I am a fan of gadgets, no real surprise, especially watches - I love my Garmin Forerunner I got last year, though I am only so-so on my Suunto golf watch. But Michael Parekh found a new device that tracks how you are sleeping and can change when its alarm goes off to wake you depending on what your sleep-state is. Cool. Add it to the wishlist!

Are we at the nadir of creativity levels in our working lives? Obviously there are people whose jobs are to be creative, but even for them, is there less creativity in the way they do their jobs than there was before? How does the proliferation of software standards, programs and templates affect this… I get the sense that a lot of times, that even when people are doing something creative, they’re starting from a template that pushes them down a certain funnel.

I don’t just mean PowerPoint, but that’s a great example. We’ve all seen presentations with the same crappy clip art, same stupid types of slide transitions - for a good description of how PPT stifles not just creativity but limits the clarity and usefulness of data and analysis presented check out Edward Tufte’s “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint”. At $7 for the essay it is a worthwhile purchase.

Employees should be encouraged to think and be creative. Thomas Watson Sr., founder of IBM, encouraged his employees to come into the office a little later than usual if they wanted to spend some time thinking. It ultimately helped the company, he felt. Google’s rule of letting people work on their own projects for a small portion of their time is nice but it also obviously has to be part of a culture of creativity too. Giving people the time to think for themselves will ultimately help the business and their sanity, but thinking needs to go along with creative exploration. One thing I’d love to hear is about ways companies encourage this or do this in their environments, structured or unstructured (it may be as simple as having a lounge with some LEGO bricks or GeoMags but it’s probably more than that)… because I fear that otherwise we risk becoming a nation and a world of straight-ahead thinking cube-zombies.

Straying a bit from my regular topics, I found this story about DNA divergence within twins fascinating regarding something I’d only recently heard about, namely epigenetics.

Their study of identical twins show the genetic code itself does not change, but rather chemical changes after birth alter the way the gene is expressed, a process known as epigenetics… This supports theories that environmental factors, such as smoking, diet and exercise, affect DNA directly, the researchers said.

Remains to be seen what this all means, but the idea that our environment can override some of our genetic predispositions is interesting and scary.

According to Jeff Pulver, Skype has released a price list now for offering users the ability to call out of the Skype network to the regular switched telephone network. Skype is very cool: you can “call” other Skype users for free… Affordable (better quality) VoIP in concert with increasing broadband penetration is changing the telecommunications landscape.

Yay! I’m really enjoying getting the New York Times back on My Yahoo once again, via the backdoor of pulling in an RSS feed! Also, have some of my favorite friends’ blogs feeding into My Yahoo as well… be sure to check out the RSS feed beta.

The demise of the ebook is greatly overplayed anyway, but not a surprise. A dedicated ebook reader of course is something that will be a very difficult sell for consumers when a cheap, portable (albeit static) alternative is widely available (actual books). The other side of it, namely people reading books on their PCs, is also constrained by technology but more by people not wanting to spend *another* three hours sitting in front of their laptop or desktop computer.

I’ve found, however, the portable/electronic audiobook to be a great hybrid technology. In getting a new PDA which has flash memory slots, I also recently tried and subscribed to Audible.com’s service which I think is tremendous. The reader is a bit slow when I start it on my PocketPC probably because I downloaded the entire 5:45hr thing onto it at once, but I just pop my headphones in and “read” the book while I’m traveling or at the gym. It’s perfect for me. I subscribe for $15 a month to the service. And if I get bored, I just switch over to listening to MP3 music… Despite the color screen and improvements in type, I still find it annoying to try to read anything substantial on the PDA. But listening is much much easier…