Saturday

Cunctando regitur mundus – Waiting, one conquers all.

The Cost of Free: It’s ironic that advocates of free online content charge hefty fees to speak at events

The above article prompted a rather weak response from Doctorov: The Real Cost of Free.

Today I read the response to the response, and I am, again, in agreement with the author, Helienne Lindvall. Maybe the tide is turning at last.

Interesting character analyis of TSA agents by a prosecutor and as a defense attorney.

Figure skating with a head cold (photo)

Great piece of Manhattan history: The Abandoned Palace At 5 Beekman Street – what a building!

Would love to try this with one of these. 85mpg.

Know Your Options at the Airport | American Civil Liberties Union
Fingerprinting:
All visitors and lawful permanent residents are fingerprinted on entry into the U.S. from abroad.

That’s a new one. For each and every entry?
I find that it’s getting scary.

New York




29th street between 6th and 8th avenue was very interesting. I noticed a pigment store, a fencing store and a Ginkgo tree….

Tuesday

New York was great. Playing solo is a great challenge that I enjoy very much. I had problems keeping the treble strings in tune. Told the audience that guitar players spend half of the time tuning and the other half playing out of tune. Asked Stephen about his recent experience with the D’Addario Titanium trebles and he told me he was also struggling to keep them in tune. I will put a regular set of D’Addario Composites on today and will email my rep at D’Addario to find out whether they changed the formula for the Titaniums and whether other guitarists have reported tuning problems as well. For sure the heat and humidity of the Blue Note stage did not help, but what I experienced was not fun – although probably typical for guitarists pre WW2, using gut strings…

Awoke to a sprinkling of snow on the landscape. Very pretty.

Schizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person’s DNA. See this article in Discover.

The article also mentions that everyone already carries the virus that causes multiple sclerosis.

It would seem to me that, especially in light of these discoveries, we should tread more ligthly with our chemistry set. Environmental pollution might have a very negative effect on the human body’s ability to control any of those viruses.

This also ties in with something Jon and I recently discussed. Farming cultures have a natural ebb and flow of time and work, and therefore stress. In the Winter a farmer will cut wood for the oven, might pickle foods and do other odds and ends, but Winter is mainly a time, I would think, of renewal. And by the time Spring comes around one is ready to get out there and work.

Modern schedules are not only pretty hectic year round, we are adding on top of that the stress of constantly being connected. I watch people, updating something while walking, emailing while waiting for their coffee, texting while running across the street. There is no downtime, espcially in the U.S. where vacations are incredibly short. I think that drives up stress levels tremendously. Add to that the (fast-)food most people seem to allow into their bodies… and, well, you see where I am going with this.

Synthesis: Will the Internet Destroy Us? – Harvard Business Review book reviews of Overconnected: The Promise and Threat of the Internet by William H. Davidow, and You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier

First they cut Arts and Music, then they cut foreign languages… what’s next?