Fred Yankowski

Links to various lifehacker articles about setting up XMBC. - Fred Yankowski

Explains how the big firms are using their advantage to get an unfair deal when trading with regular investors, probing with small offers very quickly to determine a small trader's limit price. - Fred Yankowski

Imaginary colors. - Fred Yankowski

Making sushi at home without using raw fish. - Fred Yankowski

A grab-bag of short suggestions about how to live. - Fred Yankowski

"What do you think would motivate people more — getting them to focus on what they are about to do or asking them to think about whether they will do it or not? When a group of students were given one or the other of these contemplative tasks before facing an anagrams exercise, the ones who had asked themselves whether they would do it completed more anagrams than the group who were just thinking about doing it. In another experiment, just writing ‘Will I’ rather than ‘I will’ several times before the task meant that students were likely to commit themselves to more time exercising during the coming week. Interestingly, just writing the word ‘will’ was not enough — it had to be the question form." - Fred Yankowski

"intelligence emanates from one’s ability to control their selective attention." - Fred Yankowski

"While most techniques for fighting off errant impulses focus on reducing our emotional attraction to the reward ... this new research suggests that an even more effective approach involves activating vivid, episodic associations about future events. In other words, before we decide whether or not to make a big purchase, or take out a mortgage, or make a donation to a 401(k), or contemplate a policy devoted to climate change, we should spend a few minutes thinking about what we're doing tomorrow. Interestingly, these associations don't need to have any connection to the decision in question - it's enough to simply contemplate the future. One possible explanation for this effect is that activating our "future-oriented processing" helps make the future seem more tangible and real. As a result, we're better able to shrug off the visceral emotional pull of immediate rewards. We can't always get what we want, but if we think about the future first, sometimes we can get what we need." - Fred Yankowski

Our brains are set up to do two things at once, but not three, a French team reports in the journal Science. - Fred Yankowski

Some recommendations for simple "to do" lists. - Fred Yankowski

"Where self-esteem is entirely egotistical, requiring that the world should pay court to oneself whatever oneself happens to be like or do, and demands nothing of the person who wants it, self-respect is a social virtue, a discipline, that requires an awareness of and sensitivity to the feelings of others. It requires an ability and willingness to put oneself in someone else's place; it requires dignity and fortitude, and not always taking the line of least resistance." - Fred Yankowski

1. Psychological distance. 2. Fast forward in time. 3. Absurdist stimulation. 4. Use bad moods. 5. Combining opposites. 6. Path of _most_ resistance. 7. Re-conceptualization. - Fred Yankowski

Pema Chodron writes about lovingkindness toward one's self and others, and about tonglen. - Fred Yankowski

"Fowler and Christakis, in an open access article in PNAS, demonstrate that one cooperative act has a multiplying effect. In an iterative game, when a subject gives money to help someone else, the recipients of that cash then became more likely to give their own money away in the next round. This leads to a cascade of generosity, in which the itch to cooperate spreads first to three people and then to the nine people that those three people interact with, and then to the remaining individuals in subsequent waves of the experiment. " - Fred Yankowski

A video of a virtual choir, 185 voices recorded separately and then combined. - Fred Yankowski