I'm not sure whether our reservoir of psychic energy is unlimited or finite. People under severe torture, for example, consistently don't crack. So that's +1 for the human spirit.

The fact that web videos have to be small and splotchy enable having three music videos arrayed together like that on one screen. TV doesn't do that. The best they have is Picture-in-Picture which nobody uses.

There is something really satisfying and empowering about going to YouTube, clicking on the HTML code, hitting Ctrl+C, then going to my blog and hitting Ctrl+V, repeated 3 times, and creating that.

For lack of a better word, Matt & Kim have excellent "hooks." Better yet, they have three songs from one album with great hooks at the beginning of their songs.

Here they are:

It's eye opening. In fact, some people will be so shocked at how many calories are in their thrice-daily Coke that the "aha" moment will make going on an actual diet unnecessary. Being forced to be aware of what you're eating can often be enough to help people drop weight, says Wadden.

I wonder what other things we can fix by keeping daily records. An e-mail from the office saying how many minutes of YouTube you used that day? A 24-7 webcam that measured how often you smiled that day?

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I started developing iPhone applications. Well, I have some stuff to show for my work!

I created a Tarot reader for the iPhone. Here is a video of the application:

This started out as a personal Tarot reader, but then I brought it to a party and saw its true potential. People lined up to have me do their readings. And I invented things like having my listeners close their eyes and touch the iPhone to pick their cards. Here is a marketing image I put together that shows the kind of use-cases I'm imagining:

So if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, click here to download Party Tarot. It's starting out at $1.99.

It's going to be marketed under the name Nuclear Elements, my current solo freelance company. I got the card images from a 1909 public domain Rider-Waite-Smith Deck on Wikipedia

I think of the cognitive capacities of the whole. For example, This American Life had an episode called Two Steps Back which aired in 2004 about an outstanding high school teacher who is leaving teaching because policies have changed. What's great about the Internet is that now we can have follow-up. That episode aired four years ago, but I can make it relevant right now. I can Google and see that other people are wondering, "so what happened to that teacher?" This is an important step in maturity for the overall hive mind. Memory isn't just archiving information. We've had libraries since the Library of Alexandria. What we're doing now in our "information age" is we're developing an active memory, where relevant histories can be continuously coughed up and indexed faster than it used to ever be.

This is what citizen journalism really adds to the world. It'll never replace old journalism, which to me is paid, direct observation. Old journalists are the eyes. Citizen journalists are the follow-up on what the eyes saw. The newspapers will only report flash points, but to get the follow-up, the blogosphere is just so much better in perseverance or obsession over the topics that were reported last week. The blogosphere keeps stories alive much better than anything out there.

I think it's interesting that Facebook is/was planning on eliminating the distinction between photos you upload and photos where you are tagged in.

This reduces my need to get a digital camera, as I can rely on the hive mind to produce enough event photos.

The level to which this is "covert" is that only the "Gang of Eight" knew about this:

Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.

• Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives
• John Boehner, Republican House Leader
• Harry Reid, Democratic Senate Leader
• Mitch McConnell, Republican Senate Leader
• Silvestre Reyes (D), Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
• Peter Hoekstra (R), Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
• John D. Rockefeller, IV (D), Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
• Kit Bond (R) Ranking Member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

A few months ago Vice President Dick Cheney hinted that he could whisper something in Obama's ear that would change his worldview:

"It's true. We are, in fact, distantly related," the Vice President said. "We haven't talked about a family reunion. I have no objections. I'm not sure Sen. Obama is up for it, at least not before November. He'd probably be fearful I might whisper in his ear and change his whole view of the Middle East," Cheney added.

Is Obama naive? Or is it the problem that our leaders lie to us to, as they think, to protect us? To protect us even from our own insight, such as the National Intelligence Estimate's report that downplays Iran's nuclear program? To our current leadership, it's as if the truth is a annoying hinderance to "what you really want to do."

Here's a great example, Ask Culture vs. Guess Culture:

In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it's OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't even have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

All kinds of problems spring up around the edges. ... Read More

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The keyboards to type that aren't pervasive enough. It's too bad. The modern Windows QWERTY keyboard is a standard, accepted, uniform language for humans. Make something facile, and people will use it.

This concept is something you lay out before doing a task that you have very little experience doing. For example, I have an idea that involves modifying a skateboard to operate like a Segway. Now, the wrong way to go about it is to go to Radio Shack and start trying to hack. Or to take apart a Segway even though I don't have any electrical engineering experience. Both of those attempts would be examples of rushing, or trying to operate like a pro even though you're a dilettante.

What you got to do is figure out, "what's a reasonable amount of time it should take for someone of my experience to accomplish this task." When you start thinking about that, you start thinking about the critical path it'll take for you to get from A to B, considering your experience. So for someone of my experience, someone with no electrical engineering experience, to make a skateboard-Segway, the first thing I'd have to do is probably take an Intro Course in EE, just to familiarize myself with the basics. Or the thing would be to convert the project into maybe 3 smaller, stepping stone projects or milestones. The XP-Adjusted Base Time, then should take me a total of 9 months for me. While as someone who already had the experience could probably do it in two weeks.

The whole point of this exercise in wordplay is to really assume you can do anything, that there's a critical path, a series of steps that aren't that long. If you're a scripter or were good at math in school or can fix your VCR, then there's no reason you can't imagine some brilliant idea, and then take it from idea to reality in less than a year.