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Decluttering my bookmarks

visakanv
December 27, 2012

First I’m listing them all out. With reasons. No good reason, delete.

Quora:

Spirituality and Living

Singapore

  • Singapore Budget – A link I’m keeping around, that I’d like to sink my teeth into. I don’t know very much about the budget, and I presume (foolishly) that if I don’t, then most people don’t, either. Will make sense of it and share my thoughts and findings.

Books and Learning:

  • streetswiki – Eyes On The Street Jane Jacobs is one of my favourite writers and her insights into the failure of urban planning have some deep implications to me. This is a summary of some of her ideas. I could and should put my own take on it. Been also curious about what the rest of the streetswiki site is like.
  • Lives of a Cell, by Lewis Thomas – One of my favourite books of all time. I bookmarked it so I’d have access to it in case I ever needed to quote from it. I suppose now I can save the link here and delete the bookmark.
  • WikiQuote – Simone Weil – Was planning to spend a day reading and studying Simone Weil’s quotes. French social and religious philosopher in the early 1900s, involved in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance. Her thoughts are a pleasure to read. So quotable. Have not yet read.
  • EngineeringGuy – Summary of Made To Stick – Made to Stick is a book that really hit me in the face, and it got me thinking about how we ought to express our thoughts and ideas in a way that would do most justice to them. If saying a little less means people remember what you said better, why wouldn’t you? Need to digest this. Also curious about the rest of EngineeringGuy’s “white-papers”
  • Edge.org asks a great question every year. I have about 14 years of questions to sieve through. Pretty high priority. I have a couple of the books (“What do you believe to be true, but cannot prove?”) and they get me giddy and nauseous with the raw power of their ideas.
  • Nathan Jurgenson – The Data Self, a Dialectic Nathan writes about the symbiotic relationship between our online and offline identities, and how we tend to be biased in thinking that we create our profiles, forgetting that our profiles also create us. He’s a great thinker to have as we move into a new and interesting digital age. (What is “Social” exactly? Etc.)
  • Brain Pickings – 10 Best Psychology/Philosophy Books 2012 one of my favourite spaces on the internet.

Inspiration:

Career & Personal Development:

Wikipedia

TED:

I think I should make a list of all my favourite TED talks!

Unsorted:

WSJ – David Foster Wallace on Life and Work I want to get to know DFW better. This is water, this is water.

Harvard Business Review – Managing Oneself, Peter Drucker – Distill and learn, Visa, distill, learn and apply.

Venkatesh Rao – A Big Little Idea Called Legibility Venkat is an interesting guy with interesting perspectives and I was hoping to make sense of this. Not a high priority.

How I Plot A Novel in 5 Steps – Relevant to when I plan to write novels.

YouTube – The Psychology of Everything Big, popular psychology.

Urbagram.net – Microplexes – Networks and Complex Systems. This got me excited. High priority. Read the other essays. Break them down and make them relevant.

Decision Making Techniques – a bit technical and dry but I’m curious to skim through it and see what I like.

The Conversation with Amanda de Cadenet was and continues to be interesting to me because it features women talking to each other. We actually get very little of this in the mainstream media. I think this will be relevant and useful to me, as a man, in understanding women a little better. (See: Bechdel test)

Introduction to Logic Formal logic is something I’d like to study and understand.

zenhabits: finding your passion

zenhabits: passion guide

On Copywriting: an infographic

GEP AMA I did this AMA on EDMW and it’s one of my prouder achievements, winning over a potentially hostile audience with tact. Bookmarked because I want to glean insights for future writing.

Ray Dalio Management Principles I don’t know who Ray Dalio is, but somebody I admire believed he was a great guy to learn from, so I’ll dissect it and break it down.

The Flinch ought to be summarized.

NYTimes – Writers on Writing John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut and many others.

Self Illusion – Interview with Bruce Hood I met this guy, he’s pretty cool. To do a summary.

Engineering Management, Yishan Wong Anything Yishan writes, I would read.

Vanity Fair: Obama’s Way, by Michael Lewis A study of Obama’s leadership, and a study of Michael Lewis’s sketch of Obama, in words

Workflowy: Power Of Now Book summary shared with me by a friend loved it, need to digest it again more thoroughly.

http://www.edwdebono.com/course Edward de Bono is a bit of an authority figure on creativity and lateral thinking, and he writes simply and cleanly.

The Art Of Complex Problem Solving I thought this infographic was cool.

Information about the Brain educational read! I think it’s important to understand the human brain- the thing that’s doing all the understanding.

Book recommendations: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith)

Nohari Window (mine) and Johari

Newbie’s Guide to Publishing: Ebooks and Self-publishing – relevant for when I want to start writing more seriously!

Copyblogger – How To Publish Kindle eBook

CreativePenn – Publish your ebook on Smashwords thoughts on writing and publishing

eBook cover designer –

Michael Wiese – Screenwriting/writing advice

99u – 25 Insights on Becoming a Better Writer just digest it, break it down, delete ti

 

101 ways to monetize your blog without irritating your readers

 

Thematic index for Marks and Meaning – some interesting stuff I found on Flickr, not sure how. Low priority.

Drawing tutorials if and when I want to sit down and learn to draw

Figure and Gesture Drawing Tool – Generates photos to use as drawing practice

www.eyercize.com/practice/read speed reading exercises. Not sure if I really care.

A List Apart: A Checklist for Content work

Be Awesome Online useful list of articles

No Excuse List – Learn Music, Programming, Languages, DIY etc free

Color Scheme Designer – for choosing colours!

Communications & Society: Multiplicity in the classroom here’s a thinker I can get behind. Going to follow him on my RSS.

WeighTrainer.net -Understanding hypertrophy a little better

The Writer’s Journey – Hero’s Journey Joseph Campbell, broken down

Monomyth in 17 Stages

American Scholar –  Disadvantages of an Elite Education I want to comment on this!

PR.com – Ron Reagan Jr and Stem Cells – enjoyed this article and thought I ought to read it further

Binghamton – Swarm Intel (Digest and throw)

Swarm Theory – National Geographic A single bee or ant isn’t smart, but their colonies are. Implications on humanity?

GOTTA TAKE A BREAK JUST PUTTING THIS OUT THERE

6 thoughts on “Decluttering my bookmarks”

  1. Garlic and Fries

    That GEP AMA is especially relevant considering

    1) You didn’t go on to greater things like 90% of your peers, and

    2) it would never have occurred to said GEP demographic to host an AMA like that

    I would also like to know how and why you consider yourself a GEP, seeing as you lasted only a year…that’s like an OCS dropout telling people that he went to OCS.

    1. visa Post author

      1) “Greater things” is highly subjective!

      2) I take that as a compliment! Think Different.

      I passed all the GEP tests and spent a full 4 years in GEP, not just 1.

      The OCS analogy doesn’t quite work- if you want to use it, you could maybe say that I commissioned, but was subsequently demoted for being tardy in my duties. That’s in response to the implication that you’re “not a full officer” if you don’t complete OCS.

      I know a couple of friends who chose, entirely out of their own free will, to drop out of the GEP. They are still GEP kids in my eyes.

      Actually, if someone said “I went to OCS, but I dropped out”, I would still be interested in their experiences- in fact, I’d be MORE interested in them, because they have an exceptionally unique story, and we always learn more from the unique cases than from the norm.

      Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard, but he is still Harvard alumnus, no? And even if he doesn’t qualify because he didn’t graduate, he’s still interesting, no? These things aren’t as black and white as they might seem on the surface.

      Incidentally, two of the most awesome guys in my Sig Opr course- including the Best Cadet- were former OCTs who dropped out.

      Thanks for commenting.

      1. Reluctantly I eat your face

        One thing I will never fully understand is that while you choose to see things in a different light – i.e not held to the same square standards of academia and career success as the rest of your fellow countrymen – you seem to be rather unwilling to acknowledge mediocrity where it exists, preferring to sweep it under the carpet of supposedly “thinking outside of the box”.

        Harvard is for exceptionally brilliant people. Mark Zuckerberg is an outlier: he did not in any way justify the meaningless existence of procrastinating dropouts when he left to start Facebook. Therein lies a difference: he did something monumental with his life.

        Similarly, the two people who you knew dropped out of OCS were outliers. The plural form of anecdote is not data: I knew a friend who briefly attended OCS and who got dropped from the course after he went AWOL for a day. He is the only person I know who has attended OCS, SCS, detention barracks ,and subsequently completed his service as a private soldier.

        Would his experiences qualify as interesting? Sufficiently entertaining to regale a dinner party, no doubt, but in terms of life lessons it does not teach anything new beyond simply doing what you are told and not fucking up. I did not need to have a friend to go through DB in order to restate what would have been plainly obvious to any 19-yo teenager.

        What you are steadfastly glossing over is that 90% of the OCS dropouts are people who couldn’t care less and found that they refused or didn’t care to excel under the specified parameters. Privately, I have no respect for people who constantly say that they are looking for new challenges in life, yet refuse to participate when faced with one because they claim that it is not challenging on their own terms. Not all of them were like that, to be fair; some of them did have valid medical reasons and suchlike, but most of the people who do qualify for OCS are more than happy to be there.

        But back to Zuckerberg. I noticed you deal a lot with future potential: you make a lot of noise about things you intend to do, but there is very little follow-up. He has a wholly valid and profitable reason not to go on to higher education; as it stands, it does not look like you do.

        Just sharing my thoughts. You are, by all accounts, a thoroughly brilliant person; it would be very, very saddening to see all this potential remain just that – potential.

  2. dotseng

    No point. If you don’t have a degree to put it all together, its no good.

    It is as simple as that. Life is not just a matter of putting words together cleverly. You need depth, you need to go outside Singapore and see the world and marinate in it – then it will cone around nicely. As it is, you r just going around in big and small circles

    Darkness 2013