G.I. Joe: The Movie Blu-ray offers solid video and decent audio in this overall recommended Blu-ray release A 40,000-year-old race of snake people resurface, and with. TV Theme music and songs from 31,301 different television shows. Listen to them all in MP3 format. Joe Kraus Blog. A few weeks ago I gave this rough presentation on a topic called “Slow. Tech”. I wanted to cover three things. We are creating and encouraging a culture of distraction where we are increasingly disconnected from the people and events around us and increasingly unable to engage in long- form thinking. People now feel anxious when their brains are unstimulated. We are losing some very important things by doing this. We threaten the key ingredients behind creativity and insight by filling up all our “gap” time with stimulation. And we inhibit real human connection when we prioritize our phones over our the people right in front of us. What can we do about it? Is this path inevitable or can balance be restored? I’ve pasted the text of the speech below (sorry, it’s a bit rough). Alternatively, you can watch the video someone shot of it. Remarks for Slow. Tech talk – CONSTANT CULTURE OF DISTRACTIONI want to start with some imagery of the way we live today. See you if you see yourself in this. SHOW VIDEOI want to talk three things tonight. As a culture, we’ve got a crisis of attention. We’re becoming a distracted culture… one that is disconnected from one another. ![]()
And I want to talk about what’s causing it. What are we losing – of ourselves, of our relationships to one another, of what in many ways, I would say, our humanity. What can we do about it. If we all feel it, is there anything we can do to stop it. Or, is it out of our control. Part 1. A crisis of attention. I want to ask people a simple question: are you happy with your relationship with your phone. Do you think it’s a healthy one? I don’t think I have a healthy relationship with mine. I feel a constant need to pull it out – to check email, to text, to see if there is something interesting happening RIGHT NOW. It’s constantly pulling on my attention. Do you do this? I do. If I let it, it easily fills up those gaps in my day—some gaps of boredom, some of solitude. Look at how internet access has changed since smart phones came into being (and this data is a year old, so I’m certain it’s even more in this direction). In the pre- smartphone era we accessed the internet roughly five times per day, in longer chunks. Today, with smartphones, we’re accessing it 2. The effect of all of this is that we’re increasingly distracted. Less and less able to pay attention to anything for what used to be reasonable length of times. The funny part about distraction is that it’s a worsening condition. The more distracted we are, the more likely we are to get distracted. Some people call switching our attention between things that vie for it “multi- tasking”. Like were a computer with dual cores running two simultaneous processes. Except that we’re not. Numerous brain imaging studies have shown that what we call “multi- tasking” in humans, is not multi- tasking at all. Your brain is merely trying to rapidly switch it’s attention between two tasks. Back and forth, as quickly as it can. It’s shown not only that we’re dumber when we do this (an average of 1. IQ points dumber – that’s the same as pulling an all- nighter.), but that we’re also 4. But, my favorite part about multi- tasking is that it’s proven that the more you do it, the worse you are at it. Check that out. It’s one of the only things where the more you practice it, the worse you get at it. The reason why that’s the case is that when you practice distraction (which is what multi- tasking really is – paying attention to something that distracted you from what you were originally paying attention to), you’re training your brain. You’re training your brain to pay attention to distracting things. The more you train your brain to pay attention to distractions, the more you get distracted and the less able you are to even focus for brief periods of time on the two or three things you were trying to get done in your ‘multi- tasking’ in the first place. How’s that for self- defeating. So, what have I said so far? So, why can’t we look away? Why do most all of us seem to fall prey to these devices even as we know they’re causing a real problem for us? Two reasons, I think. The first is that we’re perfectly mal- adapted, biologically speaking, to these devices. When our ancestors, the Geico guys, were sitting out on the savanna and the tree next to them rustled. The ones that didn’t look over and see the lion coming to eat them are NOT our ancestors. The ones that did look, only to see it was a harmless bird, are. We’re wired to pay attention to new stimulation. The second reason is something casinos have known for a long time. To illustrate, let me ask you if you know what the most profitable part of a casino gaming floor is? Slot machines. Slot machines are extremely powerful earners because they employ a principle called “random payout”. Turns out if you pull a handle and it pays out predictably, you very quickly figure it out and stop pulling. But, make the reward random and people have a very hard time stopping. Some pulls are nothing, some pulls give you a little, and occasionally, you get a jackpot. Think about text messages or email alerts from your phone in this context. Some aren’t important. Some are. And occasionally, something very urgent comes in. The amazing part to me is that we all look around at each other and see ourselves, as adults, failing and then we give these devices to kids and expect them to do better. Well, they don’t. In fact, as parents of teenagers know, they fare far worse…Do you know what the average # of text messages a 1. The Average? 4. 00. That’s one every six minutes that she’s awake. Boys aren’t much better at 3. Think about that. You’re interrupted once every 7 minutes. What kind of culture is that creating? What kind of mind training is that doing? I’d argue that what’s happening is that we’re becoming like the mal- formed weight lifter who trains only their upper body and has tiny little legs. We’re radically over- developing the parts of quick thinking, distractable brain and letting the long- form- thinking, creative, contemplative, solitude- seeking, thought- consolidating pieces of our brain atrophy by not using them. And, to me, that’s both sad and dangerous. Part II – What are we losing as a result of our short attention span and easy distractability? My favorite summary line on this whole topic comes from Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who studies technology and society. “We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. We expect more from technology and less from each other”. At the most basic level, we’re losing manners. At the heart of manners is a consideration of others. An acknowledgement of each other. How many times, guys, have you been barked at by your wife because instead of giving full attention to what she was saying, you were looking at your phone. What’s the message that’s getting sent? There is something more important than you and it’s not here in this room.”The second thing I think we’re losing is creativity and insight. Think about your own examples when you felt at your most creative or your best performance. Maybe it was your best round of golf, maybe it was solving a tricky computer science problem. Whatever it was, likely, you were LOST IN THE MOMENT, completely absorbed in what you were doing. It was long- form, not quick twitch. You were in the zone. Your attention was fixed, calm, present. Once people experience the zone, most of us want to get back there. It’s a feeling of peek performance, peek creativity, peek aliveness. Where’s the #1 reported place where people get insight? The shower. Why the shower? In the shower, there’s not much else to do. We’re relaxed. Our mind wanders but it’s not constantly being bombarded with new information (at least until we can take our phones in the shower which I’m sure is being worked on…). The shower time is GAP time. Time for our minds to make subtle connections and insights. Creativity REQUIRES gap time. Gaps used to happen all the time. Now they’re disappearing. You’re eating lunch with a friend and they excuse themselves to the restroom. A gap. Now, you pull our your phone because being unstimulated makes you feel anxious. Waiting time in a line at the bank? Used to be a gap. Now it’s an opportunity to send an email or a text. We didn’t think gap time and “boredom” were valuable. Now that we’re losing it, we get a sense of just how valuable it was. Simply put, at the heart of creativity, insight, imagination and humaneness is an ability to pay attention to ANYTHING – our ideas, our line of thinking, each other. And that is what’s most threatened. So, hopefully, by this point I’ve convinced you of a few thingswe’ve got a crisis of attention, mostly caused by these devices which are with us everywhere and it’s going to get worse unless we become conscious about itthere are real costs to allowing our attention and consciousness to be constantly fragmented – costs to our relationships and costs to society and creativity. Part III – what can we do. It would be so nice if I could just say that the solution is to stop using your devices. But that’s got two problems these devices do have real value – they put information at our fingertips that no one could have ever dreamed of even 3. Make your chest and back scrawny so that it’s in balance with your legs…No, I think the solution is to balance the DISTRACTING brain training you’re doing every single day with training that strengthens long- form ATTENTION. We want to OVERCOME OUR FEAR OF BOREDOM, OUR ANXIETY OF BEING UNSTIMULATED recognize the value of gap time and not have anxiety about it. In the workout analogy, we don’t want to stop working out our upper body, we want to start working out our legs. So how might we do those things? One step, I think, is to take a weekly holiday from your devices. Take a break from distraction. I’ve started it. From sunup Sunday to when I put the kids to bed I do no phone, no email, no TV, no radio. Books are fine, but not on my kindle. Martin Shkreli Says He'll Still Make Money From Jail, Will Read Philosophy. Talking to Martin Shkreli is neither easy nor enjoyable. The “pharma bro,” who once jacked up the price of a life- saving drug from $1. But I managed to get a few questions answered over email during the past week. And now that Shkreli has been sent to jail, it feels like a good time to share what I learned. I reached out to Martin Shkreli when he first published his now infamous Facebook post asking for some of Hillary Clinton’s hair. It was this post, which he later labeled a “prank,” that got his bail revoked by the judge. And it’s the reason he’ll sit in jail until his sentencing in January of 2. I asked Shkreli what he wanted to do with the hair and whether he considered this to be assault. Shrkeli responded with irrelevant references to Peter Thiel, the man who bankrupted Gizmodo’s former parent company, and then told me over and over that he wanted my wife’s phone number, saying that I couldn’t “provide for her.”“I NEED THAT FUCKING HAIR. ALSO SPIT ILL TAKE SOME SPIT,” Shkreli wrote to me on September 5th about Hillary Clinton, without answering the question of what he wants it for. I pressed him in a follow- up. Shkreli’s response: killary clinton is the greatest threat to national security. I ignored his trolling and finally started to get some insights into why he was so reckless while awaiting sentencing. He truly didn’t believe that he was going to be sent to prison.“I believe there will be no sentence of imprisonment. Please read the USSG and learn something about the law,” Shkreli wrote to me after I asked if he thought his bounty for Clinton’s hair would come up during sentencing. The USSG he was referring to is the United States Sentencing Commission Guidelines. I replied by asking if his sentencing date had been set yet. Shkreli’s response: no. LMAOalso are you in antifa? I ignored his trolling and asked, “Have people told you what prison is like? Have you consulted with anyone on how to operate once inside?”Shkreli’s response: of course! I pressed Shkreli on what he meant by life being nirvana under Trump. He replied that “trump is #1 A1 best president ever” and finally seemed to loosen up and said that if he really is sentenced “it will be a good opportunity to read and reflect and also i can make paper from inside.” But, of course, his email ended with his signature style: “NOW SET ME UP WITH DAT WIFE OF URS.”“Making paper” presumably means that he’d be making money, not a DIY papyrus- production class in prison, though I didn’t ask him to clarify. You never know. I responded by simply asking “What do you plan to read in prison?”Shkreli’s response: I think you are, once again, mistaken. You assert a proposition which isn’t certain. Please think and rephrase. After playing childish games about rephrasing the question, I pressed him for a “top five” books he’d want to read in jail, and Shkreli finally answered. Sort of. Shkreli’s response: i would mostly read business reports from my companies and technical materials (medicine, computer science)i read a lot so i’m not sure ‘top 5' works. I then asked about the Wu Tang Clan album he had purchased for $2 million and was trying to sell on e. Bay. I asked whether he’d be able to bring it into prison if he hadn’t sold it yet. I also asked if he had a plan for acquiring various forms of entertainment like music and books once he was on the inside. Shkreli replied that I should “get a grip on your liberal rage and educate yourself” and our back and forth pretty much devolved into him repeatedly insulting me and then me asking him whether he’d read anything from notorious conman and motivational speaker Napoleon Hill. By the end of the day Friday, Shkreli was clearly in deep shit over his Facebook post about Hillary Clinton. The Secret Service had wasted resources looking into his $5,0. And that’s when Shkreli stopped replying to my emails. My last email to him was yesterday, before news broke that he’d been sent to jail.“Martin, How you feeling today? Still pretty confident you’re going to stay out of prison? Do you have that list of five books yet?” I asked. Shkreli didn’t respond. I never did get to ask whether he’d be able to check email from jail. Martin, if you’re reading this, I’d still like to see that list. And if you need book recommendations, Gizmodo readers can probably help you out. Just drop us a line. From jail. The place you swore you wouldn’t need to visit. Sheet music tags | Sheethost.
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