I read two articles on a similar theme this morning. Firstly there was Scott Adams' post Startup Country, about creating a small, elite, light-weight country inside another country and using it to bootstrap the economy of the larger country. Secondly I read The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ending Poverty, published by The Atlantic. This article actually talks about Paul Romer's ideas on "Charter Cities" - a city governed by it's own charter, rather than national laws. According to The Atlantic, this idea goes back to the 12th century with Heny the Lion and the idea of Imperial Free Cities.
The Future is Addictive
I read Paul Graham's essay on the acceleration of addictiveness this morning, and it really struck a chord. I feel as though it is almost impossible to become bored these days, there is so much to do. Is this because the world is getting more addictive, or just because I have gotten older and have much more control over my life so I tend to do only those things I want to do?
Procrastination Modeling
For the last few months I've been trying to come up with a model for procrastination. Specifically; for the various factors that cause me to delay carrying out a task. Over the weekend I was pondering what I would use the model for. If I came up with an equation which effectively represented the various parameters describing how much I would procrastinate over a given task, what use would it be?
Well, my thinking is that if I have an accurate model of what causes me to procrastinate over tasks, I can then start targeting the various factors. I can create strategies to reduce the impact of different factors, and hopefully improve my own effectiveness. It will also be interesting to see if - by the very act of studying my behaviour - I reduce the amount I procrastinate.
Blogging as Gardening
You know; blogging is a lot like gardening. Some peoples' blogs have been completely neglected - untended and overgrown with weeds. Mine has become a lot like that. An out-of-date Wordpress environment, stale posts overcome with comment spam weeds.
Emacs cmd-key on Mac
Emacs on my Macbook Pro uses the "alt" key (the one to the left of the "cmd" key) to be the Alt (meta) key when doing things like Alt-Backspace to delete backwards by word. This is quite annoying for me as I naturally try and use the command key for this. To fix this put the following in your .emacs file.
(setq mac-command-modifier 'meta)