the life-changing magic of tidying up.

The Japanese art of decluttering and organizing.

I didn't know that decluttering is not a word. Yet as I write this, I see a little red squiggly under it. The suggested alternatives are cluttering and uncluttering.

As a society are we currently so obsessed with tidying up that we now need a new word  to describe it?

Anyways-- "the life-changing magic of tidying up" is a nice little book…

1. Discard things first. Only keep things that spark joy in you.
2. Tidy up by category, not by location.
3. Tidy up as a special event, not every day.
4. Storage space should be assigned to make things easy to put away, no to get things out.
5. Store things vertically, not in piles.
6. Put photos and mementos in albums and display cases. Throw them out if you cannot do so.

The book who is also a little bombastic. As much as I like a clean room, anyone who suggests that tidying up is life changing magic, may need to get out of the house a little more often.

Discarding is always hard.  I have a large collection of things packed away, for years, that I keep for no good reason. Every now and then, as luck would have it, a situation will pop up where I need one of those thingamabobs. I'm sure that if I did a cost benefit analysis of all the thingamabobs in storage, that throwing them away would be the right thing to do. But I will need one of them just often enough to make the decision tough.

The Measure of Reality. Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600

By Alfred W. Crosby

This is a history of how western society incorporated quantification into it's daily life. Numbers went from being magical things in and of themselves to being quantities that measured something else.

Out go Roman Numerals. In come Indo-Arabic digits.

The clock, the ruler and algebra dramatically changed our lives. And not without controversy. Some questioned the necessity of clocks and calendars-- "My serfs know when it's morning, noon & night, spring & fall."

Visualization, Music, Painting, Book Keeping all underwent dramatic changes once they were learnt in terms of quantification.

Brainwashed. The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience.

Neuroscience just isn't ready to be a trusted day to day technology for lie deduction, product marketing and the like.

Remember the amygdala and the amygdala hijack that supposedly occurs when rage takes over your brain? Well, the amygdala is responsible for much more than processing anger. It also processes novel experiences. So what emotion does a lite up amygdala indicate?

If I say "Pin, syringe, thread, haystack, prick. ' and then ask you if you head the world 'needle' Your brain scan will indicate you are telling the truth if you said 'yes'