

I linked to a FlowingData post on WalMart’s growth across the US, earlier.
They’ve now got a similar graph showing the growth of Target - which, as it turns out, started up in the same year.

From what it seems, this is a business analogue of convergent evolution.

In biological cases, different species may develop similar traits, especially if they’re targeting the same ecological niche.  In this business case, Target and WalMart both started off aiming to be low-cost department-store vendors; aiming for this economic niche, they seem to have independently come up with very similar formulas for successful suburban “big box” retailing.

Curiously, while Target’s main colour is red (and WalMart is blue), Target is reputed to generally support Democrats (”blue states”) while WalMart generally supports Republicans (”red states’).

This is different from what happened with the trio of McDonald’s - Wendy’s - Burger King, which is a business analogue of horizontal gene transfer.

HGT is a process whereby one organism takes genes from another.  This doesn’t seem to happen between “higher” life forms (like us) but is apparently fairly common among “lower” life forms. When bacteria develop drug resistance, it could be that some bacteria were drug-resistant to begin with, and that only those bacteria survived to reproduce.  But since bacteria swap genes near-indiscriminately with each other, bacteria-species-A might have acquired the gene for drug-resistance from bacteria-species-B!

Indeed, HGT is the biggest challenge to the Darwinian idea of a tree of life; Darwin assumed genetic variation is only caused by transmission from parents to offspring.  The “family-values” version of evolution, if you will.

HGT implies that genetic variation — at least among the single-celled creatures who started us off — could also come by transmission between any two organisms which got close enough to do the microbial equivalent of French kissing.  This superimposes an “orgy” layer atop the “family-values” model above.

In the fast food example above, the founders of Wendy’s and Burger King both heard of McDonald’s success, and went to California to study the business.  They then returned to their stomping grounds (Wendy’s - Ohio; Burger King - Florida) and started up their own versions.  This is a business analogue to HGT, because the Wendy’s and Burger King corporations didn’t independently come up with the business model, they copied it from McDonald’s.

The Wilkins ice shelf in Antarctica is melting.

The good news: it won’t raise sea levels because it’s sea ice.

The bad news: it’s even further evidence that global warming is getting worse, even faster than the worst-case IPCC forecasts.

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I’m of the school that global oil production has peaked, or will peak within a few years.  But I’m a peaknik, not a doomer.  I foresee hardship in the transition, but I doubt society will collapse as energy gets scarcer.  Communities are as likely to dissolve into lone-wolf survivalism, as whales are likely to revert to single-cell organisms. Indeed, there are so many advantages to community that if all social bonds were to suddenly break, people would immediately start self-organizing into new groups and tribes.

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This article from Bytesizebio points out that our bodies are only one-tenth human: in our bodies, human cells are outnumbered by the cells of harmless or symbiotic microorganisms, about 10 to 1. Wikipedia concurs. 

What it means to be human, when 90% of our body isn’t?  (To be clear, human cells take up a larger volume than our passenger microbes, as the latter are smaller.)  And that other nine-tenths can literally shape our lives; as the article explains, the bugs in your gut can make you fat!

Most interestingly, Part 2 of the article divulges that while identical twins share the same human DNA (their physical differences apparently being due to variations in gene expression) their gut flora populations are as unrelated as those of randomly-picked strangers. In other words, while identical twins may share essentially the same human cells… they’re as different as any pair of people, when it comes to the other 90% of their body!

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