It’s very challenging to allocate my time wisely and strategically. I often catch myself on political blogs, current events websites or popular general science instead of the more meaty specific subjects I need. I need a plan or system in place.

I love the line “Each of these phases has enriched me, and I often get the feeling that if I could sit down and chat with who I was two years ago, I’d find that person relatively clueless.” And I thought I was an educated person after college. The last few years have been exciting for me finding new areas of study, however I don’t think there will be much more novelty for me academic wise. I think I have saturated the information/knowledge market at least in terms of my interests. I cannot see myself falling in love with some new subject I have never been exposed to. I miss the novelty–at least I have found my main broad 4 or five subjects I love. I guess I will just need to dig a little deeper in each of them. Perhaps its specialization time. It’s just not as exciting as when I first started diving into, but still enjoyable.

Also, I thought I would let you all know I recently read our personality style is about 11-15% of the population. The four color personality test through the PACE organization. I did it through my employer.

All this presupposes that the launch is successful.

It makes sense that perfect rigidity should be impossible when you think about the fact that your string is composed of smaller particles (atoms, molecules) with forces acting to hold them together while maintaining a particular pattern of distances between them. Even under Newtonian mechanics you couldn’t have perfect rigidity for any force that varies with the distance between particles — one particle has to move relative to the others before any forces can change, and it takes time for the other particles to accelerate in response to the change in the forces acting on them.

My “burn cycle” consists of two processes, resentment and reward, that keep the crank turning, giving life its dynamism. Resentment comes from a feeling that one is under the control of other forces, and how they are _treated_ as part of that subjugation. Since it is threatening to them to try to challenge these more powerful people and their institutions, they instead seek resolution through rewarding themselves, like buying Faith Popcorn’s “small indulgences.” Much of our consumption of food and of buying things feeds this half of the cycle, the “burn” cycle. As a result, their resentments are not ‘solved,’ but only masked for a short period of time.

The “learn cycle” is, as suggested, a constant churning of the mind, mixing refraction and reflection. The terms are from optics, but used here to refer to the way the mind builds mental models. One acts through a refractory medium, one’s surroundings, and we actively use slow periods and sleep to reflect on how our actions impacted other people and things in our locality, if any. That reflection is used to refine our mental model of reality, sometimes by tearing some component down and building it in a different way, and more usually, continuing to add to it in ever-widening circles of complexity, as in a fractal (a major rebuild can often be viewed by others as a kind of mental breakdown.)

The “burn cycle” is self-defeating, as the cost of rewards, both in money and in other factors such as poor health and stress, cause each person to have to expose themselves to more and more situations that produce more unequal- (asymmetrical) power situations, each of which simply increases the feelings of resentment. One descends gradually (or dramatically) into a pit of one’s own making (of course, few people in this situation feel they were their fate’s author).

But the “learn cycle” person soars ever higher, with a mental picture that continues to explain more and more. But, the fate of such a person is never to be satisfied with their knowledge and understanding, but to continue to work for more insights and enlightenment.

Could this explanation produce the same dichotomy as Dweck’s model? (see my earlier treatment of this at: http://hearthhealth.wordpress.com/about/previously-published-works/feet-first-early/using-our-feet-to-reduce-our-footprint-the-importance-of-scale-in-life/)