31–40 of 46 posts
Having moved in London two years ago, I struggle to find a moment of intense quiet. The reason is mainly the planes that are authorized to fly above the city (a stupidity in my opinion) and even in the middle of a park, you can still hear them, flying just above your head. At night, cars, ambulances, you name it, will take the relay.. Frustrating.
Yep, same experience. Horses on cobblestones at 4am.
Having moved in London two years ago, I struggle to find a moment of intense quiet. The reason is mainly the planes that are authorized to fly above the city (a stupidity in my opinion) and even in the middle of a park, you can still hear them, flying just above your head. At night, cars, ambulances, you name it, will take the relay.. Frustrating.
For those looking for ideas to break away, just try the St. James way in northern Spain(or any similar walking experience). You only walk, eat, rest. There is nothing else to do for a month(if you start from the Pyrenees). You sleep mostly in pilgrim hostels, or cheap hotels. You can start alone but surely will finish with at least 10-15 new friends (if you want to of course). Every day you´ll walk for 5 to 8 hours,…
Robot apologist here, but for some reason neo-Luddism has become fashionable again and it bothers me. Is this really a war over little pings from email inboxes? Are we truly that oppressed by the ability to find out anything about anything? Do we need a virtual Moses to part the red sea of push notifications? I find it really difficult to sympathize with this line of argument. This is either a case of misconfigured n…
Attention has limits. Focus, by its nature, excludes. When scarcity quickly turns to abundance, people take a while to adapt. That's most obvious right now with food; people are learning how to live with a vast surplus of unnaturally delicious things. The same thing is happening with information. When I was a kid, I was a vacuum cleaner. I read every word on every cereal box, because that was only thing I could find…
I did explore the library extensively, some portions in depth, others not at all. Our consumption of information is by necessity highly selective. The real key is in who makes the selections.
In an economy of information abundance, most of the information you're presented with is selected for you by someone else, with their own agenda and motivations as for why you should read it.
This is among the most crucial reasons that I care very much about the ability for me to be able to exclude (and occasionally preferentially include) specific information sources. Advertising and marketing in particular.
Robot apologist here, but for some reason neo-Luddism has become fashionable again and it bothers me. Is this really a war over little pings from email inboxes? Are we truly that oppressed by the ability to find out anything about anything? Do we need a virtual Moses to part the red sea of push notifications? I find it really difficult to sympathize with this line of argument. This is either a case of misconfigured n…
I think of it more like pollution. The modern world gives us all kinds of amazing things, but there are side effects that are not immediately apparent. London was once infamous for it's "fog" until they started implementing pollution controls. It was just there. (Not that I advocate anything like a top-down diktat re: technology.) You clearly are self-aware of the impact when it comes to things like push notification…
Having moved in London two years ago, I struggle to find a moment of intense quiet. The reason is mainly the planes that are authorized to fly above the city (a stupidity in my opinion) and even in the middle of a park, you can still hear them, flying just above your head. At night, cars, ambulances, you name it, will take the relay.. Frustrating.
In central London, I find the river side reasonably quiet, and there is always the crypt of St Brides' of Fleet St - very quiet!
This is a bad comment, in that I can't bring myself to complete reading the article. What steams me about the recent "quiet", um, "discovery" and advocacy, is that many of those proclaiming it are the same fools who, last decade, were proclaiming the value of "collaboration" and cramming me into smaller cubes that eventually started to lose their walls (sort of a notched "ueber-bullpen", without naming it such). I've…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with one caveat. I love quiet, but I also love collaboration. The solution for me is in purpose-fit team spaces. If everybody in a room is working on the same thing, and all the conversation is team-specific, it can be a joy. It is tricky to get both the space and the cultural discipline, but I really love it when it works. Which means I thoroughly hate the way "collaboration" has been used to thoughtlessly b…
What about online collaboration? In my experience, that is the only place collaboration has actually happened. There's something about asynchronous collaboration that seems to make it more effective than synchronous collaboration, at least sometimes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with one caveat. I love quiet, but I also love collaboration. The solution for me is in purpose-fit team spaces. If everybody in a room is working on the same thing, and all the conversation is team-specific, it can be a joy. It is tricky to get both the space and the cultural discipline, but I really love it when it works. Which means I thoroughly hate the way "collaboration" has been used to thoughtlessly b…
What about online collaboration? In my experience, that is the only place collaboration has actually happened. There's something about asynchronous collaboration that seems to make it more effective than synchronous collaboration, at least sometimes.
The more I disconnect from various information sources, the more I realize how utterly unnecessary they were to begin with. It started with quitting Facebook back in February. After going through a short withdrawal, I deeply appreciated the "silence" that came from not knowing every single thing about every single "friend" I had on there. These days, not having Facebook is just a minor inconvenience: sometimes I don'…
I have an iPhone and sometimes just keep it on airplane mode all day to get research done. This is a bad solution for people who really need to contact me though.