1. 10,000 hour skills, and not just useful ones. The lost ones. Going round the science museum recently I was struck by all the lost expertises. How many people these days knows how to make a mechanical integrator for a tape based differential equation solver? Lets have more people who can thatch a roof to perfection or create ornate plasterwork.

2. Learning. For its own sake, just for the joy of knowing. Learning both in the sense of being taught established knowledge and studying to make new knowledge, to increase our knowledge of the world. Past, present and future…

3. Lazing around. Just because there are workaholics like me who can often only get satisfaction from doing something does not mean everyone is like that. Some people really do get honest and simple pleasure from lying on the beach, that should be celebrated.

4. Family time. Not “quality time with the kids” but doing whatever it is you want to do together. Dinner, walk in the park, football match, being there not because you should, but because you want to.

5. Drinking great beer and wine, eating good food, which of course requires that people make more of it! Down with processed crap and McDonalds!

6. Random monkey noises, any world would be better with more random monkey noises.

7. Journalism. Yes, journalism. The thing that is meant to be being killed by twitter and blogs. Not the journalism of oracles speaking from hidden sources, but people who dip into the flow of information and process it, comprehend it and pass it on. Who do the hard job of working out what is happening right now.

8. Sport. Both to watch and to play.

9. Computer games, writing but also playing. If someone can be honest with themselves and get fulfillment in a virtual world good on them.

10. Getting excited and making things.

And to finish the most important one of them all:

11. Extending this list, finding that collection of things that fulfills you honestly and completely. To sum it up finding what has meaning to you personally not just some value decided by society.

My first week on twitter from socialcollider.net

It took me a lot less time to get into twitter (@gelada) than to get a blog. However in general it is said that cycles of social media are getting faster. I realised that part of my problem, and a general problem when I look at communities online, is a fear of breaking social conventions I am not aware of. This probably comes from my English heritage.

It is not enough to be aware of this. In fact rationally I am perfectly aware that there are almost certainly no clearly established twitter conventions. A good example is how many tweets are acceptable in a day. Everyone has a certain level and I occasionally get irritated by some of the people I am following who over-post. In particular, I feel that it is at least bad style to post more than one tweet together to say something. The brevity is the key to the medium. Of course I have already broken this, which is why I say it is bad style rather than bad manners. A rule of style can be justifiably broken, however that should be thought about. It is up to my followers to decide whether the style decision I made was good or bad for them. If I make too many bad decisions they can move. That in the end is the essence, twitter currently works wonders in finding small niches. Finding the people who interest you deeply, rather than sticking with the mainstream media which have to interest a lot of people a little.

This actually leads to a fear to me. Will the growing ease of connecting to people make the process too efficient? This, combined with the firehose nature of twitter, is something I will have to negotiate with my dwindling supply of willpower. I need to make sure that I do continue to get things done, rather than get overwhelmed by potential ideas and contacts.

So the fact that I could (almost too easily) connect with interesting people on twitter (and the fact that they were there) has dragged me in. What am I going to do with it? I am not yet sure what style of tweeting I will adopt, or more deeply as Paul Prudence points out, what personality will emerge.  I am trying to stay away from too many funny comments as I feel that a) there is already plenty of this, and b) friendly feedback from my nearest and dearest has pointed out that I my funny comments are not generally considered so.  I do not promise to have no such comments, however! I started by thinking about the literary possibilities, in particular a haiku-like form, 5 sentences with 30, 29, 28, 27 and 26 characters.  I am not sure, however, that twitter is the best place for literary effort.  Though in another aspect of personal style I prefer to use full sentences and punctuation, as I attempt to in text messages.  So the best way to find out what I am doing is to look back at what I have said. There will probably be a lot on mathematics and art, with the smattering of comments on how to improve the world, and the occasional monkey joke.

So, thanks for reading and please let me know if I offend or break your personal style rules. I might not change anything but I would be interested to know.

Finally on language, when I started to write these pages I complained about the language. I simply do not like the words blogging and blogs.  To show that I am not always a language fuddy-duddy, I will say that twitter and tweet I accept wholeheartedly.

PS, why does twitter need to be centralised? Will this version be scalable? Personally for several reasons I would prefer a radically localised version, this should be about connections between individuals and small groups, not how we all plug into the same big machine.

The niche is the thing, friends. It’s the future, and it’s here. Things like this little rhubarb are just the earliest Braxton Hicks contractions of a change that will be getting way, way weirder than most people think.

But, if we each have the arrogance to demand the credit that we’re due, an astonishing number of opportunities begin to unfold. We learn who really made what we love; not just who put it someplace where lots of people can see it. We discover whom we admire and we make decisions about who to collaborate with.

Merlin Mann, Free as in ‘Me’

When I started this blog I put up a post about why.  The desire to put something out there, to say things I thought were important and hope that they manage to find the people who are interested in them.  Though I have become comically addicted to watching the rise of my rather small page views, I try not to chase them.  I know that it makes a huge difference not just who the people looking at the site are, but how they react.  If I can change a few people’s opinions about mathematics in a small way my work is worthwhile.  The difference between this metric and the page views is that it is very hard to measure.  Am I putting in a lot of effort to words that are never truely read?  As an academic of course I am used to this, but at least published papers look good on my CV.  

So I am proudly preaching to my own tiny niche.  Why do I think that niches are important?  Moving away from mainstream to a world of overlapping niches, we can admit  that there is no “real world”.  The one that people regularly accuse others of not living in, but rarely say about themselves.  In collecting their own personal collection of niches people have to ask questions about who they are.  Hopefully (I put my utopian hat on here) this will lead to an increase of the attitude that whatever one does it should be done well.  This includes consuming.  Taking the time to find out where things (from food to blog posts) come from.  Thinking about things, not just taking the convenient whether convenience is the cheap item or the easy opinion.  Maybe, just maybe niche blogs and easy publication can help some of these things grow.  

I will admit a slight hidden agenda in posting this.  I have been a fan of 43 folders for a long time, and almost worshiper of Merlin Mann since the change of direction.  His post has already attracted over 4000 comments so I doubt he will actually read this, but I can hope!  One criticism though Merlin, saying something is a polemic is just as much a sign of “people who think they are clever” as saying it is a rambling rant.