TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "time"
An interactive art/science HTML5 site illustrating the scale of time on Earth.
In case you needed reminding of your insignificance.
(thx gwenda)
90 minutes
Is 90 minutes the magic amount of time you need for a productive work session? explore-blog posted this bit of Tony Schwartz’s article, “Relax! You’ll Be More Productive”:
In the 1950s, the researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered that we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from light to deep sleep and back out again. They named this pattern the Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or BRAC. A decade later, Professor Kleitman discovered that this cycle recapitulates itself during our waking lives.
The difference is that during the day we move from a state of alertness progressively into physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes. Our bodies regularly tell us to take a break, but we often override these signals and instead stoke ourselves up with caffeine, sugar and our own emergency reserves — the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol.
Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes. They begin in the morning, take a break between sessions, and rarely work for more than four and a half hours in any given day.
I was immediately reminded of John Cleese’s lecture on creativity:
Cleese specifically advocates taking 90 minutes to create space and time. It takes him about 30 minutes to calm down and open his mind, leaving an hour of creative time working on something.
![Michael Herr, Dispatches
[Day Tripper] was on his helmet… and on the back, where most guys just listed the months of their tours, he had carefully drawn a full calendar where each day served was marked off with a neat X.
Like every American in Vietnam, he had his obsession with Time. (No one ever talked about When-this-lousy-war-is-over. Only “How much time you got?” The degree of Day Tripper’s obsession, compared with most of the others, could be seen in the calendar on his helmet. No metaphysician ever studied Time the way he did, its components and implications, its per-second per seconds, its shadings and movement. The Space-Time continuum, Time-as-Matter, Augustinian Time: all of that would have been a piece of cake to Day Tripper, whose brain cells were arranged like jewels in the finest chronometer.
Filed under: my reading year 2012](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mem98i9gZL1qz6f4bo1_500.jpg)
[Day Tripper] was on his helmet… and on the back, where most guys just listed the months of their tours, he had carefully drawn a full calendar where each day served was marked off with a neat X.
Like every American in Vietnam, he had his obsession with Time. (No one ever talked about When-this-lousy-war-is-over. Only “How much time you got?” The degree of Day Tripper’s obsession, compared with most of the others, could be seen in the calendar on his helmet. No metaphysician ever studied Time the way he did, its components and implications, its per-second per seconds, its shadings and movement. The Space-Time continuum, Time-as-Matter, Augustinian Time: all of that would have been a piece of cake to Day Tripper, whose brain cells were arranged like jewels in the finest chronometer.
Filed under: my reading year 2012
“Draw the important stuff and lob it out there. Time will sort things out.”
—Eddie Campbell, How To Be An Artist
Is Tumblr a machine for removing credit?
Clayton Cubitt asks a question I’ve asked often.
Is Tumblr a machine for removing credit? Above, my original Hysterical Literature post with @stoyatm, 3k notes. Below, an anonymized animated GIF, 8k notes. This is nothing compared to my Die Antwoord work.
In this case, I’d say Tumblr users are machines for removing credit.
(In this case, nothing in the Tumblr design would help credit the source — someone obviously went out of their way to make a GIF of Clayton’s video and repost it w/o credit.)
One hypothesis I have, which I have no data to back up other than my own Tumblr experience — video doesn’t spread as well on Tumblr, because it’s time-based. It takes time to watch a video. Images, short quotes, and animated GIFs (which are sometimes both) are instantaneous, and perfect for dashboard-surfing and mindless reblogs.
Filed under: attribution
