mathoda.com

Here’s two interesting perspectives on the use of time:

1. Peter Drucker suggested measuring what you spend your time doing. Most people will discover that they spend alot of their day on activities that they really don’t care about. Drucker teaches that by merely eliminating such activities, it frees up time for the activities you do care about, and leads to more personal satisfaction. But the key is to keep measuring one’s use of time occasionally, and see how it matches up to one’s goals.
2. Benjamin Franklin also had a habit of measuring his use of time. He carried around a list of virtues, and if he felt he had failed on one of them, he checked the list for that day. For more on the wise Mr. Franklin’s practice, see http://www.flamebright.com/PTPages/Benjamin.asp

What’s interesting about both of these techniques is that they are both about making yourself accountable to yourself and reality. They create a feedback loop, at the end of which is hopefully a more self satisfied you.

Due to some unfunny cartoons and the violence that followed their dissemination there has been much discussion lately about whether freedom of speech conflicts with one of the world’s most widely held systems of belief. That religion, which holds mankind is most righteous when it submits itself before God, subsuming self ego in service to something far greater, also appears to hold that drawings of God’s prophets should not be made for fear this could lead to idolatry.

Idolatry is defined by dictionary.com as (a) a worship of idols, or (b) blind or excessive devotion to something. The concern appears to be that symbols are powerful. The symbol may be elevated in place of God, and mankind may end up submitting before the symbol, rather then God.

What then to make of people rioting because they are angered their symbol, or their right not to have a symbol made, has been tarnished? Wouldn’t the real way to not be idolatrous be to recognize the message of God’s prophets, but avoid giving any symbol, in this case a cartoon, more meaning than it should have?

There is a very human desire to live in a world where certain things do not exist: child pornography and murder being just two examples. However it strikes me that many of us, and not just those worshipping under any particular belief, hold symbols so sacred that any defamation of them (such as the burning of our flag) is an attack not just on the symbol, but felt personally by us as well. We have so associated ourselves with the symbol that an attack on them is an attack on our person, on our ego.

Symbols are thus used to unite groups to action, to drive them towards a certain fate. Soldiers, and civilians too, have chosen to die to protect a flag, and have been counted heroic for it. Yet symbols are in the end inanimate, and unfeeling. Is it righteous to give them such importance? And in doing so, do we all become idolatrous?

Update: In Yemen, Mohammed al-Asaadi the editor of the now no longer published English language newspaper Yemen Observer, has been thrown in jail for insulting prophet Mohammed.  The act that led to the criminal charges?  Running an article denouncing the Danish cartoons, accompanied by the cartoons which had an X run through them.  He was recently interviewed in jail by Newsweek:

Do you regret now the decision to run the cartoons, however censored, given the climate?  There are plenty of religious fanatics in Yemen, even if they’re a minority.

We had a meeting to discuss this before we published them, so it wasn’t an accident.  And we felt that these cartoons had already been shown on Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya [satellite TV] and millions of Muslims had seen them.  And I personally believe these cartoons should be published.  If we make it unlawful to look at them, we give them an importance they don’t deserve, as if there’s something holy or special about them. We should be able to discuss them openly, which is what we did.

For more of the interview, click here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11414568/

What will the here web, the mobile, in your pocket web be like in a year? Today a graphics chip maker announced an all in one computer chip, on sale by the end of the year, that would provide the chip based processing for screen resolutions of 1024 x 768 (equal to many desktop monitors) and capable of taking up to 10 megapixel photos (Nvidia’s new graphics chip). And a hard drive manufacturer has introduced a 1 inch hard drive that stores 12 gigabytes (Seagate’s 12GB 1″ hard drive). With such advances, the need for robust broadband wireless access grows more acute.