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Nov 08

The Personality Pacifier

by Chris Billows in Mental Mischief 0 comments
We all believe that we have personality. We also believe that this personality is pretty static, that a person’s fundamental likes and dislikes, their tastes, and world-views do not change that much. We are a solid entity that possesses a distinct imprint, kind of like a fingerprint. In 1968, distinguished personality theorist Walter Mischel pointed out that correlations between a person’s behavior in one setting and another are often surprisingly low. Mischel’s analysis revealed that the individual’s behavior, when closely examined, was highly dependent upon situational cues, rather than expressed consistently across diverse situations that differed in meaning. For example, people we label very talkative may hardly talk at all at a formal gathering. If personality is measured by one’s behavior, then we find that personality is indeed more fluid. Another theorist, Richard Nisbett, took this argument farther and argued that personality traits are merely cognitive delusions people create regarding their friends and family in order to give their worlds and their relationships an artificial aura of predictability. Thus the personality becomes little more than a mirage that gives us a sense of comfort. Pretty harsh! 😮 Its a jarring message that rips apart a mostly universal understanding of ourselves. […]

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Oct 31

Lesson Two in Using iTunes: Rating Your Songs

by Chris Billows in Hobby Heedings 0 comments
Once you begin importing all of your music, what do you do next? Rate them! iTunes has a robust 5 star rating system that allows you to separate the wheat from the chaff. Since rating music is considered to be a personal matter, there are some who think that it does not matter how these ratings are arrived at. Personally I believe in having some standards or rules when it comes to deciding how to rate music. Here are some suggested standards: 1) Don’t confuse bad music as being the same as music you don’t like. Good and bad is pretty relative (though not completely) when it comes to music. Strive to be objective about what you are rating for. Is it about how the music makes you feel? Do you like the instrumentals? The lyrics? Is it what the artist stands for? The production values? 2) Rate only music that you honestly can appreciate. If you don’t like Rap music, then don’t rate it until you have given it an honest try and can appreciate what it trying to do. I think its an form of intellectual dishonesty to rate something you don’t understand. The challenge is to blend […]

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Oct 28

The Subtle Slope of Self-Determination

by Chris Billows in Spirit Speculations 0 comments
Working in health care, I am faced with questions about a person’s ability to say no to health care treatment or service. Unfortunately, there is so much uninformed thinking about this issue, we waste energy on something that should be much simpler. The problem is that self-determination is a concept that does not possess singular qualities, but is multifaceted and complex. Each facet has a subtle difference that requires some degree of mental focus and contemplation to look at. It is this lack of focus and contemplation that dooms us to be caught up in issues that are not ours to own and also ignore issues that we should deal with. I have spent some time thinking about this and I happy to share how I see these facets existing on the theoretical Slope of Self-Determination: 1) People Have the Right to Make Bad Choices We start out at the top of the the slope. The assumption here is that everyone is competent until proven otherwise. It is both reasonable and practical to assume that people are competent to make their own choices, whether they are good or bad. People are given the freedom to succeed or fail. A person […]

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Oct 12

Lesson One in Using iTunes: Importing

by Chris Billows in Hobby Heedings 0 comments
Since I have publicly disclosed my love affair with iTunes, I thought I would share some the my lessons in love. 😉 The first lesson I learnt in importing one’s music library into iTunes is: Do it right from the beginning. (Not really helpful eh?) 😛 What I mean by “right”, is that you should import all of your songs off the entire CD, and do it at the top end of the bit-rate range. The first mistake I made is that when I started doing the importing about two years ago, I was anxious about running out of hard drive space. I would try to pick the top five songs off every CD. When I started importing my CDs, I would listen to them, identify which tracks that I wanted to import into iTunes, write those down, do the import, and finally place the CD in storage. It became a headache in having to debate when a song made the cut or didn’t. Well, I eventually learned that a song that I might have not liked when I first heard it, might be worth re-listening to when prompted by an article or recommendation. Now I had to go dig […]

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Oct 08

The Dark Side of Human Gratitude

by Chris Billows in Spirit Speculations 0 comments
My friend recently told me that the world and universe was created for human happiness. She commented how the world is grand, amazing, colorful, and full of beauty. Of course, I could not disagree with her. From my own observations and in watching the stunning Planet Earth DVD series, the world appears to be all of these things. Yet was the earth and its various biological systems created for human happiness? Is a stunning sunset with a backdrop of mountains made for humans? We would like to think so… but it assumes that in enjoying these sights and wonders, we are made special. We witness a wonderful sunset and a nice feeling arises. Nothing new there, but it is that rising feeling that tells us more about ourselves than about our environment. For example, a beautiful bird is not put there for bird-watching. It’s foliage is not for our enjoyment. The actual purpose is biological as the beautiful colors are there for the purpose of mating. They are beautiful because beauty works. Its a simple as that. Mountains are there for their own purpose. They were not created for human appreciation but simply represent the collisions of continents. Yet our […]

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Oct 04

A Love Affair with iTunes leads to Marriage with Apple

by Chris Billows in Hobby Heedings 0 comments
I have loved music for as long as I can remember. Playing music on records (I still remember my first record player and albums when I was six), then to cassettes, and then CDs. But it was the combination of music and computers that opened up new possibilities to think about music. Combining music with computers in the form of MP3 files was a revelation for me, but I struggled with finding a program that would do everything I wanted. I tried everything except iTunes since I wrongly believed that I needed an iPod to use it and that it would not play or catalog my MP3 files, just the ones purchased off the iTunes store. So about two years ago, I decided to see what everyone was raving about, I downloaded version 7 and immediately fell in love. What charmed me was that my most wanted features at that time were being provided: iTunes provided a clean and attractive interface that controls the folders of the MP3 files. Unlike many other control freaks out there, I don’t care what the file or folder is named, I just care that the files are there and easily found. iTunes allowed me […]
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