Meditation for Beginners

Every now and then, friends ask me how to get started with meditation. I'm a longtime Vipassana meditator, and definitely recommend that people try it out. But the minimum time commitment to learn the specific practice I do is a 10-day course.

That's a bug chunk of time, so I rounded up a few resources for getting started that require just 10-15 minutes of sitting:

• This 25-minute, "Mini Anapana for All" audio is a great introduction from Goenka; the first 15 minutes are the important part. It suggests a regular practice of 10-15 minutes per day, morning and evening.
• The 10-min "Group Sitting" audio will also suffice.
• "Brief Instructions for Sitting Meditation" from Audio Dharma is a 5-min quick intro.
• calm.com, via Duncan Davidson

Creepy

I just bought a new pair of shoes, and during the checkout process I was asked to join the store's "VIP" membership program by sharing my full name, zip, email, etc. Apparently this would grant me an immediate 10% in savings, and extend my "trial window" (during which I could return the shoes) from 30 to 90 days.

I told the person handling the checkout that I'd prefer to not join the program, yet she persisted in trying to sell me on it. I declined again, which surprised her — it didn't seem like she'd often encountered someone so willing to pay "full retail price" for their items, when the "VIP" program had such obvious benefits.

Then she said, "I'm going to get in so much trouble for this." I asked her to elaborate, but she didn't share further details about why she'd get in trouble.

I assume this practice is what the NYTimes documented back in April, or is perhaps how the creepy DataLogix stuff works.

Truth

Macklemore:

"Being a rapper is one of the most narcissistic careers in the world. You are surrounded by yourself: interviews, Twitter, Facebook, Billboard charts, YouTube plays, shows, the crowds, awards etc. Fame suffocates the spirit and consumes you if you let it. You wake up thinking about you, and go to bed thinking about you. That’s not a good place to be."

Herbalife long-form

Two great reads:

1) Death and Denial at Herbalife from the LA Times, 2001-02-18

2) The Big Short War from Vanity Fair, 2013-04

Destiny

My favorite comment from the HN thread about Bungie's new game:

It's amazing to see the path Bungie has traveled. They made a couple of Macintosh games in the early 90s, then had a breakout hit Marathon in 1995 on the Mac, back when serious gamers played Doom on the PC and laughed at the Mac (maybe they still do?).

When I was a kid with a Mac, wanting to learn to program games, I read this interview over and over: http://marathon.bungie.org/story/jasonjonesTofTMPG.html 

I had to read this again to remember that the original Marathon game had taken three developers a little less than a year. 

And on re-reading it, it's great to see how much solid, long lasting advice there was in that interview.

#BungieFanForLife

Other notable coverage:

• Seattle Times interview with Activision's Eric Hirshberg
• Variety

Gun Control link roundup

Interesting / notable pieces about the gun debate:

• Mother Jones — 10 Pro-Gun Myths, Shot Down
• Rolling Stone — The NRA vs. America
• Priceonomics — Ugly Charts about Guns in America

Higher Ed

Recently, Chuck and I have been discussing the merits of a college education, which are increasingly debatable given the rising cost of such programs and the availability of online learning material.

Here are some links that have turned up in our thread, and afterward:

• Quora thread, "How much is a US college degree worth?"
• Quora thread, "Why have tuition costs consistently gone up much faster than inflation in the US?"
• Stanford faculty experiences with online courses, which are a new supplement/alternative to traditional degrees
• MIT Tech Review article about economist Josh Angrist, who's been studying this topic for decades
• North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory's silly comments about liberal arts degrees not preparing students for their eventual employment later in life
• Mark Cuban advocating that students considering 4-year college start by assembling a "college value plan"
• The Awl — "Venture Capital's Massive, Terrible Idea For The Future Of College"
• Bill Gates in a recent conversation with five journalist/bloggers
• Clay Shirky's followup piece in The Awl

Company Values

A poignant quote from Nicholas Carr:

"It might seem kind of strange for a company to build a search engine — a pretty costly undertaking — using criteria that it knows to be debased, to be anything but objective. But to Facebook, it’s business-as-usual. Here’s the difference between Google and Facebook: Larry Page recognized that commercial corruption was a threat to his ideal. For Mark Zuckerberg, commercial corruption is the ideal."

I've always admired Google for having a clearly-articulated mission and set of values since its earliest days. And even if these weren't fully-formed when Larry and Sergey first started hacking on PageRank, the company culture they created was such that values guided their choices.

Facebook, however, started as an adolescent prank, and seems to have bolted on a mission and values much later on, as-needed by outside circumstances.

[via Buzz]

Followup, 2013-01-29: Chuck pointed me to this CNN article about Clay Christiansen, which describes our "capitalist's dilemma" where companies are essentially trapped in a cycle of over-focusing on efficiency innovations, which are great for them in the short term but detrimental in the long term. Instead they should be focusing on "empowering innovations," which create new markets and jobs, and improve the economy for everyone (not just their own balance sheets).

Yay, Capitalism

High finance is both fascinating and frightening, and thus a quote from Fortune's piece on SurveyMonkey's upcoming financing round caught my eye:

"We generate all this cash and don't have any use for it." —Jimmy Lee, vice chairman J.P. Morgan's investment bank

I'm sure there are plenty of things in the world that could benefit from someone else's excess cash, things that would make the world a better place / feed the hungry / improve the environment / etc. But companies operating without higher principles end up in situations like these. Dave Goldberg should read Let my People Go Surfing.

RIP, AaronSw

I didn't know Aaron well, but was fortunate enough to hang out with him a few times during his short but brilliant life. Despite his age I always considered him a role model, for his technical prowess as well as his vision, idealism and passion. He didn't just think and talk about how the world could be better, he devoted his life to actually making it better.

One quick, trivial memory I'll share, from the first time we connected — back in ~2005 he posted something on his site about his server's hard drive crashing, so a few of us from blogger-team paypal'd him some $ to buy a new one; he would have been ~19 years old at the time:

A few months later we got to meet him in person, when he visited Google for lunch, and I saw him a couple more times over the years, at conferences and whatnot — throughout I've remained a fan of his writing, causes and code.

To see him in action, watch his Freedom to Connect 2012 talk.

His premature death is an utterly tragic loss for humanity. Rest in peace, Aaron.

(followup: videos from his memorial in SF)

---
Coverage:

• Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman
• Matt Haughey
• Cory Doctorow
• Larry Lessig (and his followup)
• Tim Berners-Lee
• Brewster Kahle
• Peter Eckersley of the EFF
• Alex Stamos, expert witness in Aaron's court case
• John Schwartz in the New York Times
• Timothy Lee in ArsTechnica
• Aaron Greenspan
• Dan Gillmor
• Doc Searls
• Henry Farrell
• Orin Kerr in The Volokh Conspiracy (and part two)
• The Economist
• PDF Tribute
• The JSTOR Liberator
• Alex Macgillivray on Twitter — "If you'd like to give money to some of @aaronsw's causes: Demand Progress, OpenLibrary, Creative Commons"
• Rick Falkvinge — The Petition to Fire Aaron Swartz's Prosecutor Reaches its Goal
• Ronaldo Lemos — 2009 email interview with Aaron
• Tim Wu in The New Yorker
• Mike Masnick at Techdirt
• Rebecca Greenfield at The Atlantic Wire — "A Guide to the Finger-Pointing"
• Adam Clark Estes in The Atlantic Wire — "The Congressional Backlash Over Aaron Swartz's Suicide Has Begun"
• Robin Amer, re: Aaron's funeral
• Ian Millhiser — "Aaron Swartz Faced A More Severe Prison Term Than Killers, Slave Dealers And Bank Robbers"
• The Huffington Post
• Philip Greenspun on the effects of plea bargaining
• Yusuf Simonson in The Daily Muse
• Health Care Renewal blog on some of Carmen Ortiz's past prosecutions
• Michael Daly in The Daily Beast
• Senator John Cornyn following up with the Attorney General
• Jennifer Granick from the Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society
• Kevin Cullen in The Boston Globe
• Charles Pierce in Esquire
• Dan Kennedy in The Huffington Post
• Joseph Perla on a new book, On Internet Freedom
• Scott Horton in Harpers
• retired Federal Judge Nancy Gertner
• the Los Angeles Times on Aaron's funeral
• Carmen Ortiz's official statement
• James Boyle's response to Orin Kerr
• The Boston Herald on Ortiz's office's handling of future cases
• Noam Cohen in the New York Times
• Gregory Foster, "Finishing what Aaron started with PACER"
• Steve Schultze's background on their PACER work
• Aaron's own Freedom of Information Act request & profile, from 2009
• Declan McCullagh in CNET
• The Economist on Plea Bargaining
• the Andrew Auernheimer case, which is startlingly similar to Aaron's
• the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's letter to Eric Holder
• The Economist (print edition)
• Adrian Lamo in PandoDaily
• Andrew Payne's letter to Carmen Ortiz
• Mark Suster
• Farhad Manjoo in Slate

Aaron's causes

• Rootstrikers
• Demand Progress
• Open Library
• Creative Commons
• Progressive Change Campaign Committee

Calls to Action

• Dan Gillmor: "We can honor Aaron’s life in the best way by doing what he did at his amazing best. We can work to expand an open Net and society, and to make “liberty” a word that means something again."
• Marcia Hofman: "Let's Fix Draconian Computer Crime Law"
• Gregory Foster: "I looked into Aaron Greenspan's proposed Operation Asymptote, and I wanted to recommend it as an effective and poetic tribute to Aaron Swartz's memory."