How long does it take to form a habit? PsyBlog summarizes a paper (sadly behind a paywall) that researches habit formation. In short, it depends on how simple the habit is and your own personality. While some tasks became habitual after three weeks, others took months. Notably, some people seemed resistant to habit formation, taking significantly longer to form habits.
I can only aspire to shooting and editing something this good.
Another Cloud Reel… from Delrious on Vimeo.
Footage shot over the summer of 2009 mostly in the San Francisco bay area.
A whimsical visualization of insomnia.
Sleep Agony vs Sleep Bliss
Then: The Gospel of Matthew
Now: 40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss
More then and now book titles at kottke, some good stuff. Originally from your monkey called via waxy. Do you have any good ones?
How about:
Then: The Book of Jonah
Now: Prophecy, Pity, and Survival via Passive Aggression
Go read this. I don’t want to spoil it with a teaser but here’s a little bit to maybe spark your interest.
What sounded like a steel cyclone hurtling from the sky toward my bow. It was a hideous, ungodly, and inevitable caterwaul. Like all hell falling at once and nowhere to turn. Nowhere to go. Except the one heading every captain prays his boat never takes: down. I looked up, saw the blur of the cow catcher, then everything changed.
The story of 6 year old Jani Schofield’s fight with schizophrenia is profoundly troubling:
A new imaginary friend named 400-the-Cat moved in. He told her to kick and hit other people. “We realized she didn’t control her imaginary friends. They controlled her,” Michael says. Many phantoms populated her mind now: two little girls named 100 Degrees and 24 Hours; 200-the-Rat; Magical 61-the-Cat; and 400.
Her father’s blog is also difficult to read.
Metafilter poster Drastic’s description of the situation as a fractal heartache is indeed apt:
The entire story’s a kind of godawful fractal heartbreak–no matter how you zoom into it, every piece contains just as much heartbreak as a wider view.
Cone Monster
Joseph Carnevale snagged a few traffic cones and constructed this masterpiece which he then returned to the construction site. Unfortunately the police didn’t quite appreciate the work and arrested him.
A fascinating essay by Lera Boroditsky that explores how language shapes the way we think.
Mandarin speakers talk about time vertically more often than English speakers do, so do Mandarin speakers think about time vertically more often than English speakers do? Imagine this simple experiment. I stand next to you, point to a spot in space directly in front of you, and tell you, “This spot, here, is today. Where would you put yesterday? And where would you put tomorrow?” When English speakers are asked to do this, they nearly always point horizontally. But Mandarin speakers often point vertically, about seven or eight times more often than do English speakers.
Look at some famous examples of personification in art — the ways in which abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time are given human form. How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist’s native language.
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