bodhi tree swaying

Interesting and provocative stuff from writer (and meditator) Robert Wright:

This autumn will see the publication of a book that promises to help us out here: “What Technology Wants,” by Kevin Kelly, a long-time tech-watcher who helped launch Wired magazine and was its executive editor back in its young, edgy days.

Don’t let the title of Kelly’s book terrify you. He assures us that he doesn’t think technology is conscious — at least, not “at this point.” For now, he says, technology’s “mechanical wants are not carefully considered deliberations but rather leanings.”

So relax; apparently we have a few years before Keanu Reeves gets stuffed into a gooey pod by robotic overlords who use people as batteries. Still, it’s notable that, before Reeves played that role in “The Matrix,” the movie’s directors gave him a copy of Kelly’s earlier book, “Out

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Very interesting article from Discover about distractedness…

I am going to do my best to hold your attention until the very last word of this column. Actually, I know it’s futile. Along the way, your mind will wander off, then return, then drift away again. But I can console myself with some recent research on the subject of mind wandering. Mind wandering is not necessarily the sign of a boring column. It’s just one of the things that make us human.

Everybody knows what it is like for our minds to wander, and yet, for a long time psychologists shied away from examining the experience. It seemed too elusive and subjective to study scientifically. Only in the past decade have they even measured just how common mind wandering is. The answer is very.

Some of the most striking evidence comes from Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara

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I’ve enjoyed some of Cory Doctorow‘s fiction — especially Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Little Brother, I admire his outspoken and forward-looking views on copyright and intellectual property, and I love BoingBoing.

I also found his article for Locus Magazine, “Writing in the Age of Distraction,” to be full of good ideas. The man has an incredibly busy life and yet manages to turn out a novel a year. That’s on top of numerous public appearances, blog posts, articles, etc.

He recommends:

1. Short, regular work schedule: Only twenty minutes a day! He points out that one page in a day mounts up to a novel a year.
2. Stop as soon as you hit that limit (20 minutes, one page, whatever you’ve chosen).
3. Don’t research while writing — use some kind of keyword as a placeholder for unresearched facts.
4. Don’t be ceremonious about how you write — just do it.
5. Switch off your

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