Being
Surely 9.8 million tweets can’t be wrong. Computer scientists analyzed millions of tweets from 2008, characterizing trends in “mood dimensions” with evocative names such as “Calm,” “Alert,” “Vital,” “Sure,” “Kind,” and “Happy.” The researchers found that the “Calm” index tracked well with the ups and downs of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, while preceding them […]
So a couple weeks ago, The Bear discovered Quora, and signed up. Pretty quickly, I got an email from Quora, asking if “Tame Bear” was in fact my real name… A Quora admin said: “Hello, One of the rules of Quora is that everyone uses his or her real full name. Do you mind changing […]
Big adventure: The Bear is going to the annual Burning Man festival out on the salt flats of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Here in home-town Goshen Indiana, it’s surprising how few people seem to know anything about Burning Man. Or maybe it’s not so surprising? That picture above is the city that springs […]
David Abramowitz has posted a speculation on Macintouch that The Bear thinks is just way cool… Imagine an iPad that you dock. When it’s docked, it is a fully-functional Macintosh computer. And when you rip it off the dock it’s back into iOS mode as a fully-functional iPad. How cool is that! So then the […]
What is reality? At its most fundamental level, reality is very strange. Subatomic particle physicists, theoretical quantum physicists, cosmologists, string theorists, and multiverse theory mathematicians are all working to get at the underlying truth of reality: How is all this we see around us formed from basic building blocks? What are the rules and forces […]
Robert Anton Wilson presents the concept of “reality tunnels” to explain how intelligence is evolving by studying itself. Here are a few key points to watch for: “Knowledge wherever it’s discovered is traveling over the whole world faster and faster.” “Yoga is the science of the East. Science is the yoga of the West.” ~John […]
An article this week in U.S. News titled “Why You Might Be Better Off Than You Think,” gives us plenty to be grateful for. In many ways that are easy to assess, American Life is still improving despite that dark cloud of the recent Great Recession we now see in our rear-view mirror. Here are […]
In the summertime, The Bear buys a season pass at the Shanklin Park Pool, an outdoor swimming pool operated by our local Parks Dept. I go swimming three or four times a week, but I need to qualify what I mean by “swimming.” You see, bears don’t do your typical crawl stroke, breast stroke or […]
New Year’s resolutions are all about wanting to change old habits in order to form new habits. So how does this happen? We’re creatures of habit you know, with wave upon wave of repetition in our thoughts and behaviors. “Bad” habits, right? Perceived problems, in need of fixing. What’s the problem unless you think about […]
