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Thursday, February 24, 2005 |
 Joe Reager has some thoughts on the perception of time. Robert C uses habits as a memnonic technique:
There is another solution, too: writing notes or its equivalent. For example, I recently started to forget whether I had already washed my hair while taking my morning shower. I tend to think about other things during the process. So I have taken to moving my shampoo bottle before showering in the morning, and putting it back differently after washing my hair.. Put another way, I use an external marker as a memory. It works.
2:49:01 PM 
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AT's Syed Shahzad on the Pakistani perspective on the GWOT and al Qaeda. "Three years of active participation in the war on terror have got me to the realization that we only searched out and cut branches, only for them to be replaced with new ones, and this goes on and on. Now we enter a phase when we are standing in the complete dark with no mark of the enemy, yet he is around and is ready to strike at his time of choice, when, where and how nobody knows," said a senior field official involved in intelligence analysis. My take: A critical part of this conversion towards decentralized operations will be a shift to systems disruption. It will enable small and relatively isolated groups to achieve substantial results with high success rates despite limited support.
12:20:22 PM
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Multipolar vs. Unipolar conflict. One problem with the growing rift between Russia and the US: they have frozen US firms/interests out of its energy industry (Russia is the world's #1 energy producer).
12:10:23 PM
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WSJ. For all the attention to Iran's nuclear capability, officials say its conventional-weapons program is just as significant a concern when it comes to preserving the regional balance of power and protecting U.S. troops. Law-enforcement and intelligence officials say Iran's appetite for U.S. military technology has increased in part because of the recent explosion in technologies such as global positioning systems and partly due to the edge its products give U.S. forces in conventional warfare. Officials fear such technology could be given to terrorists or used by Iran's own military. "Imagine what the recent fighting in Fallujah [Iraq] might have been like if Iraqi insurgents had the same caliber night-vision goggles as our own troops," says Dean Boyd, a spokesman for Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, or ICE, the lead federal agency investigating arms-smuggling cases.
12:08:39 PM
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Most people perceive time moving faster as they get older. Time perception has everything to do with habit accumulation. Want to slow time? Change or think through all your daily habits (mind and body). You would be surprised at how excruciating slow the day seems.
11:54:28 AM
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WP. This is huge and it will eventually go through. The Pentagon is promoting a global counterterrorism plan that would allow Special Operations forces to enter a foreign country to conduct military operations without explicit concurrence from the U.S. ambassador there, administration officials familiar with the plan said.
9:50:31 AM
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I have always been obsessed with the topic of habits. It's probably because I was a pilot. Much of my effort to be a great pilot was spent developing good habits. Habits that kept me safe. For example: a method of checking tires for damage during a pre-flight walk-around. Pilot training is often just a transfer of good habits.
As you get older, you collect habits. In fact, habit creep can eventually take over most of your life. A collection of good habits can define a successful life, a collection of bad habits can sink you.
Breaking habits can be liberating. An anti-zen move where the somnambalist awakes. Good vacations are really just a break from the tyranny of deeply ingrained habits.
Most self-help programs are merely an attempt to change some habits of thinking. However, habit management (top to bottom) and training still is mostly an ad hoc activity. There probably is a niche consulting gig for people that could shadow you over the course of a day to analyze your string of habits and suggest improvements. I suspect that many people would gain substantially from habit training on computer use alone.
Anyway, here are my morning coffee notes on the subject.
8:55:03 AM
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© Copyright 2005 John Robb.
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