Facebook manners

If you ran into an old friend you hadn't seen in ten years on the street, you'd probably end up having a long and interesting catch-up conversation.

However, when people see an old friend they haven't seen in ten years on Facebook, they usually just quietly friend each other without exchanging a word of communication.

Why is that?

IM manners

And since we're on the subject of manners...  I tend to use IM very minimally and I tend to give it full attention instead of that "continuous partial attention" crap.  So I'm wondering about conventions for saying goodbye in IM.  Do people usually explicitly end IM conversations or do they just let them drift off?  I've seen (and done) both.  If IM is typically about continuous partial attention, then actually explicitly ending a conversation is less important.

I tend to use IM to either do quick coordination or to talk to people on the other side of the world when skype is too bandwidth-heavy.  Generally if an IM conversation with someone nearby lasts more than five minutes, I pick up the phone and call them, as the phone is a much richer medium of communication than strings of text. 

[personaldev] The hypocritical self-help guru = The priest who downloads porn

I had the amusing thought that many self-improvement gurus probably suffer from the same secret hypocrisy as the priests who rail against the sins of the flesh and then go home to download porn onto their computers.  Let's imagine such a self-help guru, who secretly struggles with procrastination and lack of focus even as they publicly preach their techniques for staying on top of things.  Would they be a good person to learn from?  No, because they're not being intellectually honest, so they have no ability to really evaluate their own performance.  Thus, it's worth looking for people who are able to admit their own failures and analyze them in a constructive way.  This blogger: ( http://dirtsimple.org/ )  who I learned about last weekend, appears to do just that.  He's someone who has struggled through a lot of things related to mental orientation and is public about his own continuing challenges even though he heads up some mind hacker's guild and has lots of people following his blog.

It's probably also not necessarily a good idea to try to learn organization from from someone who's always had a natural talent for organization.  One of the many interesting points brought up by the excellent book Refactor your Wetware is that experts are not necessarily the best people to teach a skill to novices.  Experts are so good that most of their skills are automated as intuition and not easily explainable in a verbal way.  Intermediates, on the other hand, are more able to teach novices because their skills are still declarative as opposed to intuitive.  Of course, there are experts who are good teachers, but that's because they have specifically studied the act of teaching and have looked at the skill acquisition paths that will work well for novices.  The book's analysis of these issues is based on the Dreyfus Model of skill acquisition. 

Where cheeses/butter/yogurt come from

A few days ago I was talking with some friends about how people don't really know where their foods come from and how they're made.  I'd especially love to see a giant flowchart around milk products, with cow/goat/sheep milk at the top and all the different cheeses at the bottom.  A friend mentioned seeing one on a billboard in Canada, but I couldn't find any images of it online.  I did find this, which is painful to read but provides the relevant info:



Here's another one that focuses more on the protein vs fat broken out of the milk.

I'd love to have these charts for various different types of food.  (corn and corn products, beef, ice cream/gelato, wheat, rice, soybeans and all that processed vegetarian stuff).  They'd make nice posters. 

Update:  Here's a way better one, via [Bad username or unknown identity: easwaran  .  ]