Monthly Archives: February 2007

Modified Meditation for GTD

I practice a modified form of Zen meditation. Typically thoughts that come up while sitting should be let to pass by, somewhere off away from your conscious attention.

This is complete anathema to the Getting Things Done methodology.

When I’m meditating, a lot of times things that have been bugging me, things I need to do or take care of, that have been hiding beneath my conscious level of thought come up. So, I do what any good GTDer would do. I write them down. I keep a notebook in front of me and write them down immediately, and then go back to meditating. This way I really get them out of my head, rather than trying to somehow forget or ignore them, and they’re recorded so that I can properly deal with them later.

Once my dictaphone arrives I may try leaving it recording while I meditate, and reviewing it afterward. That way I could simply speak rather than having to move my arms from the proper posture.

I noticed tonight, and have noticed on other occasions, that things build up when I don’t meditate daily. I may think that everything is out of my head, but when I sit down to actually meditate, all kinds of stuff comes forward. Today it had only been 4 days since my last meditation. I filled an entire page of college-ruled paper (one item per line) with items I needed to somehow address. When I went a week without meditating, I filled one and a half pages at the same density.

Part of me wants to keep track of how many items come up while meditating and relate it to my inter-meditation interval or minutes of meditation per week. I’m pretty busy right now, but I’ll probably do it at some point. From my sample where n = 2, it seems to be a nonlinear relationship. 1.5 pages for 7 days, 1 page for 4. I guess it could be linear, but the y-intercept is not zero. (I think it’s 1/3?) If I always have 1/3 of an idea in my head immediately after meditating, that could be valid.

Flying Spaghetti Monster Update

Two things about FSM. (How appropriate, the day after Darwin Day, yes?)

Molly has alerted me to the hilarious FSM hate-mail page, which has its own RSS feed for your regular entertainment purposes.

Additionally, I found this Baltimore FSM sign on Flickr. It plays on two different Baltimore “sayings”. It’s not far away. I think I need to make a pilgrimage to be a true Pastafarian:
Blieve, Hon

Beating Heart Model

Dr. Viatcheslav Gurev, a postdoc in our lab, has been working on an electromechanical model of the heart. Here’s the first demonstration, showing one beat during bi-ventricular pacing:

MemoryCell Beta out for Intel-Chip Based Macs (ICBMs… hehe)

This is one of my favorite applications for Mac OS X, and it was only available for PowerPC because of major differences in memory stuff on a low level. Rogue Amoeba has come out with a beta version for Intel.

It shows, in the menu bar, the memory usage of the foreground application. For example, right now I can see that Firefox is using 76.7 MB of private memory. Link to the Intel beta page here. If you want the PowerPC version, go here. It’s at the bottom of the page.