Friday fun ..

Loved this story about Edgar Mueller's 3D art on the NineMSN website this afternoon.His drawings look so real. There are more photos here.

Panic-book

Here's a great piece about the hysteria around facebook and social-networking sites. [Mark Vernon, The Guardian].

 "So, as long as people seek to live, not merely log-on, the panic over social networking sites would seem to be just that, a panic."

Update: Here's a link to a BBC article on the risks of being online.

And another one, about politicians and Facebook. [also from the Guardian, UK]. I do wonder how many of our MP's are online...

"Most MPs don't seem to want connectivity with their electorate, avoiding useful channels such as Facebook, or even email."

"I give up on the movies.. I'd much rather TV"

Zoe Williams [from The Guardian] wrote an interesting piece on why she is giving up on movies because even
"a half-hour episode of The Simpson's has more reference, emotional complexity and political texture than probably the last decade of Eastwood's career. Nobody needs a lecture on how good The Wire is, or how hard you have to concentrate to watch The West Wing". Not only that but "even the worst of big-hitting US telly - Brothers and Sisters, Desperate Housewives, Sex and the City - has a maturity, a degree of courage, an iconoclasm, that equivalently mainstream [American] cinema would balk at."

I thought that this was an interesting point, I have felt that some TV shows often deal with issues more deeply and effectively than movies. For example I found The X Files and Simpsons' episodes on TV were richer and tighter than the movies.

Lists...

For some strange reason I've always liked listing things.. and courtesy of NPR here are 10 possible reasons why:

1. Lists bring order to chaos. "People are attracted to lists because we live in an era of overstimulation, especially in terms of information," says David Wallechinsky, a co-author of the fabulous Book of Lists, first published in 1977 and followed by subsequent editions. "And lists help us in organizing what is otherwise overwhelming."


2. Lists help us remember things — at the hardware store, for the vacation trip, Christmas presents. The One Planet Education Network, or OPEN, is a global online education content provider that counts Harvard and Columbia universities as clients. OPEN also swears by lists. "Checklists help you remember what you have done and what you have to do," the curriculum reminds the students.

3. Most lists are finite. They don't usually go on and on. And if they do, you can skip to the bottom of the list. The Internet Movie Database, for instance, lists its "bottom 100 movies as voted by users." The winner — er, loser — is Zaat, a 1975 sci-fi fiasco.

4. Lists can be meaningful. The Steven Spielberg classic Schindler's List is based on the true story of a German businessman who used a list of names to save more than 1,000 Jews from the concentration camps. It is ranked eighth on the American Film Institute's 2007 list of 100 top American films of the past 100 years.

5. Lists can be as long or as short as necessary. Jamie Frater, a New Zealand opera singer, maintains a list-keeping site called The List Universe. Recent posts include "20 Great Quotes from Ronald Reagan" and "Top 10 Codes You Aren't Meant to Know." A list, Frater says, should be "as long as is necessary. Some lists need be only a few lines an item, others a few paragraphs. I seldom write more than one
paragraph, but occasionally the need arises to do so." Frater adds, "This question is a bit like asking an artist: 'When is the painting finished?' It is when it is."

6. Making lists can help make you famous. Notable list makers include Thomas Jefferson, Peter Mark Roget, Martha Stewart and Benjamin Franklin. "A methodical and wry man," wrote Franklin biographer Walter Isaacson in Time magazine, "Franklin loved making lists. He made lists of rules for his tradesmen's club, of synonyms for being drunk, of maxims for matrimonial happiness and of reasons to choose an older woman as a mistress. Most famously, as a young man, he made a list of
personal virtues that he determined should define his life."


7. The word "list" can be tracked back to William Shakespeare, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In Hamlet, the Bard refers to "a list of landlesse resolutes."


8. Lists relieve stress and focus the mind. "Lists," sociologist Scott Schaffer told The Oregonian newspaper, "really get to the heart of what it is we need to do to get through another day on this planet."


9. Lists can force people to say revealing things. In his 25 Random Things roster, former California Gov. Jerry Brown reveals that his favorite cereal is ... Flax Plus Multibran.

10. Lists can keep us from procrastinating. We put this one off until the end. Making a list enables us to get our heads around really big tasks — and helps us tackle the work one aspect at a time. But a list is only useful if it reveals a truth, solves a problem or leads to action. Making a list, for instance, does not necessarily help procrastinators. As DePaul University psychologist Joseph Ferrari told Psychology Today in 2008, people don't put off work they must do because they lack list-making skills. And, in turn, making a list does not get the job done.

On happiness in the e-world

So evidence that perhaps blogging does make us happier..

The researchers found support for deeper self-disclosure from bloggers resulting in a range of better social connections. These included things such as a sense of greater social integration, which is how connected we feel to society and our own community of friends and others; an increase in social bonding (our tightly knit, intimate relationships); and social bridging — increasing our connectedness with people who might be from outside of our typical social network.  [Read more here]

 But, then again points made in the comments valuable too - is there, and does there need to be, a control group of non-bloggers. The comment I made with the piece yesterday holds true here too - blogging will imapct some negatively, and some positively, why do we need to extraplolate to the whole population and think about casuality. Even though its perhaps makes the article more fun.

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And in other news .. apparently its now 3 days to there is a line on the Horizon, and sadly, the U2 Conference has been postponed :-(

Oscars

So the Academy Awards are over for another year. Saw this piece 'Critics and the Crowd', which I think gets paraded out every year, that the films that win oscars are usually not the highest grossing films [US], unless its the catergories of sound editing or special effects. Looking at the winners this year, I think its held true again. (Heath Ledger may be an exception).

e-friendship..

I really enjoyed reading this article about social-networking sites and their impact on our health. I did find it hard to take the article too seriously given the tone it began with - "is an x as good as a kiss", its quite an assumption to say that trading messages doesn't equate a thriving social life". I have little doubt that there is capital in trading emails, and being a part of an online community. I do tend to agree that with the internet, we can communicate with more people, over greater distances, more often, but at the same time we get into trouble when we attribute
a universally positive or negative value to these conversations.

[.. happy birthday ... ]

I enjoyed this article about how Facebook impacted celebration of birthdays:

Birthdays used to be a measure of intimacy. Who remembered yours? Whose did you remember? The club was small, typically limited to family members, two high school pals, four college friends, two co-workers and one person you broke up with a long time ago.

The author goes on to remind us that -

Facebook is a giant non-stop birthday party. Every day, it reminds its members which of their "friends" are about to mark another year, which means that Facebook members are now likely to get more "Happy birthdays" in a single birthday than they've gotten in all their past years combined.

Facebook isn't the only prompt though ... how many people get automatic messages from mailing lists they are on, saying "Happy Birthday" or have an intranet which tells people at work. I guess there's perhaps something in this, but at the same time I do find it nice that people remember (and tell wish me a happy birthday via sms, email, card, or facebook message).

A book meme ...

It must have been ages ago now but Ali tagged me in a book meme. I did think about posting it, but then I thought about the books sitting on my table, I haven't really been a novel person recently, even though the last book I read was a novel. So my take on the meme, is to write about the books without including titles. The first was about a minister who perhaps fell from grace, the one before that about why many people are leaving church; but not faith..

In terms of what next, I have Boneheffer's Ethics; the former governor of HK's book about where 'we' are heading now; and memo to the new US President about the challenges the US (and perhaps us) will face. Then there's a book about refugees from an African war. I guess this is a start on my hope for 2009, to read more.

about I love you ...

 I read this fascinating piece about the cultural differences between Americans and Japanese (my cousin tells me that Koreans are similar).

The article begins with the surprise the author had he found out a Japanese man had never told his wife that he loved her. Apparently hallmark-sentimentality is not common in Japan.

I wondered if there's something we can learn from that - that love is more than words, its an action.

25 Random things...

No, I'm not succumbing and writing my very own list of 25 Random things. Rather I'm going to post a few random articles about "25 Random things". The first, is a direct reply, to the request to list 25 things.

I enjoyed this reminder, that while there are 25 things in each list, there is not necessarily much about it which is random, the 25 things we chose to say gives us a chance to paint our online persona a little more the way we want. And for those who are trying to work out 25 things to write, this article gives a few helpful pointers - such as recount a dramatic moment, like having your heart broken or getting arrested, but withhold details, forcing readers to ask for them in your "comments'' section. In case you didn't know, comments equate to status on Facebook even more than number of friends; and make one up. 

Here is another piece, reminding me that there's really nothing new about the 25 things list, as these quizzes have been doing the e-rounds for years, and this is article is another response to the 25 things I [don't] want to know about you...

World's top 10 scariest airports

Interesting reading this (the pictures and descriptions are also amazing). I have to admit I didn't initially think I would have landed at any of the airports on the list - but no I have flown into and out of JFK (and on reflection, perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised.

Who'd be an Ump...

Summer = discussions about the errors of umpires. According to this piece in the Herald today, the big argument is that you can't have a fair contest with umpires who make errors. I might have said this before, but I think that errors are part of sport. Its a human pursuit, the errors balance out. Little wonder some of the players aren't so keen on technology.

And on a different note here's a article about the power of sport. (touching on the story of Jelena Dokic and the South Africa Cricket team).There's another piece taking a different spin on the Jelena Dokic story, would Australians have embrace the Jelena so much if she came back as a Serbian or American.

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On the tennis, rarely do you get to see two class acts (on and off the court) both on top of the game - hats of to Nadal he played a five-hour semi-final, and then the four hour final against Federer. It was amazing to watch.

On the Cricket,, New Zealand are exceptionally good at turning victory to defeat, and last night was almost a perfect example.

U2 Conference - The Hype and The Feedback

So, I wrote last year some time about a conference being held this year about U2, their music, and their influence. The draft schedule of papers has been published here. The accepted papers cover a range of fascinating topics from the evolving performance of Bullet the Blue Sky live, including U2 in liturgy, and Bono's social activism and finding Jesus in the music of U2. Sound like a  fascinating conference and I'm looking forward to reading more about the conference - hopefully some papers, and keynote addresses will be made available online once the conference is finished.