Patrick Roberts

Flying

Emerson

"Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration had broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned tomorrow; there is not a literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned... The things which are dear to men at this hour are so on account of the ideas which emerged on their mental horizon, and which cause the present order of things, as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits."

A Gallery of Living Code

I'm enjoying Make TV's bias for steampunk. In the 19th century, the intelligence in a design had a physical representation. Shining metal pushing metal. It was beautiful and you could see it. Since the integrated circuit, a design is microscopic or invisible. Even the source code of software's too opaque: the connections are implied by shared words. Code is the most tractable medium, so our most complicated machines will be programs. But we can't enjoy the purposeful complexity of our greatest works. Imagine a program that transforms any program's movements into a visual mechanical analogy.

The Aphoristic Genre

Nietzsche, Rochefoucauld, Aurelius - who writes books of aphorisms now? No one very successfully. With our patience cut by electronic media, I'm betting on a return of the aphoristic genre. Expect my own book of aphorisms, maxims, epigrams, proverbs, parables and koans, culled from this blog and my private notes, once I'm wiser from Cor and other experiments.

How to Feel Superior to a Dead Genius

Search his ideas for one that your society's elite ostensibly judges false. You gain extra status if the media now regularly associates belief in the idea with lower class. Since today's definers of good, evil, true, false, must be right, and since you of course agree with them, then logically you must be wiser than a famous genius. Now you can skip all those other challenging ideas of his, since they're no doubt wrong too. It helps if you can ignore that the use of a genius is to discover new thoughts, especially when exclusive with any now held.

Drafting a Book Online

I'm moving the draft of my book to the Cor blog, posting each chapter as a blog page. Maybe this will flick that hidden unconscious switch, the one that decides whether I'm filled with energy and poetry. The book as web pages, not printed copies, not a PDF, is the form most will read it in, so it's right to make it the primary point of truth. I heard a hundred times to release early, release often but I somehow didn't imagine keeping the book, while writing it, online.

Ignoring TypePad's glacial text editor, using a blog's convenient enough: comments, slick template, and little HTML. Still, does anyone know of a web service, even paid, that will host my book at a sub-domain of mine? It could automatically build a table of contents, add navigation between the chapters, have a search form optimized for a book, keep a revision history like a wiki, and support customizing the look.

Energy Sources

Nietzsche wrote the first part of Zarathustra in 10 days. Largely his usual ideas in new form - still amazing.

How to match that every month?

Novelty - When you lose energy, change how you're working.

Physical - Code that runs, a printed book in hand.

Public - Humans are so social, they even die for each other. Exploit that: put something out in public, even if only technically, so fear of embarrassment, that someone, even a stranger, will see your dull prose or ugly program. There's also then a chance of someone enjoying your work and letting you know what's really wrong with it, if anything, which is the only test, not the bottomless list of flaws you imagine.

Routine - The mind is associative, so bind work with time, place, tool.

Envy - I recall reading that the ancient Greeks judged envy good. They must have expected the jealous to exceed the envied, not pull them down. Not the most pleasant way to push myself.

Once a worthy goal is well defined, energy, not method, becomes top rank. Without energy, methods won't even get tested. Nothing's less efficient than doing nothing.

On Closer Inspection

Realization: I'm not lazy. Proof: On many projects, say this blog, I'll work till my eyes ache. Why do other projects - I have my book in mind - not attract the same energy? That's the useful question. Maybe I better break that work into vivid and satisfying steps. Maybe the more familiar work is easier because I unconsciously learned to break that work, but only that work, into the right size. For the book, could a step typically be a paragraph?

Social Bookshelves

I heard of GoodReads from Felicia Day and then found Shelfari and LibraryThing. They all let you publicly list the books you read, are reading, or will read, and see the same of other users and groups. I think this is my point of diminishing returns from social web-services, but one of these might just be worthwhile for marketing my book.

From the cute book widget on the right, you can tell I chose Shelfari. You might think that the designers of sites for literati could, excepting GoodReads, coin names that don't cause blood to drip from my ears. LibraryThing has a one time fee. It's small, but I just can't bring myself to pay money for the meager privilege of them keeping a list of a few hundred books. GoodReads seemed fine. I just disliked their widget. Shelfari's owned by Amazon, so at least it won't disappear, and frankly I like cold faceless corporations.

Public Works

Slick blog, professional photo, give city, Flickr photos, Twitter micro-blogging, Delicious bookmarks, YouTube videos - my experiment in working publicly. The downside: time spent separating what should stay private. The upside to others: they can enjoy and benefit from my thoughts, solutions, photos, links and videos. The upside to me: some of that attention is occasionally, and maybe someday very, useful to me. Another advantage: all these polished cooperating services, available on all my devices.

Working publicly also builds my habit of finishing work, especially writing, even if only a sentence, and quickly putting it where others at least have a chance of seeing it. Real artists ship.

What next? A wiki.

A Science of Genius

A book I want, one that scientifically identifies the physical and chemical conditions of genius, or of productivity generally. How to sleep (if you delay it, how to avoid illness), fresh air, humidity, diet (fast? protein? vitamins?), sun exposure, exercise (aerobic or anaerobic). Not just tips on planning and prioritizing or avoiding procrastination and distraction. Varying with the kind of work: the philosopher might need isolation, the artist, a busy city.