I was just updating my google reader subscriptions. About a year ago I had subscribed to a bunch of productivity and self-improvement type blogs, a lot of them with the underlying “think positive and great things will come your way” aspect. “Five ways to do this” “Eight reasons for improving your that” “Twelve new ways to keep track of your stuff”

You know, the kind of stuff aimed at telling you how to keep moving forward.

Half of those blogs stopped updating. I wonder what that means. Maybe just doing is a better way to keep moving forward rather than just reading and writing about it.

This has been a concern of mine for a while now. Pretty much everything we are exposed to on TV, radio, News, the Internet, etc is chosen for you. Someone even chooses which books appear at the book store and library. With enough willpower and effort you can dig to find out what you are missing, but the problem is we do not know what we are missing.

There are a number of variations on the motivation for filtering what you see. Mostly, it is financial profit. Someone wants you to stay tuned and come back so they ensure the content will compel you to stick around and soak up more advertising.

My guess is all this has more of an effect than missing out on a somewhat accurate general representation of reality. Take television – content is structured both to ensure you come back for more next week and to ensure you stay tuned through the ten minutes of commercials every fifteen minutes. Build suspense, pause, four or five companies tell you about a problem of some sort (crappy paper towels, expensive car insurance, weak erections, body odor, etc) and then insist their product is the only solution.

It matters to me that the people who decide what events are news also want to make sure I’ll sit through a tampon commercial or three to get it.

My problem with the story has to do with God’s role. As I learn to believe less in God and feel more in God the idea of God getting pissed at the entirety of creation over what humans were doing and wiping it all out in order to start over sounds much more like something I might do than the timeless source of love, truth, and creative energy.

Isn’t great flood story completely typical of the egoic mind? The epitome of selfishness? “Things aren’t working out as planned. F-it I’m going to end it, tear it up, throw it away, or haul ass and I don’t care how many innocent people, places, or things get messed up as a result.” And if that weren’t enough to seal it, there’s the part where he comes back after ands says “I promise never to do it again.”

That’s me. That’s people.

God though?

Image above from Marxchivist

The problem:

Part 1: There’s only a few real people on Twitter I have two-way real-life conversations with and seeing what they say is the highest priority.

Part 2: There’s a bunch of others like #tinyquote I want to follow but there are dozens of tweets from these types each every day and I don’t want tweets from my real friends lost among them.

Between all the great Twitter clients out there and Twitter’s web based features there’s a number of solutions, like Twitter lists, that are workable. While trying to decide what to do with each Twitterer I don’t want in my main stream I may choose any from among the various solutions.

When there is one that I am just not that interested in enough to see every day but don’t want it forgotten entirely I subscribe to the RSS.

For example, newspaper and other news source feeds… There are several reasons I don’t take in the news regularly, but when I catch wind of a developing story like the Hawaii tsunami warning I want to keep up with temporarily, seeing the Tweets on it is one way to get a quick, concise, bird’s eye on what’s happening without having to plow through the repetitive minutiae that clog wire and front page stories.

Did the bill pass? Is the tsunami warning cancelled yet? A quick check of a news source’s twitter feed in Google Reader gets me those factoids quick. I’m in, I’m out, free of distractions.

How to do it:

1. Find sources you like of course. Check them out – I look for the ones that do more than just link to their web site. I want to see the fact in the Tweet.

2. Navigate to the Twitter page, in my example, the Honolulu Advertiser. On the sidebar, under all the “following” icons, is the link to the RSS feed. Click on that.

3. That will either take you to a place you can select your news reader – I use Google’s Reader, or you can just copy the link to your favorite reader.

Now you’ll have a easy to see view of all the tweets with just the pertinent stuff and none of the buttons and empty white space.

If you do not usually use a news reader as your inbox for the internet this tip isn’t going to pay as many dividends in efficiency. The real benefit of this tip is if you’re able to check up on one of these miscellaneous feeds while processing all your other internet intake. You are using a RSS news reader aren’t you?

If you are not, its time to start unless you prefer being a reactive gaping hole that anyone with something to sell can lead to their lair and shovel stuff in. News readers give you complete control over what you see. They bring all the information you want to you in one place so you don’t have to go out and hunt it down while dodging the endless distractions.

They make getting the information you want quicker, saving you tons of time. What a deal.

Subscribe to all the stuff out there you like to see regularly or may like to see later at some point. Next, organize all your feeds in a way that suits you. Now you’ll be able to “check the internet” the same way you check your email. Start with the feed to this blog.

Anything science has not proven – if it is not observable and reproducible under controlled conditions, etc, it is suspect as hogwash.

Some challenges with this kind of thinking:

Science is not a “source” of truth but there’s a danger in treating it this way, or as the title of this post says, as dogma. I’m no scientist myself, but I see science as more of a method – sort of a structure of a process. The goal is observing, discovering, and learning the truth that is already there, not to “lay down the incontrovertible truth.”

Careful scientists know their own limitations. Honest scientists say “I have no friggin’ clue” much more often than “this is how it likely is,” at least outside their given discipline, and even within their field of study “I don’t know” is much more “truthier” than offering an accepted theory. Productive scientists are curious – and I mean really curious, openly curious.

To observe something, you have to be in the right place to observe it and observing it in the appropriate context. When there isn’t enough care about knowing the limitations of the context of observation, the conditions, etc, scientists can establish the truth of all sorts of things – like spontaneous generation. I mean hey, you leave food out, you start seeing flies – obviously the flies are coming from the food right? Duh!

Like countless other times in the history of science, science itself admitted to its error. Methods of experimentation and observation evolved and more information became available and the truth of where those maggot came from was had.

“Yeah, but that was then, this is now….that was a couple hundred years ago.” A few hundred years is a speck on the timeline of human existence – especially if you listen to the scientists and not the religionists! There’s a real danger (in my mind anyway) in believing we’ve suddenly reached the pinnacle in our generation. I suggest there is an infinite amount more truth to uncover and if there isn’t we should be acting as if there is.

A little of this truth may lay in the bottom of the deepest oceans, a little more in the farther reaches of space, and much more as we explore the irreducible complexity of the stuff we’re made of and what makes everything tick and hum.

I thought I would look for some nice shots of elephants on flickr. Didn’t take long to find one.

Saying caffeine free isn’t entire true. I have been imbibing in Starbucks decaf nearly every day. That has a touch of caffeine left in it. Probably a pretty significant touch. Like a pat or maybe even a gentle rub.

Anyway, I’m halfway there. The experiment was to go a month without caffeine. Primarily I wanted to see if it would improve my sleep. I think it has tho some other variables call it into question.

One thing is for certain – March 1 I’m going to try caffeine again – the same consumption as before, a few cups of coffee in the morning, tea mid day, and none in the evening and see what happens.

My biggest gripe, and I don’t know if this is true everywhere – I doubt it is…is that Starbucks doesn’t like brewing decaf. My “work” Starbucks doesn’t even brew it unless it is requested. Most of them on the island never brew it in the afternoon and evening. Seems backwards.

I was absolutely jones-ing at first. The first few days I didn’t even have decaf coffee, just herbal tea. That just don’t cut it sports fans. The first cup of decaf was like getting a little fix.

Safe to say I am a caffeine addict on some level but it hasn’t made my life unmanageable in any sense. Some day I may develop a really good reason to put the caffeine behind me altogether but right now I’ll manage with it thanks very much.

I do plan to finish the month just because I planned to finish the month. Don’t think I haven’t brushed up against the idea of saying “#@$% it – gimme a quad and a Venti Pike and keep ‘em coming” but I think being true to my wishes feels better. And in 13 days (but who’s counting) I get to say all that without the “#@$% it.”