The surviving members of the Cowsills:
Month: September 2017
The age of Aquarius
5th Dimension:
R.I.P. Harry Dean Stanton
Happy Hour: Mary Louise Knutson – I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face …
Panhandle Slim… Art for Folk…
Sarah Sanders struggles to defend Trump’s border wall flip-flop: ‘They are building sample walls’
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders on Thursday sought to calm President Donald Trump’s supporters after Democrats announced that they had reached an agreement that a deal on protecting undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers would not be connected to funding a new wall along the Mexico border. “The president has been very clear in what his… Continue reading “Sarah Sanders struggles to defend Trump’s border wall flip-flop: ‘They are building sample walls’”
Oh, whoops
Equifax had a patch and never got around to installing it.
Samantha Bee looks at the threat from white supremacists
Samantha Bee points out that the Trump administration has defunded a program that monitors violent white supremacist groups, the most significant terror threat in the U.S. She’s been raising money for Life After Hate, which received financial support through the same program.… Continue reading “Samantha Bee looks at the threat from white supremacists”
Facebook enabled advertisers to reach ‘Jew haters’
Want to market Nazi memorabilia, or recruit marchers for a far-right rally? Facebook’s self-service ad-buying platform had the right audience for you. Until this week, when we asked Facebook about it, the world’s largest social network enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics… Continue reading “Facebook enabled advertisers to reach ‘Jew haters’”
Hah
I was just arguing with a friend about this. He thought I would be a lot more productive if I didn’t watch so much teevee.
I said that was how my brain rests, and that it actually made me more productive.
Now there’s a whole book about resting your brain, which I am all for! (It’s on my Amazon wish list and my birthday’s in two weeks. Just saying.) And Ian Welsh has reviewed it:
Too many people today think that working more equals working better. It’s not that that’s never the case; in many jobs and disciplines, the simplest and best way to increase what you get done is to just add more hours.
But that prescription, startlingly popular among many, has always struck me as dubious when it comes to anything creative. Speaking personally, even when perfectly healthy and happy, after more than about four hours of concentrated creative work my brain turns to mush. Work done after that time is not only non-productive, it’s likely to be so filled with mistakes that it’s counterproductive.
If I want to work more than that, the best strategy is to work about three hours and then rest. Best is to take a full sleep cycle nap of about 90 minutes to two hours. Then I can do another two to three hours.
And that’s it.
Further, the best strategy when working on a specific project which requires me to come up with ideas is to completely splurge, learning everything I can about the subject, over however long that takes (in four to five hour daily segments), and then to do something else.
The “something else,” and ideally that involves not work, but rest or play, is necessary, and it is during that time at some point, perhaps in the shower, after a nap, or during a long walk, that the key ideas will occur. They rarely occur during the study period, unless they are fairly obvious.
This is the prescription given by Graham Wallas in The Art of Thought and far more succinctly by ad-man James Webb Young in A Technique For Producing Ideas and it is at the core of Rest:
Prepare by immersing yourself.
Try to solve the problem.
Give up and rest.
Eureka.