Each year, Edge.org asks some of the brightest minds in science and technology to consider one question and respond in essay form. The question for 2006 is:

What is your dangerous idea?

Leo Chalupa, Ophthalmologist and neurobiologist at the University of California, Davis chose a 24-hour period of absolute solitude:

“Our brains are constantly subjected to the demands of multi-tasking and a seemingly endless cacophony of information from diverse sources. Cell phones, emails, computers, and cable television are omnipresent, not to mention such archaic venues as books, newspapers and magazines.

My dangerous idea is that what’s needed to attain optimal brain performance is a 24-hour period of absolute solitude. By absolute solitude I mean no verbal interactions of any kind (written or spoken, live or recorded) with another human being. The only activity not proscribed is thinking.

Imagine if everyone in this country had the opportunity to do nothing but engage in uninterrupted thought for one full day a year!”

In August last year in my old blog, I wrote something which echoes this:

I’m still pondering the topic of interruptions in our day. I’m finding that the more and more I work on computers, the more difficult is it to really get to a deeper level of thinking and it’s a struggle to turn off all the potential sources of interruptions while working on something. I know I’ve posted about this before and I don’t really have anything new to add, it’s just something I wrestle with. Everyone asking me a question, emailing me wanting help or a reply, an inbox that fills up quite rapidly, txt messages which stream in and I’m not that excited to get them.

Were we meant to multitask?

Sitting in the mail box today came a Happy New Year card from Google! I’m impressed that it arrived at the right time - the first day of mail delivery of the New Year.

I’ve now got a Google t-shirt (”I’m feeling lucky” is on the back), Google pens and a Google card. I was wondering what other Google items exist because Darren over at Problogger recently showed a picture of the Adsense Christmas gift that went out to some of the biggest publishers and then I found…. Google Store which I never knew existed. You can now brand everything - from baby’s first clothing to dog’s leashes - with Google.

Comments (4)

• New release DVDs feeds… for New Zealand release dates
• New release movies feeds… for New Zealand release dates
• New release New Zealand CDs (Amazon wouldn’t stock most of them, and they’d be imports and have later release dates)
• New release magazines (especially New Zealand ones I read) with feature article highlights
• New clothing items at my favourite stores (saves me going to the mall to see what’s new)
• Trademe feeds for search terms (our version of ebay)
• Latest news feed for the NZ Herald (their RSS service is overly complicated, doesn’t include breaking news and has only 40 words in the excerpt)

While much focus went into providing multi-language sites, many services are still very much US or North American-specific. I’d love to be able to find New Zealand RSS feeds but unfortunately we’re still a little slow off the mark.

When Outlook 12 comes out with a built-in RSS-reader, RSS will hit mainstream internet users - even if they don’t realise they’re using it. Perhaps then, companies will realise that RSS feeds are like the next generation newsletter.

I am waiting on this book to arrive from Amazon in the next week or two and got thinking about AJAX tonight. If you’d asked me what AJAX was six months ago or earlier, I would have said it was a household cleaner:

…which made me wonder, since AJAX is a registered trademark to Colgate, have there been any lawsuits over the use of it? A quick search on google brought up the following information:

Colgate-Palmolive vs. Ajax.org. Those of us over the age of 40 remember Mom using the blue can of Ajax to scrub the pots and pans after dinner. Colgate-Palmolive took exception to the use of that trademark name by “Ajax.org.” Public support for the general information portal website was so strong, however, that the corporate giant eventually dropped the suit. (Source, 2003)

Ajax.org is now practically an empty site. I can’t seem to find any information on Colgate taking legal action against the current use of AJAX. (Unlike Sellotape ®) Since books are now being published, I guess the cat is out of the bag.

I thought I’d share a little plugin I’ve been using that I recently wrote, because I wasn’t happy with the default display of trackbacks in Wordpress. If you have any problems, please let me know.

This plugin changes the display of trackbacks from:

[...] Trackback text [...]

to something a little more readable - I have it producing:

Trackback text …

but you could change the plugin code to suit your tastes, just change $pre and $post to what you’d like to appear before and after trackbacks.

Download
http://www.cre8d-design.com/code/rvc_trackback.txt

Changes
3 Jan 06: Version 1