QotD

Heard this on the radio, worth re-sharing… an observation by someone:

“I am so glad that the public library system exists already.  Could you imagine trying to get it passed through Congress nowadays?”

Getting my goat

There’s a lot of back and forth going on in the USA right now on the topic of healthcare as a “reform/overhaul bill” is being pursued in the halls of government.  And with all that comes a lot of chatter on the airwaves and in public about it… and much of it is really getting my goat.

QotD and more

”I have found that most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” – Abraham Lincoln

And how!

I am now officially entered the newest phase of geekdom, for I have taken my notebook to a coffee shop (to drink tea, naturally) and connected wirelessly and surfed/worked for a bit.  And am now posting this via said notebook (albeit at home).  Hooray!

Washer and dryer are being delivered tomorrow morning, also a big hooray.  It’ll be grand to have in-house laundry, especially a nice front loader, and no quarters…

Fun push hands practice today, and got to push with Sifu for about 45 mins on Tuesday playing around and even getting into some freeform.  Wow.  Much to develop there, and way fun.

Kitchen still needs cleaning and putting together, going to work more on that this weekend, along with plans et al for the house addition.  Talked to someone today about starting up a new green venture/partnership that could prove very exciting.

And may the bay blow a cold breeze our way tonight…

Big news, the second!

To put it succinctly, I bought a house!

Roofs and more

It’s about architecture and food!

Now this is what I’m talking about, an example of a house typology I’ve been envisioning for a while. Simple, passive design for a place, not divorced from its milieu:

To paraphrase an article I read on it: “The steel shading and concrete foundation help keep the home’s temperature a comfortable 23~C, even with outside temperatures hitting in the 40s; the air conditioning unit required by county codes still hasn’t been turned on.”

This is more of what we need.

Food wise, I caught a lecture by Michael Pollan on “It’s your World” (on NPR), great little lecture with those again simple three rules he’s researched:

• Eat Food (and have them be whole foods)
• Not too much (the 80% full rule seems to work well)
• Mostly Plants (85%+ of daily intake)

He also says much other interesting stuff to sum up his research and writing.

That the “western diet” is proving disastrous to health is one of those things that seems to fall in the “We don’t want to believe what we know” category. His illumination of the focus on nutritionism is spot-on, and interesting how it has not only altered eating and allowed huge profits and marketing, but also provided a cover for not confronting our actual food choices and consumption and their impact.

Good stuff.

Something to ponder

The quote in my last post is a great segue to something I’ve been doing some contemplation over the past few weeks and wanting to explore and share, and that is the human phenomenon of Cognitive Dissonance.  It’s one of those things that hides out in the background, going mostly unnoticed in our lives, yet it’s there at play.  Broadly speaking one of the key components to cognitive dissonance is the ability to actually hold two contradictory ideas in our mind simultaneously.  When the two are actually present at the same time there is discomfort and discord and so to avoid this (cope with it) we often rationalize and justify the discontinuity, or we isolate the two in a way that the twain shall never meet.  And this is where the quote “We don’t want to believe what we know,” lives.  Something comes up to challenge where we stand, and we rationalize it, explain it away, or simply dismiss it out of hand.  It doesn’t even matter if it’s right in our face, we can do a great job of sweeping it under the rug and not seeing it, explaining away the discomfort.

Another aspect, mused upon by Scott Adams on his blog once, is that cognitive dissonance also gives rise to resistance to and the inability to hear and to entertain other explanations or viewpoints other than those we already hold.  New ideas and new information, or information that simply doesn’t match up, are filtered through this barrier, making it the rare few that make it through.

Given that we are human beings, we have cognitive dissonance.  It’s not a question of “if,” it’s a question of “where do I have cognitive dissonance?”  The great thing is that once we recognize we are having it we are free to just let it be and to actually, well, listen, learn and grow.  I think if we all spent more time getting that cognitive dissonance is at work in all sorts of instances, we’d grow our understanding of the world, of possibilities, and of each other.  And that can only make the sandbox in which we play bigger.

And that would be a fantastic place to be in.

Reflective QotD

QFMFT:  “We don’t want to believe what we know.”  –  Yann Arthus-Bertrand

That’s a good one to meditate on.

QQotd and QotD

Quasi Quote of the Day:

“Let us redefine progress to mean that just because we CAN turn any movie into an action movie, does not mean we must turn every movie into an action movie.”

Quote of the Day:

“Let us redefine progress to mean that just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily mean we must do that thing.”

– Federation President

What I Love: Vol 9

I love Role Playing Games.

I love the rules, the simulation.

I love crafting rules.  Tweaking rules.  Writing supplements.

I love creating characters.

I love getting into character.

I love the surprising events that grab everyone and make the table cheer or jeer.

I love the storytelling.

I love the imagination and the creation.

I love how gaming can be evaluated on several axis, and it’s best when all are in balance.

I love being editor of a gaming magazine.

TEDdage

Oooo, shiny, new embedding of TED talks… must try it out… loved this one: