Monkey See, Monkey Do

h.e. tai situ rinpoche would like to pass on this sweet (and wonderfully cheeseball) spiritual message for you today:

today i made a small edit to a wikipedia page. it’s become a hobby that i’m enjoying, and feels like my contributions will benefit many over a long time. a very simple way to spend 20 minutes now and then and add lasting value to the world.

but it brings people together that would otherwise be so far apart. the article i helped today was about a piece of historical trivia about world war 2, just added today. i noticed it in the recent changes summary, and found a small formatting error as well as an improper citation. so i removed the citation; left a super nice note on the article’s discussion page about it; and thanked the person for adding a piece of history to the wikipedia.

then i looked at the user’s profile, and found that he or she purports to be a card carrying nazi and also believes that war is better than peace. this person might be as far apart politically and philosophically as one could get from me, and yet here is a forum where we actually worked together. it’s a small, minor kind of collaboration. but how amazing is that, we could unexpectedly work together?! what is this world coming to? <grin>

tomorrow i’m running a series of user tests with low fidelity prototypes. i’m increasingly appreciating that low fidelity actually encourages participatory design with your customers. if your mockups are high fidelity, then test subjects are going to relate to it increasingly like it’s set in stone and they have to succeed or not succeed. but a few buttons on the page made of post-it notes - and encouraging them to move things around to where they would expect them - will encourage customers to get involved in the design process with you and tell you more about how they would really like the product to behave.

of course take ideas with grains of salt. but it can be hard sometimes to get people to really open up in a short user test. and i’m increasingly appreciating anything that encourages that openness.

core77 posted an interesting comparison between design methods yesterday, worth a gander.

cal newport at mit posted [1] a good comparison of david allen’s getting things done versus his notes on high accomplishment.

i think allen’s system includes the idea of noting completion criterion for each project and being clear about how to complete something. that was my take away at least. but i appreciated his note about productive people having a near obsessive interest in finishing projects that they start and not getting so distracted by other projects or ongoing work beyond completion criterion.

so i was watching wikipedia vision, a mostly useless but entertaining glimpse at edits to wikipedia real-time, when i saw some racist vandalism occur to the online encyclopedia. someone in england posted a comment about a neighborhood in london being downtrodden by youths of a particular ethnic group selling drugs. so i clicked quickly on the page, and began the process of undo-ing the change. but someone beat me to it! the racist edit was removed by someone else just 7 seconds after it had been entered into the encyclopedia. my 30 seconds was just too slow. amazingly fast!

also, wikipedia is problematic.

i love this trungpa rinpoche quote:

How on earth, how in the name of heaven and earth can we actually become decent human beings without trying to entertain ourselves from here to the next corner?…It boils down to taking interest in what you see. I have a very frustrated feeling, actually, that when I talk about appreciating red, white, blue, and green, I’m not sure whether you actually appreciate those colors or not. Maybe you think I’m trying to tell you that you should be artists or something. And when I say that you should listen to the sounds that go on in the world, maybe you think I’m trying to tell you to be musicians. And when I talk about the textures of your body — sense perceptions and feelings — maybe you think I’m trying to tell you to become salesmen in the garment industry. I’m beginning to wonder.

We are not talking about becoming experts in marketing things, but we are talking about our own situation: how we can actually stop habitual patterns and appreciate the nitty-gritty of the real world on the spot. We can appreciate the bright, beautiful, fantastic world around us; we don’t have to feel all that resentful….Once we put a stop to habitual patterns, the vividness, the magic, will begin to descend, and we will begin to become masters of our world — individually, personally, of course. We will begin to appreciate our world.

-From “Overcoming Habitual Patterns,” in Collected Kalapa Assemblies, pages 266 to 267.

i think there’s a difference between ‘wanting’ something and ‘appreciating’ something that’s pretty key. we could appreciate having a nice car, or a nice house, or a nice well-fit suit. and that appreciation is just appreciation of richness, of contentment. but if we want those same things, to feel like we need to have those things to be happy, then instead of richness we’re feeling a form of perpetual poverty. we don’t feel good enough without them. we’re really selling ourselves short, and forgetting a kind of dignity that is always really available to us. that we *are* good enough and have tremendous richness already…

note: i never would have thought to post this quote because it’s from a restricted text. the kalapa assembly transcripts are restricted for folks who had completed our buddhist seminary program and a few other retreats and therefore presumably understand prerequisite concepts and language. so they aren’t restricted in the sense that they say controversial things, just that they might be misunderstood without the preliminary study. but this quote stands alone just fine and was sent out to a public email list, so i think it’s safe to comment on here.

today while talking to friend john over lunch, i decided that web 3.0 is really about embedding content and features into other people’s web sites, not about semantic data and turning the web into a database. folks have been suggesting the database model is the next thing, but i’ve been dubious.

semantic data and api’s are fine and good, but i just don’t see it driving new and interesting things that much: too complex; too abstract; not literal enough and literal approaches are necessary for the mass market. abstract approaches are for technologists. the mass market is about entertainment and communication.

but look at youtube’s embedded videos and facebook applets. those are driving new usage models and creating tremendous value. the ‘embed’ tag is really the defining moment of web 3.0, and i think we’ll see more and more widgets as products. for example, the new company gydget adds fan information to your personal web page and valuable info about the band at the same time. it’s both a statement of identity and useful.

perhaps we’re somewhat saying the same thing, widgets really are lighter weight applications that rely on a semantic connection to a back end to operate, instead of serving the entire site. so they require more of a semantic architecture behind them. still, i think it’s the form factor that will define things. small widgets on phones, on web pages, on your desktop that get fed data from services. something like that. it’s about embedding things.

another example: linkedinabox makes a flash widget for your personal page with details from the linkedin networking site.

blood flow may directly impact cognitive function in the brain.

i love how we’re finding that the brain is really more complex than simply a neural network, that it’s deeply interconnected with the whole organism (with the environment even). therefore, consciousness would not really be a cartesian split as descarte framed things.

though i appreciate one kind of split: the idea that mind is not ‘me’ entirely: that i can experience the process of ‘mind’ in my self awareness, and that the experience of mind (ie. thoughts and emotions) can be like just other phenomenon and i can be curious about it and learn about it neutrally.

Perry Garfinkel describes his experience meditating at aushwitz in the huffington post today. also an amazing story.

I had joined the Peacemaker Institute’s Bearing Witness Retreat, a five-day session held at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camps, now a memorial museum, as a way to gain a deeper understanding of suffering and one’s own reaction to it…

We walked the grounds, sat in barracks, sat on the tracks, and had evening discussions in order to try to synthesize the intense emotions that inevitably arise. My worst nightmare was that just seeing the wooden watch towers, the barbed wire fences and the sadly iconic brick gateway through which trainloads of doomed prisoners passed would cause me unbearable suffering. I feared sitting cross-legged on those infamous tracks, silently meditating in the Soto Zen tradition in bitter cold winds slapping my face under a monotonic gray sky… The nightmare was realized. And then some.

his holiness the dalai lama has an article in the washington post today. it’s really quite good. it also speaks to our cultural bias for freedom quite well.

If religious practitioners can heed this scientist’s advice and refrain from being attached to their own faith traditions, it could prevent the growth of fundamentalism. It also could enable such followers to genuinely respect faith traditions other than their own. …
I do not mean to suggest that religion is indispensable to a sound ethical way of life, or for that matter to genuine happiness. In the end, whether one is a believer or a nonbeliever, what matters is that one be a good, kind and warmhearted person. A deep sense of caring for others, based on a profound sense of interconnection, is the essence of the teachings of all great religions of the world.