The Inflation Tsunami

It's in America's best interests for the dollar to depreciate. It will stimulate trade and demand for American goods. Don't be surprised if in a year or two the dollar to euro conversion rate is 2:1.

Blinkx video wall

For Mr Show:

We Live in Public

"at first everybody's gonna like it... but then... the big brother aspects of the internet are going to become insidious to the point of madness..."
--Josh Harris, internet pioneer

SFW trailer (some nudity):


NSFW extended trailer (nudity, sex):

We live in public trailer from RADAR on Vimeo.

Simple Rules for E-mail

The NY Times has a popular article explaining how to organize your inbox. I've also adapted David Alan's "Getting Things Done" to manage my inbox, and the techniques are easily applied to Gmail. Here are some of my time savers:

Filter your mail
I have a bunch of labels to sort various reference-related e-mails. Newsletters, product information, and e-mail flyers from stores automatically go into a "News" label. When I have time to read them, I search through this label. I also have separate "Notifications" and "Facebook" labels to flag e-mails that come in to let me know that Netflix has received my DVD or a friend has commented on my Facebook page. These could also go under the "News" label if you don't want to call them out separately.

Create action labels
I have four action labels: "_Resources", "_Someday/Maybe", "_To Do", and "_Waiting", for sending items that I have to deal with later, or want to keep on hand. The underscores at the beginning of each is to keep them at the top of Gmail's list of labels. Resources are e-mails sent from friends about helpful sites, or attachments with pictures from family, and other items that I may need to reference later. Someday/Maybe is for e-mails I'd like to get to eventually, usually for things that I'd like to do, not responses. I clean these out once every few months. To Do and Waiting are used daily. To Do includes any e-mails I need to respond to or take action on. For example, someone invites me to a party and I RSVP. To remind myself, I label this To Do until the party is over. Then I unflag it. Likewise with Waiting-- if I forward an e-mail to someone and I need a response, I flag it Waiting and check on it later to make sure I received a response. This method has improved my productivity considerably without the stress of having 50 million uncategorized e-mails sitting in my Inbox.

Empty your Inbox
I also archive old mail. Gmail makes this easy with one button. You can always search old e-mail to reminisce about those old conversations, or find something you need. I definately don't spend any time categorizing mail by date or sender, as Gmail makes it easy to search under these parameters. I make it a goal to keep my inbox empty, so that any new mail I receive either needs a response and a label, or to be archived.

The key is to keep things simple, but not too simple. If you open and read an e-mail, you shouldn't have to open and read it again to figure out what to do with it. Use labels to jog your memory about what had to be done, and put the stress of managing your life onto the computer, so you can enjoy your life.

Source:
1. Basics: An Empty In-Box, or With Just a Few E-Mail Messages? Read On, FARHAD MANJOO, March 4, 2009.

4100 bottom

The Dow has fallen 1632 points since I predicted the bottom, so I'm going to make another prediction-- we will hit the resistance seen in January 1995-- around 4100, before this market turns back up. Now we all know that good technical analysts watch the S&P, so I'll wager that the S&P will hit 500 before this is all over. That was the plateau in 1995. I believe it will take at least 4 years to get back to Dow 10,000. Hopefully by 2012 we'll be in the midst of a solar energy bubble, bolstered by healthcare and education spending.

EGGs

For years now I've been obsessed with the noosphere, or the EGG project, which is now called the Global Consciousness Project. It's a set of random number generators (called "eggs") distributed throughout the world that basically flip a coin 200 times a second. Statistically, the probability works out to 50/50, but sometimes, these eggs have shown that large scale world events, both positive and negative, have influenced the numbers. The scientists conducting the study hypothesize that this can prove that we are all connected to a larger global consciousness, that attention influences reality, or that future events can be predicted.

Here's an NBC News video that explains it in video:


Plus, it's very meditative to listen to the heartbeat of the eggs in the Realtime Display.

Deadmau5