Recent Feeds + Reads

To start with, devaluation is not an alternative to sovereign default. When a government decides to devalue, savers who trusted the currency to store their wealth, and creditors who bought bonds denominated in the currency, find the value of their assets cut. That’s sovereign default by a different name.

Official net U.K. debt excluding the effect of financial interventions such as bank bailouts is about 1 trillion pounds ($1.57 trillion), or 36,000 pounds per household. […]  The U.K. government must either default or modify unfunded promises if it is to resolve those debts. Devaluing the pound would be one way to achieve that.

Partly because Greece, Spain and Italy cannot devalue without leaving the euro, it is often argued that devaluation is a potential savior for countries such as the U.K., which luckily have their own currencies. This is deeply flawed logic. The answer to whatever the U.K.’s current problems are can hardly be more of the same policies that created those problems.

We need solutions to both of these problems [sovereign defaults and banking collapses] and, despite its many fans, currency devaluation addresses neither. It can mask the symptoms of the crisis, but it can’t cure them. Such policies are like plastering over a structural crack in a load- bearing wall: They end in a pile of rubble.

People tend to think of perception as a passive process. We see, hear, smell, taste or feel stimuli that impinge upon our senses. We think that if we are at all objective, we record what is actually there. Yet perception is demonstrably an active rather than a passive process; it constructs rather than records “reality.” You construct how you choose to see the world.

We see no more than we expect to see.  Our stereotyped notions block clear vision and crowd out imagination.

We make instantaneous judgments every day all predicated on what we see and hear based on our past experiences. 

[J]ust a few moments’ thinking time can prime you to perform either better or worse than normal at both mental and physical tasks.

In the wake of my colleague Harry McCracken’s sensible commentary on Richard Gaywood’sTUAW piece about the iPad’s viability as a content creation tool, I wanted to write from the standpoint of someone with friends in both the pro-visual and audio side of the biz who increasingly use tablets as go-to devices for serious musical and visual content.

Spoiler: Yes, I view tablets as content creation devices in their own right. And by “content creation,” I mean everything from keying in a book to tapping out a music album to finger-sketching serious visual art.

This is not encouraging:

“I believe the decrease results from a climate that continues to grow less tolerant of creative expression. Everyone claims to love creativity, but very few of us understand what is really involved in creativity.”

“The decrease in Originality scores is an indirect measure of growing social pressures toward conformity and status quo, and increasing intolerance for new ideas.”

Dr. Kim adds, “The Creativity Crisis is not an event, but an era of continued decline in most measures of creativity. Reversing the trend will be a process that will require patience and perseverance, because the results will not be immediate. Part of the barriers to creativity results from public demands for immediate and measurable solutions in education, business, and government. Even in this hostile climate, we need creative solutions presented to reverse the trend.”

I’ve actually read (and enjoyed) numbers 1, 4 and 6 on this list from i09:

1. _ Cryptonomicon _ by Neal Stephenson
2. _ Dune _ by Frank Herbert
3. _ Gravity’s Rainbow _ by Thomas Pynchon
4. _ Foundation _ by Isaac Asimov
5. _ Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell _ by Susanna Clarke
6. _ 1984 _ by George Orwell
7. _ First and Last Men and Starmaker _ by Olaf Stapledon
8. _ The Long Tomorrow _ by Leigh Brackett
9. _ Dhalgren _ by Samuel Delany
10. _ Infinite Jest _ by David Foster Wallace

Over the past decade, studies have shown that both our thoughts and behaviors are heavily influenced by our surroundings, in ways we often fail to recognise.

One of the ways we become more creative is by exposing our minds to a broad variety of stimuli. The wider the selection of information you mentally digest–whether it be foreign movies, experimental novels or exotic travel–the more remote associations you’ll have in your arsenal. Or, in laymen’s terms, the more creative you’ll be.

We tend to find more insightful solutions to a problem when we’re in a good mood. One method experimentally proven for improving people’s moods is enjoyable scents. Positive scents don’t just make us feel better–they lead us to set higher goals for ourselves and experience a greater sense of self-efficacy.

Part of what makes bathroom visits a boon to creativity is that they represent one of the few times during the workday when our physiological attention is directed inward, mimicking the psychological experience of insight. But it’s not just inward attention that’s needed–it’s inward attention in the context of fresh ideas.

Good summary of a book by music historian Rosamond E. M. Harding, at Brain Pickings.  Some selected quotes:

[M]any ideas outside the subject become associated with it by a kind of interest association and acquire a similar tone. Thus they tend to become available at the same time as the ideas directly connected with the subject itself. The variety of interests tends to increase the richness of these extra ideas — ‘fringe-ideas’ — associated with the subject and thus to increase the possibilities of new and original combinations of thought.

Harding’s method for capturing and harnessing ideas:

(i) The ideas occurring when in the glow of inspiration are (a) briefly noted down and (b) checked.

(ii) (a) The subject is worked upon immediately, the thinker being wholly absorbed by it to the exclusion for the time being of everything else, or (b) The subject is set aside to develop and is then worked upon after an interval of time has elapsed, © the first draft of the completed work or half of it perhaps is put aside to ‘mature’ for a while; then it is again revised before publication.

(iii) Working at two or more subjects concurrently.

(iv) Working up the imagination to the state of vision and sometimes an audition.

(v) Trusting to feeling (or intuition, instinct).

(vi) Procedure when baffled by a problem; namely, laying the work aside and turning to something else. This process may be repeated many times during the course of a long work of any kind.