Step Right Up And Enter The Pavilion Of Fantasies

In Shanghai I found a gap in my considerable mental database of the trivial, obscure and probably-useless. They’re busy enthusiastically ripping the city to pieces for World Expo 2010 (that tooth-like creature in the photo is the mascot)… but what exactly is a World Expo?
So I Wikied it, as you do, got a bit of [...]

Civilisation – Until You Try Hailing A Cab

Yesterday I hit the more gentile side of Shanghai… the M50 arts district and New Heights on the Bund.
Along Moganshan Road where M50 is, I managed to stop in at m97 Gallery who have been my penpals for quite some time. Well, not penpals exactly. They email me notices of their exhibitions and I read [...]

It Doesn’t Take A Genius

You’ve probably noticed the way things cluster around you and figured there’s just a lot of industrial spying going on.
Movies are a great example. Deep Impact and Armageddon came out back-to-back. So did A Bug’s Life and Antz. It happens with books, TV, fashion, technology, advertising and pretty much everything you can think of. I’ve [...]

What Happens When The Dreams Don’t Come?

A late-night muse visited my sister Liz a few nights ago and now we’re in an exciting development stage for Life Dreaming, an amazing project we’re working on together.
It’s a collection of tools to help you focus on what’s important in your life right now. Not what your friends or family say is important, not [...]

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

With every change there’s a backlash, and I’ve noticed there’s a new form of Ludditism creeping into a lot of the stuff I read. The posture is that the internet is making us stupid and a new generation of lazy thinkers is coming through.
Over lunch today I read a piece by University of South Florida [...]

The People’s Blackboards

I’m in Philly at the moment, staying in what has got to be the campest and most eclectic BnB in the US. It’s a turn of the century townhouse run by the Mrs Madrigal-like Barbara and every room (and the back garden) is filled with eclectic flea market finds in an over-the-top celebration of quirky [...]

Life Dreaming ~ Is It Better to be Apathetic or Anxious?

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the retired head of the department of psychology at the University of Chicago, has published a lot of work related to happiness and creativity, but he’s most famous for ‘Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience’, where he presented his research of the theory that people are most happy when they are in a [...]

Surviving The Global Financial Hissy Fit

One of my favourite writers/thinkers, Kim Sbarcea coined the term GFHF (Global Financial Hissy Fit) and I like it so much I want to get tshirts made, because in a way I’ve been struggling with with what it’s all about. Is it a recession or a reorder? My vote is going with reorder.
What’s the difference? [...]

Life Dreaming: Happiness Is Being In Your Element

When it comes to Sir Ken Robinson I’m a sycophant fan boy. I think he’s an amazing thinker (and speaker), and previously I would have said that if you’re involved in education in any way, or you’ve got kids going through school, you need to look him up (here, here or here).
But he recently released [...]

SheepTool – Remote Group Decision Interface

“SheepTool offers a better, more natural alternative to videoconferencing. At meeting time, everyone logs onto a shared virtual workspace and opens up a communal audio connection, the Bleatspace. At the same time, a round field is shown onscreen, and clustered in the middle are icons that represent each participant, consisting of nothing more than a [...]