Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Google's Done It Again!

Let me be the first to praise Google for their new invention, Google Custom Time. The idea is simple: you can pre-date your e-mails so that it appears that they were sent at the appropriate time (birthdays, anniversaries, before the big presentation was due), and they will appear at that time, in the proper place in the recipient's inbox. It will appear that they simply got 'lost in the ether' during the interim.

Good times! Now that the concept of 'on time' is slowly being eradicated, I look forward to the day when concepts such as 'date' and 'time' lose all meaning altogether, which will allow me to finally live in a nirvana where every meal is breakfast (what? Time for pancakes with whipped cream again?), and every day is both a Saturday and my birthday, simultaneously.

Although, I would like to know a little more about their 'e-flux capacitor' before signing on whole-hog...

Liberal Praises Liberal Paper - Counterintuitive!

Okay, just to prove that I'm not entirely a New York Times-basher, a couple plaudits for its pundits.

In today's op-ed section, the oft-maligned (and deservedly so!) David Brooks writes really well on the subject of behavior and discipline, and how good habits brought on through rote and routine can lead to perfection of execution in the physical sports. He doesn't really go into it in great depth, but I think the point he's getting at, which is something I am really a firm believer in, is how these sorts of habits can help you in your everyday life as well.

For instance, with all these new responsibilities at work, I am finding myself having to be, roughly, a billion times more organized than I've had to be in the past. Which is to say, fairly organized.

Now, strictly speaking, my ability to organize my thoughts and processes have nothing to do with my ability to, say, keep a very clean desk. Indeed, if you listened to Will Wilkinson's diavlog with Richard Florida over the weekend (sorry for the lack of a dinglelink, but I'm too busy!), you'd know that people who score very high on the 'open to new experiences' axis in Five-Factor Personality Analysis tests, like me, tend to have very messy desks.

Nonetheless, I am now aspiring to keep a clean work area, both at my cube and in the lab, the idea being that if I can keep order in my physical surroundings, that will assist my brain in keeping itself neat and tidy as well.

It's really a nice column by Brooks, and a reminder why the hell the Times pays him to write three times a week. I find his political columns to fall in a fairly narrow space between uninformative and uninformed, but when he writes about behavior and sociology, which is the area where he got started, he really can be both interesting and insightful.

On another note altogether, bravo to the Times, via the Freakonomics blog, for giving my brother-in-law's father, the weird-and-wonderful Daniel Hamermesh an outlet for his economic thoughts. Daniel is quite the character, as anyone who has spent a Passover dinner with him can absolutely attest. But he's also, I'm told, quite an insightful economic thinker. I've been to one of his undergrad lectures, and he is definitely an engaging speaker, and his occasional posts to Freakonomics have been fun to read. And he's definitely the most famous blogger that I'm related to by marriage, although since I am very loosely related to David Copperfield by marriage, he's not the most famous person to meet that qualification.