Ok, this is loads of fun for geeks (and thus slightly embarrassing or more than a little puzzling for everyone else).
First, go here and check out this wonderfully optimistic commercial for the Discovery Channel. Yes, there are days when even I love the whole world too.
Then, go here and read the xkcd comic inspired by that commercial.
Now, go here and view the video of the xkcd comic inspired by the commercial, which was made by various Internet geeks.
Squee!
(via Boing Boing, of course)
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We introverts are much misunderstood and maligned creatures. An introvert is a person who feels drained when they are with other people too long and who recharges from being alone. Extraverts, on the other hand (and there are so many more of you), recharge from being around other people and can’t stand being alone. Yes, we introverts get tired just being around you people.
If you have an introvert in your life, know that we don’t require all that much, just a little support and understanding. Please know that we are not being “stuck up” or “cold” or “brainiacs.” We are not “too sensitive” and we don’t need to stop being so sensitive. We like to read; it doesn’t make us weird, and we don’t love books more than you (well, maybe we do). We need our space, but truly, we are OK — you don’t need to keep asking.
We introverts may not be very pleasant to talk to on the phone, but we’re trying. It’s already hard enough to be social in person; talking on the phone deserves a special circle in hell. We can’t see you, you see, and that enhances all the usual difficulties of conversation. The awkward pauses just get awkward-er. We will always, always answer your emails, though. Unless we just don’t like you.
Another realm of hell should be reserved for the meeting. It is inconceivable to us that so many people would want to spend hours shut up in little rooms drawing on whiteboards and achieving absolutely nothing. We just want to get on with our work. Why won’t you let us?
Please, if you know an introvert, be kind to him or her today. Make a cup of tea, give your introvert a book and leave him or her the hell alone.
Caring for Your Introvert (The Atlantic)
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- Leverage the advantages of being an introvert at work (penelopetrunk.com)
- Interview with author of Introvert Power (boingboing.net)
- Living in a state of confusion (thiswomanswork.com)
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I have no preconception that I’d like to see you be or do. I have no desire to foresee you, only to discover you. — Mary Haskell, in a letter to the poet Kahlil Gibran
The Kid is almost 2, and he’s not really speaking yet. He babbles, he signs, he knows a couple of words, and he makes animal sounds. But he doesn’t talk.
Even a cursory amount of Internet research turns up dire warnings about speech delays. The extreme importance of intervening with speech therapy early is often stressed. I’m not discounting this, and indeed, we are getting speech therapy for our son. If it helps him, great, and I certainly don’t see how it can hurt. Although if it does cause him undue stress, I will probably discontinue it.
The most difficult thing about this situation — and I imagine this is true with every parent of a child who experiences some kind of delay or abnormality in their development — is to tamp down the anxiety. I tell myself every day not to stress about this, that The Kid is doing just fine in other areas and is likely just a late talker. This is a case where access to too much information, via the Internet, is probably a bad thing. It raises anxieties unnecessarily, leads me to fret about the rarest of outcomes and makes me worry that my child is not “normal” enough.
I never even wanted my child to be “normal.” Of course, no one wants their child to have a developmental disorder or a disease. But I mean that I don’t want my child to fit comfortably into what is average and expected for every person. I certainly didn’t. Rather, I want The Kid to be exactly who he is, even if that means he’s not talking like the other kids his age.
Thomas Sowell has researched late talkers and has found a corollary between late talkers and ability in music, math and memory. He also gives this sage advice, which I think applies to all parents and children:
In this age of labels, when there is a government program for every label, parents have to be on guard against having their children pigeon-holed. The stakes are just too high.
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Need a few minutes to recharge, put your feet up, mix yourself a martini? Just put on this video for the little ones and keep them distracted for 3 minutes 28. (They won’t understand the lyrics anyway.)
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So the Kid is not really talking yet, and to compensate, I’ve been teaching him to sign so he has some way to communicate. It started out slow at first, but now he’s able to learn one or two new signs a day. He’s even made up some signs himself.
The easiest signs for the Kid to learn were signs that he could relate to an object or picture. He learned several animal signs (dog, elephant) and favorite things (book) right away. Concept signs takes longer, but it feels good to see it “click” for him after working on it for a while. Combining a sign with a verbal phrase helps (such as “All done!), and it encourages him to talk. At first, he just parroted the signs back to us, but now he uses them as language, to indicate what he wants or answer a question.
Interestingly, he took a very long time to learn Mommy and Daddy, but now he uses them a lot, especially when he hears one of us in the other room or is asking for one of us. The sign for Daddy is pointing at the forehead with the thumb, and the sign for Mommy is pointing at the chin with the thumb. But the Kid points at his neck when he wants to say “Mommy.” So I think he’s saying that Mommy is a pain in the neck, which I guess is true sometimes.
I recommend focusing on one or two signs at a time and not moving on to the next until the child is using those really well. It’s best to start with signs that relate to immediate needs (eat, drink, more) or for which you can find concrete examples (animals, objects). Then move on to more abstract concepts such as “all done,” “help” and “thank you.”
Use the sign every time you say the word or see a picture of it, and make sure the child is looking at you when you sign. I’ve found that showing the Kid the sign using his own hands, rather than just making the sign myself, helps him learn it faster. It’s important to reign in our tendency to guess what our children want and to make them request it specifically with the sign; for instance, I might ask, “Do you need help?” but I wait until he makes the sign for “help” before I actually do help him.
There are many well-established signs, but I see nothing wrong with making up our own when it suits us. We made up signs for giraffe, elephant and helicopter, for instance — some of the Kid’s favorite things. He even made up his own sign for fish. He moves his hands up and down while singing “mmm mmm, mmm mmm.” I don’t get it, but it works for him. (Maybe it’s meant to mean fish swimming.)
You don’t need to buy a book or video or take a class to start signing. Here are a few good online resources that are FREE (although they are all selling something, of course), which also have a lot more information about signing and language development:
- Baby Sign Language Dictionary
- Signing with Your Baby
- American Sign Language Browser — if you can’t find the sign somewhere else; you may have to modify more complex signs
- Teach Me to Talk – a great resource if you are worried about speech delays
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Here’s a taste of what’s popular on my other blogs this month:
On my books blog, folks seems to be enjoying What Now? A Post-apocalyptic Reading List. I guess it’s those winter blues spurring them to read depressing novels about the end of the world (they’re my favorites too!). In fact, several people got to the list after searching for “how to rebuild society after the apocalypse.” I’m glad somebody is thinking ahead.
If you’re interested in the apocalypse, you might want to check out An Empty Earth, which is essentially my research notebook where I mix together a soup of vaguely apocalyptic thoughts, links and other resources. The Ruins of Detroit is a popular example.
Here, you guys seems to be enjoying learning how to give Google Wave invitations and how to create a GTD project list. (Does anybody actually use Google Wave? Because I haven’t found a use for it.) I have posts that are so much more entertaining, but the public likes what it likes, I guess.
I’m skipping my cooking blog, because it’s always the same posts that are popular (their titles are so Google-able).
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So we got about 6 or 7 inches of snow over the weekend. We aren’t used to winter precipitation around here, so we don’t have any of those new-fangled inventions for dealing with it, like snowplows or snow tires or sleds. We just have to make do with what we’ve got.
Hey, it’s probably more fun than the alternative:
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He’s not doing much talking yet, but The Kid has become very interested in his letters. He constantly wants to look at them and practice pronouncing them. I’d say the alphabet comes after only animal noises and blueberries in his gigantic catalog of interests.
Fortunately, society has a vested interest in helping my kid learn his letters and has provided tons of resources so that we can practice all day long. Here are a few I particularly like, all available on the Interwebs for FREE:
- Sesame Street rules the alphabet, of course, and here are my two favorite videos featuring the ABC Song: Celebrities Sing the Alphabet Song and African Alphabet Song.
- Fisher-Price gives us the ABC’s Zoo Learning Game, which combines the alphabet and animal noises in one fun game your kid will want to play over and over and over (also useful for learning the Fisher-Price toy animals, a marketable skill).
- ProjectAlphabet lets you make alphabet books using your own photos. This sounds like a cool, creative, personal art project that my child will treasure his whole life, if I actually ever get around to taking the pictures, uploading them and making the damn thing.
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Image via Wikipedia
It was exciting to learn yesterday that part of the stimulus package includes $520 million for North Carolina to improve its rail infrastructure. The funds will go to improving rail lines to handle high-speed trains and to building new stations, including one in my little town of Hillsborough. Eventually, the plan is to link to Washington, D.C., and from there probably to New York City and New England.
Would I take a high-speed train to Washington instead of driving or flying? You bet I would, if the price was right. If I could make the trip in less than the 5 hours it takes to drive (while avoiding the horrendous traffic) and yet not have to deal with the hassles at the airport, I would probably go to Washington three or four times a year.
I’m very excited about the possibilities of high-speed rail. I think improving the infrastructure now will provide needed transportation alternatives when oil starts to get expensive, and I am sure it will put people to work.
$52oM puts fast trains on fast track (News & Observer)
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- Obama Taps High-Speed Rail Winners: Florida, California, Illinois and More (streetsblog.org)
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1) Sign and repost this petition, at One.org, to cancel the $1 billion debt that Haiti owes to international lenders and has no hope of repaying.
Haiti incurred this debt by a) being forced to pay 150 million francs to France in exchange for recognition of its sovereignty after its successful slave rebellion; and b) taking out loans from foreign countries, which were then misappropriated by dictators such as the Duvaliers. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere and probably will never be able to repay this debt following the tragic earthquake 2 weeks ago. (via Wikipedia)
Update: Also, this op-ed from the New York Times succinctly explains the reasons for Haiti’s poverty and debt.
2) Continue to give generously to earthquake relief funds. I suggest some nonprofits in my previous post on Haiti. The NY Times is reporting that charitable donations to earthquake relief in Haiti may be eligible for deduction on your 2009 tax return.
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Whether you’re a corner boy in West Baltimore, or a cop who knows his beat, or an Eastern European brought here for sex, your life is worth less. It’s the triumph of capitalism over human value. This country has embraced the idea that this is a viable domestic policy. It is. It’s viable for the few. — “Interviewing the Man Behind The Wire,” Slate
When I was a full-time writer, I heard a certain question a lot. It was posed different ways, but it always amounted to the same thing: “Do you make any money doing that?” And the implicit question behind it was: “Why don’t you get a real job?”
Real job meant, of course, a job that paid a salary. A job that took place somewhere other than my home. Where I had a boss telling me what to do.
The idea was certainly attractive. As a writer, money and my next project were constant worries. I had to provide my own benefits and pay my own Social Security. But it was only after I took a couple of gigs that didn’t feel were right for me — but still, I needed the money — that I decided to chuck it in and get that real job.
Here were some things I learned while I was working my real job. Nothing can be done without holding a meeting — or preferably, a whole series of them — first. “Collaboration” means spending countless hours consulting everyone without anyone helping you do the actual work. Having to be in a certain place at certain hours even if it wasn’t the most productive use of my time feels unpleasantly like being back in middle school.
I don’t have a real job anymore. I don’t have any job right now, unless you count mothering as a job, which most people don’t. And it feels great. I know that I don’t want to go back.
Reflecting on this brings to mind the eye-opening book Your Money or Your Life. We must each ask ourselves: “How much value does my life have? How many hours should I have to work to buy this pair of designer jeans or this new television or this DVD I don’t need? Is it worth it?” No one else — certainly not your boss or the company that gives you that real job — will be asking these questions for you.
It saddens me when I hear people say things like: “I’m lucky just to have a job.” Yes, even in these tough economic times, we must remember that our time and labor still have value. We have to establish our own value. We can’t let our employers determine how much our lives are worth.
Everyone acknowledges that there are no more jobs for life. I would argue that there are no more real jobs, even. Companies showed no hesitation at shedding workers when hard economic times hit. Wages have been stagnant for decades. Health insurance and other benefits are being cut back, and more of the cost is being passed on to workers. Companies show no loyalty to their workers, so why should workers be expected to be unquestionably loyal to their employers?
We all work for ourselves, even if we have real jobs. We can’t expect our employers or the government to look out for our best interests anymore. Each of us is a corporation of one, and we are our own CEOs. And it’s time we start deciding for ourselves what our time, what our labor — what our lives — are worth.
For further reading:
- The Disposable Worker (BusinessWeek)
- Are Americans a Broken People? Why We’ve Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression (AlterNet)
- Study: Bush Tax Cuts Cost More than Twice as Much as Dems’ Health-care Bill (Crooks and Liars)
- America Without a Middle Class (Huffington Post)
- White Faces in the Day Labour Queue (Futurismic)
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Haiti is an ill-fated country. Not that I believe in curses (certainly not of the Pat Robertson variety) — or even fate, necessarily — but there is no denying that Haiti has received more than its share of misfortune.
Even before the earthquake hit last week, Haiti was the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Eighty percent of the population lives in poverty, and more than two-thirds of the labor force don’t have formal jobs. Excessive deforestation causes regular flooding, and the country lacks reliable infrastructure for transportation or telecommunications. Sixty percent of the population has no access to regular health care. Haitians suffer disproportionately from tuberculosis, malaria, HIV/AIDS, cholera and typhoid, when compared to other countries in the region.
When Christopher Columbus discovered the island of Hispaniola in 1492, a Native American tribe called the Taino inhabited it. Spanish settlers virtually obliterated the Taino within 25 years of Hispaniola’s discovery. In 1697, the Spanish ceded the western third of the island to the French, who established sugar plantations there and brought slaves from Western Africa to work them.
The slaves outnumbered the plantation owners, and in the late 1700s, they revolted. They were probably able to organize the revolt through the religion that developed among the slaves called vodoun, an amalgam of West African beliefs married with some Taino rituals, and camouflaged from their masters by the adoption of Catholic saints and holidays. (Voodoo is a fascinating and much misunderstood religion, but that is the subject for another article.) In 1804, Haiti became the first black republic to declare independence, the high point of its history.
Following the slave revolt, Haiti has been plagued by political violence and abused by a series of dictators, many of them propped up by the U.S. government. Since a military coup ousting President Aristide in 2004, United Nations peacekeepers maintain civil order there. In 2008, four hurricanes passed over Haiti, killing several thousand people and severely damaging the transportation infrastructure and agricultural sector on which most Haitians depend for subsistence. Last week, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck the island, killing as many as 100,000 people and destroying the capital of Port-au-Prince.
Despite their history, Haitians surround themselves with beauty. Haiti has a rich culture comprised of a unique language, religion and artistic, culinary, dance and musical traditions. It is hard to imagine what more could befall these unfortunate people. It is hard to imagine how anyone cannot feel compassion toward them.
When disaster strikes, the response from most Americans (although not all) is always immediate and generous. Our first impulse to help when it is most needed has always sustained my faith in my country and its people. I am sure you have already given as generously as you can, but if not, here are some good places to start:
- International Red Cross
- Doctors Without Borders
- CARE
- North Carolina-based organizations working in Haiti
(Please take care when you donate and ensure that your money goes where intended.)
Follow what’s going on in Haiti as it happens on my current events list on Twitter.
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I used to subscribe to all my favorite blogs and read them in Google Reader. But no matter how much I tried to stay on top of them, I always ended up subscribed to 100 or more blogs, which were collectively posting hundreds of times a day. I was spending hours skimming through blog posts.
There is something about the RSS feed reader that makes a completist like me feel like I have to at least look at every post that shows up. Maybe it’s that bold number at the top. I have to get it down to 0 each time I open up Reader. It’s like my email Inbox — it must always be empty. And it feels like cheating to mark everything as read when I hadn’t actually read it.
Another problem was that I was reading about the same things 5, 6 or 10 times over in different blogs. There aren’t that many blogs that consistently post new content. Usually, they just react to the same bit of news as everyone else.
So one day, not too long ago, I unsubscribed to most of the blogs in my Reader. And I started following the bloggers on Twitter instead.
Almost everyone who blogs is also on Twitter. And they usually tweet about their own blog posts as well as other interesting bits of news and links. So everything in their RSS feeds also shows up on Twitter.
But I don’t have the same need to have to catch up with everything on Twitter that I do in my RSS feed reader. Twitter is like a river of information flowing by (I know that New York Times columnist used the same metaphor in his Twitter article but he stole it from me — he must have overheard me making this observation in a Starbucks or something). Every now and then, when I have a few minutes, I dip my toes in the river. Google Reader, on the other hand, is more like a dam, and all the new information flowing in backs up into a lake that I feel compelled to empty.
But what if I miss something? Well, so what if I do. The Internet is so vast, and there is so much interesting stuff going on all the time, that I’m bound to miss many things. Besides, the truly interesting things get reposted so much that I will see them sooner or later. By doing most of my reading through Twitter, I have found that I am more in control of how long I spend surfing. Whether I want to stop in for a few minutes or hang out for an hour, when I am done and ready to move on to other things, I just close the page and walk away.
Twitter lists are the new feature that have made this really possible for me. I obviously don’t want to follow thousands of people — too much noise. I tend to follow just the people who are consistently interesting. But I can add anyone I want to a list without having to follow them. So when I want to dip into a particular subject of interest, such as the world of book bloggers or minor celebrities, I open up my list on that topic.
I still use Google Reader, but it’s a much more targeted use now. RSS is a very handy way of keeping on top of news that really interests me, such as local events or personal friends’ FriendFeeds or Google alert results. And there are still a very few blogs where I want to see every posting. For instance, I know if it’s interesting, eventually it’s going to show up on MetaFilter, so I still subscribe to that feed. But now when I open Google Reader, the bold number that faces me is usually less than 20, which is a lot easier to zero out.
This is yet another reason why Twitter is so much greater than people generally think it is. And it’s not at all addictive. So if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find out whether Justin Bieber is still trending.
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- Google Reader is Wrong (thenextweb.com)
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Even though we are already well into January, I still think it is a good time to pause and look back at the past year. For your perusal, I offer my most popular posts on my other blogs for 2009.
On my books blog, Books Worth Reading:
- Books that changed your life
- Lost as book and the books of Lost (just in time for the final season premiere!)
- The Dark Tower series: From start to finish
- Book to film: I Am Legend
- What now? A post-apocalyptic reading list
On my cooking blog, Simply Cooking, check out how to make lasagna, sorbet, roasted chicken breasts, quick and easy tomato sauce for pasta and pan-fried chicken and fish.
And on this blog:
- How to give Google Wave invitations
- How to create a master GTD project list
- The new iGoogle — the good and the bad
- New social media integration in popular Web 2.0 tools
Why do you guys always like the techy stuff?
(My other 2 blogs are a bit too young to do a “year in review” this year.)
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Here is a nifty idea: Pick one word (or three) that for you encapsulates what you would like to accomplish in the coming year.
My word is: purpose.
Here is the definition: “A result or effect that is intended or desired; an intention.” Also “deliberately.” And to good purpose: “with good results.”
My goal is to choose the activities I spend my time on consciously. I want these activities to have purpose, which is to bring meaning into my life. These purposeful activities can range from working toward larger goals to the small things we do every day. In other words, I don’t want to waste my time on activities that have no purpose.
The purpose of life is a life of purpose. — Robert Byrne
More:
- IAM Learning
- The 5 percent trick: Finding passion and purpose in life (Zen Habits)
- What I’ve been avoiding… (me)
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The blog has become so popular because it is a format that has a wide variety of uses. Generally, web surfers are used to seeing blogs used in one of the following ways:
- to present information and news on a narrow subject in small, manageable chunks, generally supported by advertising
- to communicate news about a service, product, organization or program
- as a diary, detailing the daily life of the writer, which may or may not be of interest to anyone else
- in its original usage, as a place to post interesting links (although I think other tools have surpassed the blog for this purpose)
Or as some combination of the above.
I have found the blog to be a useful format for another purpose: as a notebook or journal. I keep 6 blogs (5 public, 1 private), which I grant you, seems like a lot. But to my mind, they are the virtual equivalents of 6 notebooks I might have once kept or did keep before I discovered blogging. Yet they are so much more powerful.
I think of my blogs as journals or research notebooks. Journals differ from diaries in that diaries typically focus on the mundane day-to-day events in the life of a person. A journal, on the other hand, is a record of a person’s thoughts and learnings, often about a particular subject. For instance, you might keep a journal recording your thoughts about the books you read, as I do. Or if you are teaching yourself to cook, you might keep a journal of tips, recipes, ingredient notes, etc. (again, as I do).
A journal can also be the equivalent of a research notebook, although I differ between the two because I tend to keep more clips, quotes, pictures and other people’s writing in a research notebook, while a journal is usually all original writing. For instance, one of my blogs is my notebook of post-apocalyptic research. It contains photographs, lists, article summaries, poetry and my own thoughts, all mixed together.
Blogs have it all over physical notebooks, though. Here’s why:
- Links - you can link to articles of interest, research sources, related pieces, etc.
- Media - it is relatively easy to incorporate graphics, photographs, audio and media into a blog to enrich the content.
- Search - a blog is fully searchable, making it a simple matter to locate whatever you’re looking for.
- Tagging - enables you to quickly categorize your work, cross-reference related items and visually see patterns emerge over time.
- Unexpected feedback - Blogs can be public or private. But if you make your blog public, you are inviting comment, which allows others to contribute their own ideas, other resources, questions and support to your work, which may enrich your work in unanticipated ways.
Whenever I start a new project from now on, I intend to start a blog to accompany it. Whether it amounts to anything is not important. What is important to me are the tools that blogs offer to help me plan, record, organize and — yes, this one is important, as well — share my work and what I’ve learned.
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Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of what I call “avoidance activities.” To name a few:
- Playing The Sims, which is the ultimate example because it allows me to substitute the mundane activities of a virtual life for the mundane activities of my actual life.
- Rating movies on Flickchart, which pits two movies head-to-head and asks you to choose the better one; I have noticed that once you reach a certain number of movies — for me, it was 600 or so — it only shows the same movies over and over, which makes a pointless exercise even more pointless.
- Updating and rearranging my themed reading lists on Lists of Bests, an activity I find endlessly engaging, but I could be spending that time doing some actual reading, don’t you know.
I call these “avoidance activities” because they suck away hours of my day, hours when I could have been doing something productive or interesting or working toward one of my goals. Instead, I’m avoiding doing anything at all meaningful with these time wasters.
This year, I want to focus instead on purposeful activities. Some examples:
- Spend some meaningful time on my friend’s social network IAM Learning Community, setting goals and getting support from the great network there; this is a great network of people all working toward a similar vision using similar tools and a resource that I am not taking advantage of.
- Blog more. Blogging is a sure-fire way to jump-start my writing engine. I also want to write more meaty blog posts, rather than just tossed off lists of links. My goal is to blog my way to a writing project idea.
- Remember how to do things just for the pleasure of it. Like writing, especially, but also reading, cooking, gardening — all those things that enrich my life.
- Spend more time with friends. I made space to spend one-on-one time with many of my friends over the holidays, and each visit left me feeling more energized and happier. I want more, please.
- Come up with more interesting activities for my son. This will be easier once the weather starts to warm (I truly hate the cold and going out in it), but we are already signed up for a dance class and I am starting a neighborhood playgroup. I also want to reinstate our Saturday family excursions.
In short, I want to waste less of my time and focus more on living my life. It’s not really about accomplishing anything specific so much as about engaging in the process.
I guess you could call this a resolutions post. I don’t like to make resolutions; I prefer to set goals. These are my goals for 2010.
And one prediction: 2010 will be the beginning of a much more positive and affirming decade. The Zero Decade is over, and even though it was a great time in my life, for the world it wasn’t so hot. Time to move forward!
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Track Santa on Twitter.
Imagine how you would film Alien vs. Predator Save Christmas (excerpts from the rejected script). And more holiday goodies from McSweeney’s.
Read the Onion’s special holiday edition. (Video and audio included for those who do not read.)
Listen to A Juniper Creek Christmas — a free album for downloading and Christmas greetings from the Prophet himself.
Watch the all-time worst Christmas specials, and get all nostalgic on the Christmas Specials Wiki.
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Image via Wikipedia
I have always been fascinated by randomness. I am not alone, as shown by the ancient pastimes of gambling and divination. It is our lot as humans to peer into the chaos of the universe and try to discern patterns there. But perhaps a bigger question is whether our lives have some purpose or whether they are the results of a series of random events. Not a comforting question to consider, unless you posit that without randomness, you cannot have free will.
So instead let’s consider writing a story based on a randomly generated plot or theme or even a single word. Let’s start a website or band around a randomly generated name. Let’s decide who goes first (or last) using a randomly ordered list. Or maybe we’ll just do a little random surfing.
But can we really behave randomly and perhaps beat the lottery? Or is there too much order in the universe after all?
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Now I finally understand why so many people have toddlers and babies at the same time.
shannon.turlington AT gmail.com 
