Toluu

Broadcasting Brain

An uncanny blog by Mark Dykeman

The stimulating yet relentless insanity of paper notebooksToday

I own a lot of notebooks.  Not the ones below…

but I do tend to get a lot of cheap notebooks and scribblers over time.  I make notes to myself all of the time.  Some of them turn into essays, blog posts, or other content.  Some are just there to kill time.  And, sad to say, some of those notes are desperate attempts to keep myself from falling asleep at times when I really, really should be awake.  You can tell because these semi-conscious scribblings gradually trail off into illegible gibberish.  But I digress.

A new notebook feels wonderful.  It’s full of promise;  of undiscovered words; of unseen ideas; of unknown adventures.  Sometimes it’s hard to write the first words in a notebook because you don’t want to spoil the pristine pages, but then you get over that as you start writing, doodling, and otherwise filling in the space.  It’s great.

Every now and then I go through the notebooks that I have on the go and see what’s there

Thoughts from Hugh MacLeod of GapingVoid.comYesterday

The Thoughts From series of interviews are simple: I ask someone ten questions and they respond. It works very well and I hope that you’ll learn some new things from the people featured in these interviews.

Hugh MacLeod runs the incomparable GapingVoid.com website.  Hugh’s succinct and pithy cartoons are all over the Internet.  He’s written a book called Ignore Everybody; blogs in copious quantities; talks about evil plans; creates cube grenades; and is CEO of Stormhoek USA.  He is a creative instigator, striking fear into slow, rigid, arrogant bureaucracies everywhere.  Here are Hugh’s thoughts about ten questions that he graciously agreed to answer for our readers.

Speedlinking – February 5 2010February 5

Here’s some link goodness from the past week:

Random rules for ideas worth spreading – the man behind Unleashing the Ideavirus, Seth Godin, provides a list of ideas about… how to work with ideas.

The Dowager Shadow – Ian M Rountree and Leila Evans have started to publish a new web novel, in installments.  Looks like it’ll be full of mages, adventures, and other fine things.  This link takes you to a teaser page leading up to the start of the novel.  Keep clicking through to read the prologues, Chapter 1, and more as it’s published.  Worth checking out if you’re a fan of swords and sorcery, fantasy fiction, and all that magical stuff.

How To Break A Social Network – on his own blog, Ian M Rountree provides some interesting insights about his use of social n

Book Review – Business Relationships That Last – Ed WallaceFebruary 4

This is a book review of Business Relationships That Last by Ed Wallace.

How I got the book:

Electronic review copy was sent to me on behalf of the publisher (sorry it took me so long to write this, Greenleaf Group Book Press).

Background:

Ed Wallace is the Chief Relationship Officer of  The Relationship Capital Group.  He has many years of experience in sales and business development.

Business Relationships That Last – 5 Steps to Transform Contacts into High Performing Relationships is quite a timely book in this age of social media, networking, trust agents, and generally behaving like a decent human being.

This book focuses on a key concept called relationship capital, which resembles the concepts of the emotional bank account (as per Stephen Covey) or

When a river stops runningFebruary 3

There is a river that runs by my office building, as it has for hundreds of thousands of years.

It’s not running right now, at least not along its surface.  It was running, even through the winter, until yesterday, when temperatures of -25 degrees Celsius finally caused ice to form on the top of the water, bringing its movement to a halt.

I don’t know about you, but the idea of that much water stopping, frozen, is pretty amazing when you think about it.

But what’s really happening when a river freezes?

• Is it that the energy that tends to hold objects at rest becomes stronger than the energy that keeps them moving?
• Or is it that the energy that tends to keep objects moving becomes weaker than the energy that keeps them at rest?

Physics will give us one answer:  that as it grows colder, the energy to keep molecules moving dissipates the colder it get