Grayclaves and Henry the Lion

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.

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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.

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)