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Cross-Pollinating Ideas via the Internet

I call these occurrences examples of the “cross-pollination” of ideas. It’s a collaborative, unpredictable, uncoordinated, complex effort whereby ideas and information gleaned from disparate sources are examined in relation to one another. It is knowing the trees and seeing the forest. The goal is to create more useful ideas and better information, and then spread this new knowledge far and wide. And do it over and over again. If this reminds you at all of evolutionary processes, not only are you catching my drift, you’re cross-pollinating.

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Birthday Shoes dot com

Five Fingers are just footwear: how great could this product be? Pretty extraordinary, actually. Why? Because they empower us modern hunter-gatherers to move about the earth and do things in accordance with our evolutionary design, which is to say, locomote a concrete, polluted and often trashy world wearing virtually nothing on our “birthday shoes” (Yeah, like “birthday suit!”) but a thin piece of rubber sole.

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Peter Thiel responds to Folk Activism

[T]here’s one frontier that isn’t being talked about, and that is the frontier of day-to-day life that transpires outside the purveyance of Big Brother. Indeed, that is most of our lives, so this frontier is immensely important. Indeed, many, many people live most of their lives incredibly freely beyond the view of government. It should go without saying that one of the preeminent goals of any liberty-minded person would be to advance ways to expand this frontier and further shield life from government. And yeah, cyberspace can help do that, but we need more realspace solutions.

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On Nassim Taleb’s Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world

“Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news.”

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Creating Communities (or Tribes)

I say “meaningful ways” because our enumerated causes are often incredibly shallow. I still have great friendships from my old days as a Christian (this was back in my teenage years) even though I am more an atheist or agnostic (whatever) today. Most Christians even within the same church body have vastly different beliefs and still manage to enjoy each other’s company. Why? Because the relationships are bigger than the beliefs. The beliefs are (mostly, or most importantly) just an excuse to get together with others.

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Patri Friedman on Folk Activism

I wonder if the search for the most functional and free government is a leprechaun we’ve no hope of catching. This could be because governments are inherently anti-freedom (After all, they are: monopoly of force is always anti-freedom), so their very existence unavoidably negates the goal. I’m not sure it matters. It seems the best solution is to seek out new frontiers. Seasteading, space exploration, and “more fences” via digital encryption all work to achieve more frontier. We need it.

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Giving up the Mouse: Use Hot Keys [Grind Skills]

In our computer-driven age, quite possibly the greatest “Grind Skill” that everyone could benefit from, aside from knowing how to type, is knowing and using keyboard combinations to perform necessary functions in lieu of using your mouse! The mouse (or touchpad in the case of laptops) is a fantastic and integral part of using a […]

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Natto: Another fermented food I probably should be eating

Prior to Seth Roberts mentioning it on his blog (here), I had never heard of the Japanese dish called “Natto,” which is a fermented soybean product. Apparently, it contains a great deal of Vitamin K2, is anti-bad-bacterial, and effectively lyses human thrombus. If you’re like me, that last bit probably made no sense to you, […]

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reading

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

Finished reading Stumbling on Happiness (SoH) by Daniel Gilbert last night, which weighs at about 240 pages and is an easy and informative discussion of the human mind, how we perceive the past and future, and our own ineptitude at understanding what makes us happy. It’s explicitly not a self-help book or a guide to finding happiness. SoH is more an expose on how our minds work to deal with reality, remember the past, and predict the future

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The Importance of Brain Tech and the Limits to Acquiring It

“There’s an idea articulated in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon that goes something like this: imagine there is a project that will take five years to complete. Imagine further that a technology that could be developed in a year would, once acquired, enable the project to be completed in only two years. Thus, rather than use existing technology to complete the project in five years, it makes more sense to acquire the time-saving technology first. Reality is considerably less predictable than this simple example allows, but it still illustrates a useful idea: acquiring the right technology first can save time and effort later.”