How do you work? How do you live?
Matt Mullenweg is the guy who, as a teenager, started developing WordPress, the terrific blogging/content management software on which Clusterflock runs. At the ripe old age of twenty-five now, Matt was the subject of Inc.’s column “The Way I Work” this month. And he’s posted a revised and expanded version of the piece, with links, on his own blog, because the third-person-interview-as-first-person-monologue format the magazine used came out strange (as one would expect). Some snippets:
On a good morning there’s no alarm clock. I wake up with the sun and do my best to resist the instinctive urge to look at the computer or check email for at least an hour.
My vice of choice isn’t coffee, but the Kindle. Its electronic shelves are filled mostly with the business books I read in order to grow up to be a real businessman (before someone figures out I’m not). At any point in time I have about 120 books downloaded. Interspersed between Drucker, Godin, and Buffett are classics like Seneca, which I wish I could read more often but only get to a few times a year.
. . . When you’re coding you really have to be in the zone so I’ll listen to a single song over and over on repeat, hundreds of times. It helps me focus. The other best way to focus is to turn off email and instant messenger. The moment that little toaster pops up and says “you’ve got mail” you’re taken out of the flow. You’re juggling variables and functions and layouts and the moment you look away it all falls to the ground — it takes you 10 minutes getting it back in the air again.
. . .
I go out for lunch whenever I can, which fits well with my preference for no meetings before 11 AM. There’s something very personal about sharing food with someone; it’s a deeper connection than shaking hands in a boardroom. . . .
In general, I’m pretty darn disorganized, late as often as not, and really bad at keeping a schedule. . . . Last year I was on the road 212 days and clocked 175,000 miles, which is seven times around the globe . . .
. . . For my 25th birthday in January I published a list of 2009 goals on my blog. It included learning Spanish, learning how to cook, and posting 10,000 photos. Cooking has been a total fail so far; I go out for every meal. If you open my refrigerator you’ll find Girl Scout cookies and barbecue sauce. Photos are blazing along, half-way through the year and I’ve taken 20,000 photos and posted about 4,000 of them.
. . .
I do my best work mid-morning and super late at night, from one to five in the morning. Some people don’t need sleep, but I actually need a ton. I just sleep all the time, catching naps in the afternoon or a 20-minute snooze in the office. Our business is 24 hours — folks in Australia start their day around 4 PM my time and our guys and girls in Europe get going around midnight. Sometimes I’ll go out at night, come home from the bar at 2 or 3 AM, and then go back to work.
—Matt Mullenweg, “The Way I Work, annotated” Jun 19, 2009
Dear clusterflock, is there such a thing as a typical day in your life? If so, what’s it like? How do you keep it together, especially if you live alone and work by yourself?
The Kissing Experiment
Here’s what to do: Below the fold you’ll see a 15 photos (labeled A-O) of couples kissing. We need you to help us categorize them into three groups:
1) erotic – passionate/sexually-charged kiss
2) friendship – kiss between friends
3) relationship – affectionate kiss implying commitmentTo participate, email me (srkirshenbaum@yahoo.com) with the list of letters (A-O) and corresponding rank (1, 2, or 3) based on how you perceive each image.
Wallace’s Rottweiler
George Beccaloni, an evolutionary biologist with the London Natural History Museum, has taken it upon himself to champion Alfred Russel Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin’s, now largely lost to popular understanding.
Calling himself Wallace’s Rottweiler, Beccaloni has barnstormed across England to preserve Wallace homes and other sites. He convinced the Natural History Museum in London to buy the scientist’s insect collection, correspondence and books from Wallace’s two grandsons.
He also runs a Wallace Web site and is helping British standup comedian Bill Bailey plan a routine based on the scientist. Beccaloni’s biggest job by far, however, is defending Wallace’s legacy.
A comedy routine?
Also controversial is Wallace’s support of spiritualism, a popular movement that held seances and believed spirits of the dead can communicate with the living. He upset Darwin and damaged his scientific reputation by arguing that the development of the human mind and some bodily attributes were guided by spiritual beings rather than natural selection, Beccaloni acknowledged.
The story is even more involved.
Life and Death in Kritsa, Crete (Κριτσά, Κρήτη)
Γεώργος Αποστολάκης (Yiorgos Apostalakis). Age at death: 40. Valedictory gunfire both at the church and at graveside.
Read more
Everything You Need to Know
Figurine. Calcite. Circa 10,000 BCE. (Mesolithic.) Found/acquired: Ain Sakhri. Small cave in the Wadi Khareitoun, south-east of Bethlehem in the Judean Desert.
A clustercommenter introduced me to this Mesolithic figurine, now held by the British Museum. I thought it might get buried in the great midden-heap of commentary, so I reckoned I’d bring it to the surface.
“Awesome and humbling,” says the commenter. I concur.
Terry thought of something that Ray Davies had said recently . . .
. . . about how he felt like sobbing his heart out whenever he looked at anyone’s record collection, because it was just so moving to see that personal soundtrack laid out before you, naked and open and fading with the years, because if you cared about this kind of thing then it was all there among the scratched vinyl and the cracked gatefold sleeves, as plain as could be, all the hopes and yearnings of someone’s private universe, and everything that a young heart could possibly want or need or yearn for.
Tony Parsons – Stories We Could Tell
What is Transhumanism?
Kyle Munkittrick wrote to Marginal Revolution about the three characteristics that would signal a shift to transhumanism. If I excerpt any part of it, it will distort the scope of the argument, so better to read it in whole.
You’re cute
Or, alternatively, I love you.
A snippet of Lloyd’s reflections from yesterday evening on the porch.
AP press release about Michael Jackson’s death
Ok this is indeed the Des Moines Register, but it was the only link on the topic on the AP’s front page as of a few minutes ago. The AP broke the news.
Michael Jackson Dead at 50
This is according to TMZ. He was rushed to the hospital under cardiac arrest and apparently was never revived. RIP King of Pop.
The blue and the green are the same color
Plus, it is used to illustrate a nifty principle.
Tiera, Cedar Springs, unedited
NPR crowdsourcing
“Please help us identify the lobbyists in this photo. [...] You’re also invited to post comments with further information, including confirming or disputing a person’s ID.”
right ear dominance
Most people prefer to be addressed in their right ears in everyday settings and are more likely to do a favor when the request is received in their right ears rather than their left ones, new research suggests.
This preference for hearing with the right ear is also found in rats, Japanese macaques, harpy eagles, sea lions and dogs.
meet the emotional robot
Researchers at Waseda University in Japan have created a humanoid robot that expresses emotion.
The Emotional Humanoid Robot can express seven different feelings, including delight, surprise, sadness and dislike. In addition to assuming different poses to match the mood, Kobian uses motors in its face to move its lips, eyelids and eyebrows into various positions.
Pinktentacle has more pictures and video.
Richard Was a Dick
Speaking to Charles Colson after the January 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, the president said: “I admit, there are times when abortions are necessary, I know that.” He gave “a black and a white” as an example.
“Or rape,” Colson offered. “Or rape,” Nixon agreed.
From the comments
…
I harken back to something I heard that resonates with me. When we love, we are called to perform in that expression.
I can say “I love you” as many times as I like and have it mean as many different meanings as the number of times I say it. But when I am, willingly and often without forethought, moved to move on another’s behalf, that’s when I know it’s real.
I never sought anything in you but yourself
From a NY Times review of Cristina Nehring’s book A Vindication of Love.
“We have been pragmatic and pedestrian about our erotic lives for too long,” she writes, and in an examination of real and invented figures from the Wife of Bath to Frida Kahlo, she revels in love affairs that do not rely on our more hackneyed narratives. The result of Nehring’s literary and historical inquiry is a celebration of the wilder, messier connections. Her heroes and heroines tend to die, like Young Werther, who shoots himself; or try to die, like Mary Wollstonecraft, who throws herself off a bridge; or suffer, like Abelard and Heloise, one of whom is castrated and one of whom ends up in a nunnery. And yet Nehring admires these flamboyant men and women for the creative force of their affairs, for their ability to live outside the lines, for the ferocity of their feelings. She sees our modern goals of marriage, security and comfort as limited and sad, and quotes approvingly Heloise’s statement to Abelard: “ ‘I looked for no marriage bond,’ she flashed. ‘I never sought anything in you but yourself.’ ”
(via marginal revolution)
the morality of ethicists
Two studies on the ethics of ethicists.
Most of the 277 survey respondents reported no positive correlation between a professional focus on ethics and actual moral behavior. Respondents who were ethicists themselves shied away from saying that ethicists behave worse than those outside the discipline – generally reporting that ethicists behave either the same or better – but non-ethicists were mostly split between reporting that ethicists behave the same as or worse than others.
Even those ethicists who did rank their peers’ behavior as better than average said their moral behavior is just barely better than average – hardly a ringing endorsement.
In another of Schwitzgebel’s papers forthcoming in a peer review journal, he looks at whether ethics books are more likely to be missing from libraries than non-ethics books.
from the comments
If it weren’t for photos I would have no idea what my father looked like. I first saw a photo of him when I was in high school and although it could be considered a poor substitute for the man I never got to meet, it at least filled a bit of the wondering void in me.
This question made me imagine how much more I might know and understand about him if he had also left a visual story behind. I’d be able to follow the places he went, see what he saw and discover whether we were attracted to similar things.
It would be a cool thing to have, don’t you think?
the longest day of the year
headline of the day
With prey scarce, wild dolphins turn to humans
this is it. The big one
A TED interview with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran.
What do you make of what’s going on in Iran right now.
I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted “the whole world is watching.” Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.
Father’s Day with Dodson and Ross
Peta2
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Still, “swatting a fly on TV indicates he’s not perfect,” Friedrich said, “and we’re happy to say that we wish he hadn’t.”