Living in Hong Kong I can’t help but be fascinated by the way pedestrians self-organize. It’s one of the densest populations on earth, so navigating one’s way through the urban jungle requires a lot of mental processing. The pedestrian bridge in Wanchai that goes from the subway to my office is probably half a kilometer,… Read More »
Nowadays I get three days in the office to do part of my job, editing The Asian Wall Street Journal’s print edition of the Personal Journal (great piece in tomorrow’s edition, by the way, on South Korean female blogging by Lina Yoon (I noticed the Sydney Morning Herald also did something on this earlier this… Read More »
I’m getting increasingly concerned about the potential for serious ‘texting accidents’ (what I’m going to call textcidents). These occur when two or more people are walking along texting into their cellphone and, oblivious of their surroundings, bump into each other. I’ve already advocated public ‘SMS Crannies’, where people can move out of the flow of… Read More »
Reading at the moment Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who mentions the trick German experimental physicist Heinz Maier-Leibnitz used to do in boring conferences to entertain himself and to measure the lengths of his trains of thought — microflows, in Csikszentmihalyi’s words. The passage is conveyed in full here: Professor Heinz Maier-Leibnitz, a German experimental physicist,… Read More »
Further to my growing collection of programs that run off USB drives, here’s another, noticed by someone in Australia who prefers to remain anonymous: wikidPad, an excellent freeform database, outliner and textpad. I copied wikidPad from my PC to a jump drive and hey presto! it works on PC’s without wikidPad installed. The only hitch… Read More »