Some random stuff I thought you might enjoy (admittedly, somewhat off-topic):
Nietzsche Family Circus
A cool ad
Stephen Colbert's election advice
Maps of War
Neuroscience Gateway

From Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: "People have gut feelings that give them emphatic moral convictions, and they struggle to rationalize them after the fact. These convictions may have little to do with moral judgments that one could justify to others in terms of their effects on happiness or suffering. They arise instead from the neurobiological and evolutionary design of the organs we call moral emotions... The difference between a defensible moral position and an atavistic gut feeling is that with the former we can give reasons why our conviction is valid. We can explain why torture and murder and rape are wrong, or why we should oppose discrimination and injustice. On the other hand, no good reasons can be produced to show why homosexuality should be suppressed or why the races should be segregated. And the good reasons for a moral position are not pulled out of thin air: they always have to do with what makes people better off or worse off, and are grounded in the logic that we have to treat other people in the way that we demand they treat us."

Wake up! If you're reading this post, then you're already awake in the traditional sense. (Unless you're dreaming this and I'm just a character in your dream, in which case, please don't wake up.) But are you currently conscious of the fact that you exist? (Now that I mentioned it you are, but were you a minute ago? If not, when did you last have this thought?) I believe that in one important respect, a person is only truly awake while, and to the extent that, (s)he is thinking the thought "I exist". At all other times (i.e. almost always) the brain is on autopilot and the person is not acting with true autonomy. This idea is similar in many ways to the Buddhist concept of mindfulness. Until a few years ago I was (like most people) only aware of my existence in rare fleeting moments, but now that I realize its importance, I have been able to increase both the frequency and the duration of this awareness, and hope eventually to be able to keep it in my consciousness continuously. If you'd like to give this a try, all you need is a reminder to wake you up periodically. A strategically placed post-it note or a watch that beeps on the hour could do the job. The technique I use most often is to anticipate where I'll be or what I'll be doing in the near future (say in an hour) and make a mental note to wake up when that happens (and at the same time to choose the next "wake up" event). This practice has been enormously enriching for me, having both the intended effect of increased autonomy and a pleasant side effect of heightened appreciation of my existence (which I didn't earn and I consider an immeasurably fortunate gift). I hope you decide to give it a try.

From Paul Graham: "This is a good plan for life in general: If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what's the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it."
I would add that the same logic is valid for procrastination: If you can do something today or tomorrow, do it today. Laziness is probably the only thing making tomorrow an option at all.
By the way, this is my blog's 100th post. If you haven't been reading it from the start, I encourage you to check out the archives. I have designed the posts to be as timeless as possible, so even the older ones should still be useful (that is, assuming they were useful before). Here they are: June July August September October

A few thought-provoking quotes, in ascending order of shock value...
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller
"What prevents the achievement in reality of peaceful social arrangements throughout the world is not chance, not fate, not stupidity, not individual error or wrongdoing, but the unlimited will to power of sovereign states." - Allen Wheelis
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger." - Hermann Goering, second in command of the Third Reich, at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945
"Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter." - Richard Dawkins

From paulstips.com: "One of the big differences that I've noticed between those who get what they want and those who don't comes down to one simple behavior - whether they're willing to ask for it. Why are some people so afraid of making simple requests? Almost inevitably it's because of the fear of rejection. Certainly if you make a habit of asking for things, you're going to get rejected more often than if you don't. But you're also going to have your wishes granted more often. It's a trade-off - more rejection for more success. And believe me, it's a trade-off that's well worth it. The thing to understand about rejection is that it hurts less as we experience it more. With time, it starts to feel like water running off a duck's back - you hardly even notice it's there. You will become almost immune to feeling let down. Simply look upon rejection as part of the process of moving towards success. If you need to be told no ten times before you receive a yes, then you'd better start working through those no's."
I agree entirely with this sentiment, and would add one explanatory comment. Much of our fear of rejection is an evolutionary relic. Such fear was appropriate in a small hunter-gatherer community in which a single rejection could result in permanent social ostracism, and our genes were shaped by such an environment. But in modern society, communities are fragmented and often non-overlapping, and many of the people you meet today you'll never see again. Retaining this evolutionarily induced caution when interacting with strangers and casual acquaintances is maladaptive and unnecessarily restrictive. When your instincts tell you one thing and your reason tells you another, it's often better go with your reason. Get out there, make a few mistakes, make some slightly outrageous requests, and don't worry about what people think. As long as you don't break the law, it probably won't go on your permanent record.

One great way to learn about yourself is to ask yourself difficult questions. Fortunately, philosophers have already found a lot of difficult questions, so all you need to do is think about the answers. Here are some quizzes from PhilosophersNet that I found very illuminating.
What is identity?
What is taboo?
What is morally required of us?
Is your concept of morality internally consistent?
Is your concept of God internally consistent?

It wouldn't be too much of an oversimplification to say that, for most people, happiness is determined by three sets of factors:
- Objective external circumstances and events
- The person's subjective perception of those external circumstances and events
- The person's expectations and standards, to which those external circumstances and events are being compared
This immediately suggests three potential routes to happiness:
- Act in a way that causes good things to happen to you, for example, by working hard to give yourself better future options.
- Think about the things that happen to you in a way that focuses on positivity, for example by finding silver linings and appreciating what you have rather than lamenting what you don't have.
- Have realistic expectations about the future. Or, if you are able to delude yourself, have slightly pessimistic expectations about the future, so that you're pleasantly surprised by how things turn out.
The optimal approach is probably a combination of the three.

If you believe that religious tolerance is necessarily good and questioning the religious beliefs of others is necessarily bad, I encourage you to read Sam Harris' The End of Faith. Whether you agree with him or not, I think you'll find it to be extremely thought-provoking. Here are a few quotes from Sam, to give you an idea of what to expect:
"Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed."
"The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so."
"120 million of us [in the U.S.] place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer."
"The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not "cowards," as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith -- perfect faith, as it turns out -- and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be."
"A significant percentage of the world's Muslims believe that the men who brought down the World Trade Center are now seated at the right hand of God."
"We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia -- because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons."

In the past when I've posted humor I've been accused of being off-topic. So let me preface this post by saying that it has nothing to do with how to live (except to the extent that the right way to live might be "with as much humor as possible"). Without further ado, here are some classic insults...
- "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." Groucho Marx
- "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." Clarence Darrow
- "Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it." Moses Hadas
- "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." Winston Churchill
- "I feel so miserable without you, it's almost like having you here." Stephen Bishop
- "He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." Oscar Wilde
- "Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." Oscar Wilde
- "I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." Mark Twain
- "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination." Andrew Lang
- "In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." Charles, Count Talleyrand
- "He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others." Samuel Johnson
And my favorite...
George Bernard Shaw, in a letter to Winston Churchill: "I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play, bring a friend... if you have one."
Winston Churchill's response: "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one."

What advice do you wish you had received when you were 18? When people are asked this question, some answers are quite common:
- Your choice of a mate is more important than your choice of a career. Don’t marry until you find someone you are very confident is right for you. Don’t be afraid of being alone; being with the wrong person is worse.
- Take care of your body. It’s the only one you'll ever have, and the gradual damage caused by not treating it right is hard to reverse.
- Don't stress about the little things. The importance of everything gets exaggerated right before, during and after it happens, but you'll later realize most of those things weren't worth worrying about.
- Pay less attention to what other people think of you. When close friends tell you you're making a mistake, listen to them. But when you aren't doing what strangers would want you to do, that's usually their problem, not yours.
- Don't waste time. The old adage "time is money" is wrong, since it's easier to convert time into money than the reverse.
A lot of this seems like common sense, but it's common sense that many people don't heed, or just pay lip service to and don't incorporate it into their daily lives.What advice will future you's wish they could've given the current you? If you can figure out the answer to this question, you can substantially improve the rest of your life.

If you think the world's problems are so big that you can't make a difference, don't be intimidated or deterred. One person can change the world. When I began writing this post I wanted to include a few examples, but rather than going with Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Ghandi, and others you already know about, I decided to focus instead on a few people who are less well known but nevertheless are having a real impact on making the world a better place. Wangari Maathai started a movement that has already planted 30 million trees in Kenya. Recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus has helped millions out of poverty with microcredit, very small loans to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. Mikkel Frandsen is trying to make clean drinking water accessible to the billion people on the planet who don't have it. And Norman Borlaug has already saved about a billion people from starvation. Admittedly these are special people, in terms of both their commitment to their causes and their abilities to effect change. But even if you can't do it all yourself, there are plenty of problems for which every step toward a solution is itself enormously worthwhile. If you can't end the suffering of a million people, aim for a thousand, or even a hundred. As Edmund Burke said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." If you want to change the world for the better but don't know where to start, let me suggest Darfur.

Today I'm introducing a new type of post that I call "nontrivia". These facts may be surprising, maddening or thought-provoking, but there's nothing trivial about them.
- The fraction of the U.S. population employed by the government increased from 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 75 in the last 150 years.
- Most of the members of the Forbes 400 pay a lower percentage of their income, counting Social Security, than the receptionist who works in their office.
- Years of tracking political elections have revealed that the single most reliable predictor of who will win an election is the candidate who is the most physically attractive.
- "In God We Trust" wasn't added to U.S. money until 1956.
- Based on a recent survey, only 40% of the U.S. believes in evolution, placing it 33rd out of 34 countries surveyed.

When humans were given the gift of self-awareness they were also given the knowledge of their own mortality. Traditional strategies for coping with this knowledge of mortality seem to fall into five categories:
1. theist: death should not be feared, because there is life after death
2. "newageist": death should not be feared, because when you die you once again become one with nature
3. pessimist: the inevitability of death makes life itself absurd
4. optimist: although (or perhaps because) life must end, you should live it to the fullest while you can
5. "ignorist": don't think about death and don't let it affect your behavior
One commonality among these strategies is that they all assume that death is inevitable, and until recently that certainly seemed to be the case. However, technology is advancing exponentially, and breakthroughs in our understanding of the causes of aging are now happening almost weekly. Several visionaries at the forefront of aging research, including Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey, believe we'll soon have a "cure" for aging. Although I'm not an expert on the subject, I do share their confidence that immortality will eventually be achievable (provided humanity doesn't self-destruct first), but suspect that will take another 100 to 200 years (unless it becomes a global priority, which seems unlikely). If and when that happens, humanity will be able to add a sixth strategy to the list above: avoiding unwanted death altogether.

From Lee Smolin: "A question no longer being asked is how to make the next step in the evolution of a democratic society. Until very recently it was widely understood that democracy was a project with many steps, whose goal was the eventual construction of a perfectly just and egalitarian society. But recently, with the well-deserved collapse of Marxism, it has begun to seem that the highest stage of civilization we humans can aspire to is global capitalism leavened by some version of a bureaucratic welfare state, all governed badly by an unwieldy and corrupt representative democracy. This is better than many of the alternatives, but it is hardly egalitarian and often unjust; those of us who care about these values must hope that human ingenuity is up to the task of inventing something still better. It is proper that the nineteenth century idea of utopia has finally been put to rest, for that was based on a paradox, which is that any predetermined blueprint for an ideal society could only be imposed by force. It is now almost universally acknowledged that there is no workable alternative to the democratic ideal that governments get their authority by winning the consent of the governed. This means that if we are to change society, it must be by a process of evolution rather than revolution. But why should this mean that big changes are impossible? What is missing are new ideas, and a context to debate them."

I can't think of anyone that I'd want to permanently trade places with (in the sense of actually becoming them), but there are a lot of people I'd like to be for a day. Most of the people on my list would be friends and relatives, but I'd also include some strangers. Once such person is Terence Tao. Terence won the gold medal at the International Math Olympiad at age 13, the youngest winner ever. He got his PhD from Princeton at 20. He has won the Clay Research Award, a MacArthur Genius Award, and the Fields Medal (math's equivalent of the Nobel Prize). With technical brilliance and deep insight, he solves problems others consider intractable, problems the human brain wasn't designed to solve. (Quick example: He and Ben Green proved that there are an infinite number of arbitrarily long strings of prime numbers that are a constant distance apart.) And he's only 29, so his biggest breakthroughs are yet to come. But my reason for selecting him isn't simply because he's one of the smartest people on the planet. He has privileged access to a type of knowledge about our world that few others have. It has often been said that God is a mathematician. Of course, it's usually mathematicians who are saying this; I suppose engineers say God is an engineer, artists say God is an artist, etc. But math does seem to offer a window into an aspect of reality we don't usually see, one that's fundamental, beautiful, and timeless. I admire those who can genuinely appreciate the secrets it holds, and I especially admire those who can unlock these secrets.

One technique useful to achieving success in life is the ability to influence others. This is true not just for getting what you want, but also for encouraging others to change the world in ways you want it to change. Here are some keys to rallying others to your causes, from influence expert Robert Cialdini:
- Reciprocation: People give back to you the kind of treatment that they have received from you.
- Scarcity: People will try to seize the opportunities that you offer them which are rare or dwindling in availability.
- Authority: People will be most persuaded by you when they see you as having knowledge and credibility on the topic.
- Commitment: People will feel a need to comply with your request if it is consistent with what they have publicly committed themselves to in your presence.
- Affability: People prefer to say yes to your request to the degree that they know and like you.
- Consensus: People will be likely to say yes to your request if you give them evidence that people just like them have been saying yes to it.
Cialdini says that successfully influencing others requires using the factors above to arrange for a favorable psychological environment before making a request. What do you want? Whatever it is, you can probably use these factors to successfully encourage others to help you make it happen.

In an earlier post I mentioned that I'm not a fan of Successories posters because they're usually purchased for the purpose of increased corporate profitability rather than for personal development. Having said that, I did recently see a Successories poster whose sentiment I agree with and thought I'd share. "This is the beginning of a new day. You have been given this day to use as you will. You can waste it or use it for good. What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever; in its place is something that you have left behind... let it be something good."

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said, "You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you." What he said was true, but was only half of the truth. The wader is changing continuously just as the river is. The apparent continuity of identity is a fiction, albeit an extremely useful one. You are not the same person you were last year, yesterday, or even one second ago. I often find it instructive to think of myself as a sequence of I's over time (about 40 per second, according to some neurophysiologists), who are affected only by those who come before them, who affect only those who come after them, and whose interests are usually, but not always, well aligned.

Random stuff you might like...
http://www.solaas.com.ar/dreamlines/
http://phenomenon.org/intense/zentences/flash4.html
http://www.5ives.com
http://www.mouseprint.org
http://www.handlordzstore.com/kickassFinal.wmv

How old are you? You almost certainly gave your answer in years. But here's a page that makes a strong case for thinking about your age in days, and even includes a calculator that tells you your current age in days.
http://www.peterussell.com/age.html
Measuring age in years rather than days is obviously done for practical reasons, but it can have the unfortunate side effect of causing us to live less urgently than we should, since it lulls us into thinking that we're not aging at all for more than 99% of the year. I especially like the quote on that page from Wayne Dyer: "Have you really lived 10,000 or more days, or have you lived one day 10,000 or more times?"

Want to make a difference? Here are some tips from Peter Singer, who is worth listening to because he practices what he preaches and because he knows what it takes to make a difference. (Excerpted from this page).
1. Try to understand the public's current thinking and where it could be encouraged to go tomorrow.
2. Select a target on the basis of vulnerabilities to public opinion and the opportunities for change.
3. Set goals which are achievable. Bring about meaningful change one step at a time.
4. Establish credible sources of information and documentation. Never assume anything. Never deceive the media or the public. Maintain credibility, and don't exaggerate or hype the issue.
5. Don't divide the world into saints and sinners.
6. Seek dialogue and attempt to work together to solve problems. Position issues as problems with solutions. This is best done by presenting realistic alternatives.
7. Avoid bureaucracy.
8. Ask yourself: "Will it work?"