1. A country cannot be truly free until its people can print out airline boarding passes from home.
2. If my mother starts running at the sight of someone, you should start running too.
3. Wherever your are, the drivers are worse than wherever you just were.
4. There is nothing more arbitrary in this world than airport taxes.
5. If you are on a historical tour, and your tour guide is not speaking in his/her native language, the truth will become slightly more malleable.
6. It is difficult to trust anyone who packs more than 50 lbs. of luggage for a vacation to anywhere short of Antarctica.
7. The same holds true for those who refuse to turn off their phones in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.
8. The number of crying children on your plane varies directly with the length of your flight.
9. It actually kind of helps to smile while you’re getting screwed.
10. Luxury is a very, very relative term.

Today is my birthday, and my annual reminder of how much I dislike the concept of time.

Truth is, time is unfair. When I see someone wearing a watch, I don’t see someone with punctuality in mind. I see someone slowly counting down the seconds until the grave.

What is a day, after all? It’s a very strange segment ⁽¹⁾ of a larger year, which we define as the time it takes for the Earth to circle the sun. And if you’re like me, you can’t get enough reminders that the Earth is spinning blindly at 67,000 miles per hour through a vast and unknowable universe.

Point is, I’m just not a fan of time, especially on birthdays, when it serves to remind me that I’m getting both older and no closer to figuring anything out. Human years are so scarce; if we’re lucky, we get 70 or 80 years to live, and that just doesn’t seem like enough.

What I wish was that there was a way to make time seem less scarce ⁽²⁾. So I’m proposing here, on May 16, 2010, that we adjust our notions of time.

The human attention span is, depending on which Google source you trust, somewhere between five seconds and 20 minutes. 150 years ago, the Lincoln-Douglas debates lasted anywhere from five to seven hours at a time. Today, those debates would be reduced to mere soundbites, because our attention spans are shrinking. Who has time for five hours of political discourse? Hell, who has time for any political debate involving more than a few bullet points?

In the 2010, we have more distractions than ever, and we’re as easily distracted as ever.

But if that’s the case, then why are our standard units of time not adjusting to our shorter attention spans?

Let me put this another way: when Andrew Carnegie died, he was worth $475 million. But $475 million in 1919 isn’t worth what it is today. Luckily, we’ve got tools to compare the dollar from 1919 to today’s dollar. ⁽³⁾

We adjust to each age. When humans got taller, we raised the height of our doors. When people got fatter, we widened the space in the supermarket aisles. A news cycle used to last months. Now it lasts hours. We constantly recalibrate to what’s happening now.

But we still allow time to remain constant. I don’t think that’s fair.

If a piece of paper can become more or less valuable over the course of time, then, well, why can’t time, too?

The best part is, there’s some precedent for this.

Abraham lived to be 175. His wife, Sarah, continued to have kids well into her hundreds. Biblical time clearly didn’t use our rigid time structure.

So what’s stopping us ⁽⁴⁾ from altering our concept of time? I’m okay with seconds and minutes and hours — anything that can measure the length of a YouTube video seems like it should stay — and I’ve got no problem with sun-up-to-sun-down days. But why shouldn’t we alter our concept of years? Does any modern human have the capacity to actually pay attention to something for an entire year?

How’s this sound: let’s decree that each season is considered a year. The modern calendar year gets split into fours, so today, I’d have just turned 92 — and I’d still be entering my prime.

What happens to everyone else?

Dick Clark becomes four times as valuable. Gyms get four times the number of resolution-related membership drives. Champagne companies see four times the rate of sales.

And best yet: wasting a year doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, because there are so many more of them to waste. Sure, it’s just a way to trick the brain into believing that we’re not screwing around as much as we really are.

But it’s working.

Our concept of time is changing. It’s time to make it official, I think.

When I die, I want my rabbi to be able to say, “Here lies Dan Oshinsky, who died at the age of 375.” The crowd will nod appreciatively. Honestly, who’d believe that a man so old could have accomplished so little?

But thanks to Facebook and Twitter, we’re more easily connected to others than ever before. You don’t need a giant Rolodex anymore, just an active news feed and the latest version of TweetDeck. So I started wondering: I’ve got a few hundred Facebook fans and a few hundred Twitter followers. And that’s on top of my normal, Dunbar-defined circle.

I may not be a Supertasker, but could I be some sort of Supernetworker?

The résumé-deflating answer I came up with was, No, I’m not a Supernetworker, and neither are you. See, Dunbar’s theory creates circles, starting with your innermost circle of friends and expanding until you reach that outer circle of passive acquaintances.

Think of it this way: the inner circles will end up at your wedding. The outer circles might get a Christmas card (or maybe a Facebook birthday wall post). Social networking might bring you a few hundred or a few thousand additional connections, but the majority will remain in that outer circle — or beyond.

The irony is, you might engage them regularly — but you can’t really care about them on the level that Dunbar’s describing. ⁽¹⁾

But I was hugely impressed to see a media outlet finally discuss the ramifications of social networking on Dunbar’s Number. It came in a Guardian piece that actually asked Robin Dunbar what he thought of his number’s role in the world of social networks.

I asked Dunbar if he saw anything in the evolution of online networks to suggest that the next stage might extend our social horizons in any meaningful way.

“The question really is,” he said, “does the technology open up the quality of your social interaction to any great extent, and the answer to that question is, so far: not really.”

Exactly. But that doesn’t mean these connections are worthless. As Clay Shirky points out in the same piece:

“What these games and applications do,” he says, “is extend and churn the edges of our network, which is often how new ideas are brought into it.”

So add those friends on Facebook. Connect with others on Twitter. They probably won’t be coming to your wedding, and they might not even end up on your Christmas card list.

But if you’re smart, those fringe circles might just help you create something that your circle of 150 never would have thought of.

You don’t have to be a Supernetworker. You just have to be a good listener.

I have recently begun to consider the idea that if there a God, he is probably not very good at multitasking.

I’ll direct you to this recent study, which suggested the existence of a rare group of humans known as “supertaskers.” They’re not just capable of multitasking; they actually perform better when doing so.

About 1 in 40 — or 2.5 percent of humans — have such skills, the study found.

But these guys are the outliers. Which brought me to an unusual thought: man was created in God’s image, or so certain books suggest. But if 97.5 percent of mankind is incapable of properly multitasking, then by the transitive property, can’t we assume that God probably isn’t a very good multitasker either?

Which brings me to another thought: if God is present in every aspect of our lives — and certainly, there seem to be more than a handful of athletes who believe in God’s willingness to take part in a post pattern — how does he juggle it all if he’s so average at multitasking?

¶¶¶

I put the question to a friend of mine today. We were on the front nine of some hacker course in Austin, Texas, and my friend was working on a precision slice that usually isn’t found outside a 10-piece knife set infomercial.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said after knocking consecutive shots into the pond.

“You sure you want him here for this?” I asked.

I gave my friend the rundown. Look: God’s a busy guy. He’s trying to balance the cosmos. His divinity might not even be able to solve the matter of Inbox Zero. He doesn’t care about your short game, and he probably shouldn’t.

“So?” my friend said.

Well, let’s suppose that God spent most of his time just watching over humanity, I said. But in a very limited way, he’d take an interest in you. You’d get to choose one aspect of your life, one thing that you do regularly, and God would play a role in it. You wouldn’t be superhuman in that one thing. But you’d know that when you took on that task, you’d have a bit of divine protection.

“So God could be present on the golf course?”

Yes.

“Or when I play Facebook Scrabble?”

You’d be wasting it, but yeah, sure.

“Or in the bedroom?”

You got a girl you’re trying to impress?

And that’s when it really began.

¶¶¶

The immediate instinct, under this God-as-a-Genie-with-one-wish-to-grant concept, is to go for something big. Ask God to keep watch when you’re playing poker. Or when you’re shooting those championship-winning free throws. Or when you’re looking for luck with the ladies. Ask for one of these, and you’re asking for God to give you house money to play with in Vegas.

But then there’s a secondary thought: What if you could better use your divine intervention? I’m talking about the kind of intervention that gets tossed around at Sunday School: Dear God, help me find courage. Dear God, help me comfort the sick. Dear God, please make me sick so I can leave this sermon early.

And then there’s the last thought: What if you could take it just a little bit further? If God can’t be present in every little thing you do, why not just choose one little thing that you do every day?

What if God could be present during your rush hour commute? (Finally, a practical reason to have a “God is my co-pilot” bumper sticker.) What if God could keep you engaged during those dull moments in your day? (When waiting in a dentist’s office, God could deliver the manna that is Men’s Health magazine.) What if God could help you be on time for meetings? (He might be a watchmaker anyway.) Why not ask God to be present in the kitchen? (Just smile and nod when someone tells you, “These fudge brownies are just heavenly.”)

¶¶¶

I’m not saying this theory of divine assistance is for everyone. What I am saying is this:

The next time you’re 130 yards out and deciding between a 9-iron and pitching wedge, ask yourself whether or not you really want the Almighty as your caddy. Besides, he might be able to spot a triple-word score in Facebook Scrabble that you’d never be able to see.

Soon, I found myself keeping score. About to graduate, aimless, preparing for joblessness and possessing a degree worth about as much as the paper it was printed on, I realized — belatedly — that I wasn’t exactly a modern guarantee of potential.

I started searching for something tangible, something worthwhile to get me through my remaining months at school. As a college basketball obsessant, it’s no surprise that the end of the NCAA Tournament had something to do with it. With the games over, I felt a sense of emptiness. During the Tournament, a one-too-many-beers promise to follow a favorite team had suddenly turned into a road trip. (Dude, we’re going to Phoenix!) I had goals and aspirations and dreams. Most importantly, I had more games to watch.

But the Tournament ended, my team lost, Phoenix turned out to be a hell of a drive — who knew? — and I was facing the unthinkable: graduation. So it came to be that out of a month of non-stop basketball watching, I started keeping score.

It was innocent enough at first. I decided that I’d make up goals to distract me from my life as a writer of failed cover letters. These daily goals were my way of staying sane, of finding blips of success hidden amongst routine.

I started with a small one: every day, make someone laugh really hard. I wasn’t going to make milk come out anyone’s nose — you’d be surprised how rarely one sees college students consuming milk in public — but I could try. Do it once a day, and I could enjoy the scoreboard at the end of the night: Dan 1, Failure 0.

I liked coming out on the winning end so much that I added more categories to my day. The points started trending upwards, the scoreboard spinning like an odometer on a cross-country trip (to, please God, anywhere other than Phoenix). Being thankful for little things wasn’t hard; I could rack up a dozen points a day doing that. Being punctual was even easier. Soon, I was running up the score. 5-0, 10-0, 20-0.

It only got worse from there. I had started out seeking moral victories and joy in day-to-day moments, but the high from those little wins faded faster with each day. I craved even bigger wins.

In one day, I decided to start being more spontaneous and to start speaking Spanish more often. But I abused the system. Getting a haircut at a barbershop run by Spanish-speakers and discussing mullets fit both requirements. Or: Look! I’m ordering a chalupa without sour cream!

I decided to stop skipping breakfast, and I was earning easy points there, until I decided that I wanted to start sleeping later, which meant that I wasn’t waking up early to eat breakfast anymore. But the scoreboard took no notice. I’d only ever created one rule: complete the category and earn the point. There was no penalty for breaking the rules, because there really weren’t any rules.

The points piled on. I had created my own metrics for success, and by my own best standards, I’d become wildly successful.

With so many paths to success, I’d guaranteed myself blowout victories with each new day. I’d been giving myself points for reading books, for creating esoteric theories, for watching new movies, for blogging, for napping — all at odds! — but the scores kept going up, and it didn’t matter how hollow my victories had become. I found myself saying odd things in the morning, like, “Right here, in this moment, this is where the day will be won.” When had I started talking like a member of the Roundtable? When had I become obsessed with winning?

Then graduation came closer — first weeks away, then days, then looking back as I crossed the dais — and I wasn’t any closer to getting a job. But I’d still been finishing my day completely convinced that I’d spent it well. I was a success, but only in a world in which I controlled the definition of success.

A few weeks after graduation, I was lucky enough to take a job that I actually wanted. Everyone wanted to know: how much money would I be making? In a world where success can’t be easily measured, salary seems like the simplest way to understand value. But I’m not sure that’s what really constitutes success.

I’d like to think my daily scorekeeping — at least my initial efforts — came close to defining two key measures of success: chasing ambition and building a better community (one in which, I’d hope, success can be further nurtured). But I’ve started to realize that we can’t attach a number to success, and we probably shouldn’t try to.

So I’ve stopped keeping score. When I make a friend laugh, I’m not declaring it a personal victory. Happiness isn’t tied to some internalized competition. I’m not winning, but I feel sane.

Though part of me still thinks that I’d need a scoreboard to know for sure.

But what else could I be expected to write on in such a moment?

What hit me last night, what pulled me out of bed and sent me searching for any scrap of paper, was a simple truth: I only have good ideas when there’s barely anything around to write on.

I have owned dry erase boards that I’ve never used, oversized notepads that stayed blank and binders that held nothing.

But I’ve captured eureka! moments on cocktail napkins, scribbled genius ideas in the margins of newspaper columns and on business cards. I’ve rarely had success carrying around a notebook, with one exception: in the summer of 2008, when I had this bound, 3” x 2” pad that I covered every inch of with tiny thought bursts during my travels in China.

The more I consider it, the more the words jotted down last night on the back side of that envelope ring true: “The profundity of an idea varies in inverse proportion to the size of the paper it’s written on.”

Or, in words: the smaller (and stranger) the thing I’m writing on, the greater the eureka being written. ⁽¹⁾

I’ve always kept these big legal pads around for the moments in which I’d need to fully flesh out an idea. But maybe it’s that a confined space — forced brevity! — is the key to innovation.

Shouldn’t the best ideas should be jotted down in their most basic form first before being carefully considered and expanded upon? Isn’t it only fair to let a spark turn into a slow burn, to let brief moments of genius turn into something of scale?

This is the kind of revelation that could force a change in lifestyle. I’ve started thinking about getting rid of all the big legal pads around my apartment. With the money saved, I could head to a local paper store instead and buy a stack of customized cocktail napkins. (“From the Desk of Dan Oshinsky,” they’ll read.)

That’s just one idea; I still haven’t decided what the next step is. But I’m not too worried. I picked up a tiny green receipt from a parking garage the other day. It couldn’t be more than an inch tall and two inches wide. I guess I’ll just have to keep it around and wait for inspiration to strike.

Certain jobs are disappearing, and that’s a shame. It’s a shame that copy editors at newspapers are being fired. It’s a shame that accountants are being replaced by inexpensive computer software. It’s a shame that elevator operators are out of jobs (and have been for quite some time).

It’s a shame, but that’s all it is.

What’s terrifying — and maybe even dangerous — isn’t the loss of those jobs but the loss of certain skills. Technology has given us a wonderful ability to streamline our lives by pushing us past our cognitive limits. We have brains, yes, and when you sync that brain to an iPhone, you’ve got a tandem that’s capable of sorting through infinite amounts of hard data while freeing up space to make the difficult rational and emotional choices in our lives.

But what happens when we allow the machines to wholly replace certain skills? ⁽¹⁾

This isn’t the first time that someone’s raised concerns about the loss of basic human skills, and it won’t be the last. Consider the classroom, where teachers worry about the impact of calculators on students. Who needs long division when a TI-83+ can do it for you? Who needs to master proper spelling when spell check will fix your mistakes?

Technology is evolving faster than we are. It will, I believe, come to a point where it overwhelms us.

The only question left is, What do we do when we get there?

I think of poor orientation skills due to GPS technology, poor researching skills due to Google and poor handwriting skills due to computers. I wonder how my brain will hold up under an inundation of information. On a daily basis, I multi-task while monitoring cable news (including the ticker at the bottom of the screen) and a cascade of news and links via Twitter. There’s no way my brain’s capable of processing it all.

Then I think a bit deeper: I wonder what will happen to our interpersonal skills now that Facebook is the link connecting friends. Chivalry is dead, but text messaging has taken communication to an instantaneous level that humans have never before experienced.

There’s one more level, and it’s the one that worries me the most. Maybe our brains will be able to evolve with technology. Maybe my fears will go unrealized. But what if — in 20 or 30 years — we find out that technology has come at a human cost?

As I write this, I’m sitting in a window seat on an airplane. It’s a prop plane, and the blades are whirring with remarkable noise. I can barely hear my friend, who is sitting in the seat next to mine.

Two rows in front of us, on the other side of the aisle, a man is listening to his iPod at what must be an incredible volume. He’s seven feet away, but I can hear every drum snare and every bass line escaping out of his headphones.

I’d like him to turn the music down, not as much for my sake but for his. I cannot imagine how many decibels must be pumping into his ears, but I know it cannot be a healthy number. At this volume, this man is literally listening himself deaf.

So I wonder: what will my generation do if iPod use wreaks permanent hearing damage upon us? And what will we do if we find that cell phones have been pumping cancerous waves of radiation into our brains?

In previous generations, health risks were slightly less complicated. Cigarette use was linked to disease and early death, and smoking rates have declined steadily since. But cigarettes were just a tool to relax the mind; they weren’t rewiring it. Even if we find out that certain forms of technology are detrimental to our health, putting down the smartphone might be a tough task, especially as we grow dependent on it as the brain we keep in our pocket.

What I’m saying is this: if technology doesn’t leave us behind, we still might have to find a way to leave it behind.

That might just be the scariest thought of all.

The chart above is from Steve Rubel’s blog, and I think it’s a monumentally important step in terms of defining the scope of all this new media. ⁽¹⁾

I’ll let Mr. Rubel explain what the chart means in terms of his blog:

How would you feel about a structure like this where I theme the content based on the day of the week? Monday we tackle models and/or mindmaps, Tuesday we talk trends, etc. I want to post more often and more creatively than just writing.

This gets to a thought that I’ve been working through for some months now. My blog has become much more targeted: I write about journalism, with a few anecdotes from my life thrown in. But my Twitter feed is all over the place. It’s essentially a link dump; I see an interesting article, and I post it to Twitter. The thing is, the links have no common theme, except for the fact that I find them interesting. So basically, I’ve got a Del.icio.us page that’s targeted to friends.

I know I’m not the only one with such a problem. Take the Twitter feed for the San Antonio daily newspaper, The Express-News. Follow @mysa on a day-to-day basis, and you’ll find that their tweets are very strange. One minute, they’re tweeting the daily pollen count. The next, they’ve got photos from a crime scene. And minutes later, they’ll have the lotto numbers, or the score of a high school football game, or maybe a column about tacos. Point is: I’ve followed them for months, and I have no idea why they tweet the way they do.

That’s a problem. If I follow you on Twitter or subscribe to an RSS feed of your blog, or even if I read/watch/listen to your media outlet’s news on a regular basis, I want to know the answer to two questions:

1. What do you write/talk about?
2. Why do you write/talk about it?

I like Rubel’s idea of defining days of the week, especially for new media that tends to span a variety of topics. It could be an interesting way to keep readers engaged.

As for my Twitter feed, I’d like it to be a bit more focused. The only question is: when I see a link or a topic that’s outside my scope, what should I do with it then?

I’m talking, of course, about the word ‘dedication.’

It’s a word that gets associated with athletes and scholars and really anyone for whom hard work is a core value. But I’d like to suggest that dedication may simply involve any act in which the soul and the body unite for common purpose.

Naturally, I’d like to bring an anonymous University of Texas Longhorns fan forward as proof.

On Saturday, I was up in Austin for Day 2 of the Austin City Limits music festival. Between sets by the Levon Helm Band and Dave Matthews Band on the main stage, I found my way over to the stage where Austin-based band The Scabs were playing.

The Scabs are a pleasantly and refreshingly weird act. They’re fronted by singer Bob Schneider, who’s something of a legend in Austin. Nearly ever band he’s played in has become a local favorite, and The Scabs are no exception.

On Saturday, Schneider and Co. put on a show too obscene to be called quirky and too absurd to be underestimated. Their 45-minute set featured material that’s entirely unprintable in this forum. (On the set list: a tune inviting comparisons between oral sex and French explorer Jacques Cousteau, and a faux-death metal parody about shopping at H.E.B.) But the band kept the crowd rocking and laughing all at once, and that’s no easy feat.

But while Austin music fans were loving the joyfully bizarre set, I noticed one fan who was enjoying the music more than most. He kept bobbing his head and pumping his right fist in the air, even between songs. I didn’t understand why.

I assumed that — this being a massive music festival — some combination of alcohol and drugs were at work. (They were.) But then I got closer and found out what was really causing this man’s spontaneous celebrations. YouTubing the clip below is believing:

That, in the name of all things Merriam and Webster, is dedication. Skipping Austin City Limits was out of the question. Missing Miami’s 21-20 victory over Oklahoma wasn’t going to happen, either– and DVRing the game simply wouldn’t cut it. This fan had decided that it all had to be experienced live.

What this Longhorn fan found, I believe, is a remarkable testament to the pursuit of hedonism. He fused two outstanding passions — in this case: great music and college football rivalries — and found a way to multitask the many causes to which he dedicates his time.

As a lover of live music and a hater of opposing college sports teams, I must say: I was inspired. The bar has been set high for us all.

>>You can click here to read the whole post.

When I was a kid, my family used to spend summers up in Nantucket, Mass. At the time, Nantucket didn’t have any popular sentiments attached to it. It definitely wasn’t cool, and it probably wasn’t uncool, if only because no one really knew it existed.  Cape Cod was a big deal, and so was Martha’s Vineyard. But nobody really went to Nantucket. My family would go to the beach, and if we saw another person, we’d declare it a crowded day. We’d stay along the southern edge of the island, three quarters of a mile from the ocean. The only thing that stood between us and Portugal, my mother would tell us, was some scrub brush.

At the time, I had a strange obsession with airports. ⁽¹⁾ Not with airplanes, mind you; I didn’t care much for flying in pressurized metal tubes. But I found airports fascinating. In D.C., I’d ride the subway down to National Airport with my dad and watch the planes take off and land. On airplanes, I’d flip to the backs of the in-flight magazine and trace the airport gate maps with my finger.

Nantucket had an especially unusual airport. It was built during World War II on the south side of the island, which locals know as the foggy side of the island. The move was intentional: the air force hoped it would prepare its aviators for the foggy conditions along the British coast.

When World War II ended, the air force moved away, but the airport never did. It stayed on the foggy side of the island, and in the evenings, the fog rolls in. Most days, it won’t clear out until noon. Nantucket’s airport became famous for delays. The airport’s gift shop — singular, mind you — started selling shirts that read, simply, “Fog Happens.”

I remember spending a lot of time at the Nantucket airport as a kid, probably because there wasn’t a lot to do on the island. You could go to the beach and the movies, and you could read or listen to the Sox game on the radio, and you could get ice cream, and you could go biking or play mini-golf. That was about it. My family stayed in a house without a TV. ⁽²⁾ On those foggy days, when the beach wasn’t an option, and when other kids were probably inside watching TV, we went to the airport.

It was a tiny airport, and it still is. Back then, it only had three gates, and most travelers showed up four or five minutes before departure. There were no metal detectors or security. There was no need.

At the end of the terminal, there was a restaurant called Hatch’s. They had a counter with seating for six or seven, and maybe a dozen tables. The food was average, except for one item on the menu: the clam chowder. For whatever reason, Hatch’s had the best chowder on the island. It was so good that people actually wanted to go to the airport to eat.

So my family would head down to Hatch’s for dinner some nights. We’d order our clam chowder, and my brother and my sister and I would run around the airport — all 150 yards of it — and back. We’d go outside, where we could press our faces up against a fence and watch the planes roll in with the fog. The airport’s mini-tanker would drive around and refuel the planes, and the passengers who’d shown up four minutes earlier would hop in these tiny Cessnas owned by Nantucket Airlines or Island Air — both of whom only offered non-stop service to Hyannis, a destination eight minutes away — and disappear into the fog.

More than anything else about Nantucket Airport, I remember the smell. The air stunk from the oil layered onto the runways. In my life, I’ve experienced few smells as strong as the Nantucket tarmac up close.

Which brings me back to today.

I was down at San Antonio’s Central library, walking back to my car, and I smelled it. I don’t know where it came from or why it was so strong in the air, but I’d never smelled oil that thick anywhere except at the Nantucket airport. It was chilly — it’s rained here for almost a week straight, and the front has settled in over south central Texas — and I almost expected my mother to pop out from behind me with a hooded sweatshirt, telling me to put it on and come back inside to eat at Hutch’s.

And standing there in downtown San Antonio, the scent of the tarmac filling the air, I suddenly felt the urge to grab a bowl of clam chowder.