Mining your Creativity Mind
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Maxima and minimaData miningGoodness of fitComputing platformInformationPattern languageRow (database)Context awarenessMultiplication signData miningAreaLevel (video gaming)QuicksortBitUniform resource locatorXMLUMLComputer animation
01:44
Context awarenessWordOptical disc drive1 (number)Representation (politics)Pattern languageQuicksortPhysical systemExpert systemGoodness of fitSoftware testingPunched cardNetwork topologyCycle (graph theory)Video gameNumberGraph coloringCombinational logicWeightMereologyoutputCodeSet (mathematics)Multiplication signProjective planeResultantDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Point (geometry)Context awarenessPhysicalismVirtual machineObservational studyDevice driverInsertion lossComputer programmingSpeicherbereinigungRoutingScaling (geometry)SoftwareCognitionReal numberLevel (video gaming)ConcentricBitObject (grammar)Moment (mathematics)Mixed realityIntegrated development environmentGraphics tabletProcess (computing)UsabilityInformationNavigationInteractive televisionComputer animation
08:38
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17:56
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24:55
LogicRule of inferenceAreaBulletin board systemNoise (electronics)QuicksortPoint (geometry)Symbol tableAsynchronous Transfer ModeClassical physicsTable (information)SphereReverse engineeringService (economics)Software bugProcess (computing)Combinational logicStatement (computer science)OracleSemiconductor memoryDependent and independent variablesHTTP cookieSearch engine (computing)Medical imagingPattern matchingImage resolutionRight angleExistential quantificationMatching (graph theory)Power (physics)Parameter (computer programming)MathematicsProof theoryBlock (periodic table)Key (cryptography)Amsterdam Ordnance DatumRoundness (object)ChecklistWordMathematicianDisk read-and-write headCASE <Informatik>Metropolitan area networkLogicContext awarenessCategory of beingSoftware testingTranslation (relic)Figurate numberInstance (computer science)Computer animation
31:38
TrailWeb pagePhysical systemTable (information)Figurate numberLine (geometry)Keyboard shortcutSymbol table2 (number)QuicksortProcess (computing)Type theoryComplete metric spaceComputer programmingDevice driverAsynchronous Transfer ModeNavigationPresentation of a groupBitTrailMultiplication signArithmetic meanGoodness of fitNumberSpacetimeFisher's exact testComputing platformSubject indexingPlastikkarteSoftware bugVirtual machineComa BerenicesTheory of relativityDisk read-and-write headWebsiteLaptop1 (number)FreewareUsabilityArmEmailNeuroinformatikMessage passingOffice suiteUniform boundedness principleBus (computing)Sampling (statistics)Wave packetRandomizationCommercial Orbital Transportation ServicesDiagram
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Lemma (mathematics)Reading (process)Visual systemArchaeological field surveyConvex hullFunction (mathematics)BitNichtlineares GleichungssystemoutputQuicksortVariety (linguistics)Different (Kate Ryan album)1 (number)Boiling pointE-bookModal logicPearson product-moment correlation coefficientContent (media)Form (programming)MultilaterationTable (information)Sheaf (mathematics)MereologyGoodness of fitMonad (category theory)Exception handlingType theoryPoisson-KlammerArchaeological field surveySoftware testingDampingInformationConnected spaceDataflowProgramming languageSemiconductor memoryDisk read-and-write headRight angleProcess (computing)ConcentricDichotomySet (mathematics)LinearizationCombinational logicSoftware frameworkUniverse (mathematics)Formal languageCASE <Informatik>Line (geometry)Web 2.0Instance (computer science)2 (number)Computer programmingArithmetic meanPoint (geometry)Library (computing)LaptopMultiplication signWordVisualization (computer graphics)Tape driveSource codeComputer animation
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Core dumpSimultaneous localization and mappingEmailWechselseitige InformationMaizeQuicksortMappingExploratory data analysisLevel (video gaming)GradientMereologyNeuroinformatikObject (grammar)Projective planeSymbol tableTexture mappingInformationPhase transitionWikiBitText editorCASE <Informatik>TrailCategory of beingGoodness of fitAffine spaceLatent heatWhiteboardGroup actionCircleMultiplicationWordProcess (computing)Computer fontData conversionWindowDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Type theoryAsynchronous Transfer ModeMusical ensembleComputer programmingExpandierender GraphIntegrated development environmentSource codeInsertion lossData miningTheory of relativityOutlierMetropolitan area networkAreaSelf-organizationMultiplication signPhysical systemComputer fileWeb pageAliasingProduct (business)Computer animation
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EmailComputer multitaskingElectronic mailing listContext awarenessTask (computing)Interrupt <Informatik>Communications protocolOperator (mathematics)InformationCodeMultiplication signQueue (abstract data type)Figurate numberResultantElectronic mailing listSet (mathematics)Extreme programmingSystem callProduct (business)BefehlsprozessorPoint (geometry)Equivalence relationSpacetimeComputer multitaskingObservational studyRule of inferenceLogic gateNumberTask (computing)Data conversionWeb 2.0EmailInterrupt <Informatik>Dependent and independent variablesAxiom of choiceCommunications protocolServer (computing)WindowTelecommunicationTouchscreenFunctional (mathematics)CodeContext awarenessException handlingDynamic random-access memoryDisk read-and-write headoutputProcess (computing)Software bugLattice (order)Duality (mathematics)Order (biology)Different (Kate Ryan album)CASE <Informatik>Semiconductor memoryCycle (graph theory)QuicksortBand matrixDatabaseLevel (video gaming)BitCellular automatonScaling (geometry)Sign (mathematics)Greatest elementVirtualization2 (number)Dynamical systemMusical ensembleRight angleDataflowBoss CorporationComputer animation
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MathematicsNP-hardFunction (mathematics)BlogBlogEmailMultiplication signPlastikkarteTwitterGraph coloringFeedbackSoftware bugMappingWindowAddress spacePlanningComputer animation
01:01:04
XMLUML
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:06
Can you hear me in the front? Can you hear me over the babble down there? Okay, so I can babble up here. That's good. Alright. How are you all doing this morning? Waiting for that coffee to kick in, huh?
00:21
You all got your coffee? You good? You ready to go? You're not going to nod off on me first thing? Okay. I still have jet lag, so I might nod off, but you know, that's okay. Well, it's a pleasure to be here today. It's really exciting to be up here talking to you on this little tiny platform wiggling by four tiny wires. Great start to the day.
00:41
Just a warning in the front row. If this starts to go, I am headed your way. Other than that, we should be fine. So today, I'm going to talk about, I got three talks today. This first one is on mining your creativity or mining your creative mind. And that's mostly what I'm going to talk about, but I've got a couple other things I have to talk
01:02
about sort of first and after or around that. A lot of these ideas came from a book I wrote a couple years ago, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, my seventh, as it turned out. But these are the topics that I covered in the book. I unfortunately don't have time to go over all of these today.
01:21
And if you'd like a copy of this mind map of what's in the book, you can download that from that URL. And that just gives kind of an overview of the sort of topics that are interesting, to me at least, in this kind of area. So first off, I want to talk about a few bits of kind of background information.
01:43
Three things in particular, I want to talk about context, patterns, and neuroplasticity, one of my favorite words. I'll start off with context. If I asked you to draw a tree or think of a tree, what's the Norwegian word for tree?
02:02
Okay. If I asked you to think of one of those, odds are, or ask you to draw it, you would think or draw of something sort of like this. This represents the absolute pinnacle of my artistic talent. That's as good as it gets, as far as it goes. And this is how we tend to think of things.
02:21
This is how our brain tends to organize things. You say tree, we think of this sort of, you know, very limited, very symbolic representation of it. The danger is that that does not in any way represent what's interesting about a tree. A tree, in fact, isn't an object. It's not even a system.
02:41
It's a set of inter-reacting systems that all meet in this thing that we call a tree. So you've got the whole respiration cycle with the leaves and the air and the carbon dioxide. You've got the Krebs cycle, the nitrogen cycle in the soil.
03:00
You've got the overall life cycle of the tree. As it grows, it dies. The stuff rots, becomes part of the soil. It goes back around again. There's all these different cycles and systems and processes inter-reacting and inter-relating, and that's what makes a tree. So we hit this in software sort of all the time.
03:23
You know, you think of the project as just this thing, but it's not. You think of the team as just a thing, but it's not. It's like this. They're a bunch of systems that all inter-react with each other. So one of the things I exhort people, I urge people to always bear in mind is
03:43
that you always have to be aware of the context. A tree doesn't just stand by itself. Neither do you, your project, your code. It's all part of some system, and the context matters a great deal, as we'll see in just a moment.
04:00
The other thing that I find interesting about how the brain works is patterns. This was pair programming in the good old days, just if you were curious. So interesting thing about pair programming, we tend to refer to it as you've got the driver, the person sitting there typing, and the navigator, the person sitting back and free
04:22
to observe differences in the system and see patterns in the code, patterns in the project, and see these kind of higher level things. It's interesting that there's actually good cognitive research that says the person who's not typing can actually see those patterns emerging in the code,
04:42
and the person who is typing cannot see them, just by the way the brain works. We'll look at that in a little tiny bit. So it's interesting to see that even on some simple XP practice, such as pair programming, there's demonstrative cognitive help there. It's a good thing to do.
05:01
You can get advantage from that. And this idea of being able to see patterns and being able to recognize patterns is one of the hallmarks of expertise. This is something you see in expert doctors or firemen or airline pilots or what have you. And so this whole idea of pattern matching, pattern seeking is kind of interesting.
05:24
Last thing I want to cover, just a sort of background sort of things, is this idea of neuroplasticity. And this is kind of a funny story. For many years, many, many years, it was assumed and taught that you had a fixed number of neurons in the adult brain.
05:42
Once you got to that number, that was it. You couldn't grow anymore. You weren't getting new ones. And sadly, they also said that beer and wine would kill neurons. So this was a really bad combination. You're kind of just going for a net loss as life goes on. Turns out that's not true.
06:01
You actually do grow new neurons in your adult life, quite a few if you need to. They've done studies on London taxi cab drivers and they've got a huge concentration of neurons that were grown specifically to memorize the routes that they have to take as taxi drivers. If you're a piano player, you've got a whole bunch of neurons that were dedicated
06:23
to the purpose of memorizing scales and these sorts of things. So what actually happens is there's a battle for cortical real estate in your brain. And whatever you do the most of, your brain will reconfigure itself to accommodate that. And if need be, it will grow new neurons and dispose
06:43
of some of those old drunk ones in the corner. It doesn't need anymore. A little garbage collection. Just get rid of those. But the punch line, the funny part about the story is for decades, the researchers got this wrong. They thought that you did not grow new neurons. And the reason that they thought that is actually even more interesting
07:04
than the fact that you grow neurons. They would do their laboratory tests with primates in a sterile lab environment, sort of like a gray cubicle, if you want to think of it that way. And in that environment, sort of sensory deprivation, I mean these primates are used
07:24
to being out on vines in the jungle with color and scents and leaves and predators and all kinds of sensory stimulation. You stick them in a cage or a cubicle without much sensory input and you don't grow new neurons. You might as well be sitting there watching The Voice or something
07:43
or Norway's Got Talent, whatever. Something. You won't grow new neurons under those circumstances. So this brings us back to the idea of context. They got the wrong results by studying the animal outside of its native context.
08:02
They decontextualized it. You take it out of context, you get the wrong idea about it. And they were wrong for decades about this. So point one, context is utterly important for whatever we're going to talk about. Point two, what you think and how you think it can physically change your brain.
08:24
Physically. It will grow new neurons, dispose of old ones, reroute pathways, get rid of old information, reorganize new stuff. It is a self-modifying machine which makes it kind of tricky to talk about. But we're going to try anyway. So when we try, the stuff I'm going to talk about today when talking about the brain,
08:43
I'm going to use a very grotesquely oversimplified analogy. And invariably somebody comes up afterwards and says, the brain doesn't really work that way. And it's like, no, of course it doesn't. This is a very simple picture. Your brain doesn't work like this. But it's a helpful way to kind of think about it and certainly to talk about it.
09:05
So imagine as a metaphor, imagine if you will that your brain is kind of like a computer. And if it were a computer, it's not. If it were, you could picture it as a dual CPU shared bus design.
09:22
So what that means is you've got memory sitting up here. You've got a shared bus to these two CPUs. You've got this CPU on the left, which functions as kind of like a very traditional van Neumann processor. Step by step, this instruction, then the next, do this, do the next thing, do the other thing.
09:44
That little voice in your head that you kind of chat to yourself, that comes from over here. Hopefully you only have the one little voice. If you've got more than that, then you've got some kind of like multiprocessor design. I don't know what's going on with that. But this is very linear and very slow.
10:03
This part, this style of processing that your brain does over here is what we're calling the CPU 1, runs at about 110 bits per second, about the speed of speech. It's relatively slow. This other CPU over here is quite different.
10:23
It's more like a magical digital signal processor. It's like this kind of magic, you know, graphics chip or DSP chip. It is blazingly fast. It is not linear. You cannot order it to do anything. It is asynchronous.
10:41
You give it a job, it goes off in the background, putters around for a while, and sometime later, the results get delivered asynchronously. You notice that CPU 1 is conveniently on your left and CPU 2 is on your right. And back in the 60s, they actually referred to this as left brain and right brain.
11:04
Turns out, as with most things in the brain, it's not that simple. It doesn't actually even really work that way. But you'll see oftentimes in the literature, they talk about right brain thinking and left brain thinking, and that's kind of hooey. There's really no such thing in that sense.
11:20
What you have actually are more this style of processing and this style of processing that different areas in the brain will light up and activate depending on the task at hand. So if you think of these as sort of modes instead of physical hemispheres, we'll talk about it as L mode for linear mode and R mode for rich mode.
11:44
And it's slightly more accurate than getting into the old-fashioned left brain, right brain thing. So if we look at this CPU 1 left mode of thinking, these are very familiar traits that this style of processing happens in your brain. This is where you get generation of language, analysis, symbolic representation,
12:05
you know, very logical, very linear. This is what we're all very accustomed to in our day jobs, yes? This looks familiar, comfortable, but it's very slow. Then you've got this other thing happening over here, and that is quite different.
12:24
This rich mode is not verbal. It can't generate language. It is non-rational. Oh, I was stepping on some toes here. Non-rational is bordering on insulting, right? You get in an argument with your significant other, you're not being rational, okay?
12:43
Probably not. Interestingly enough, if you do go back to sort of geography of the brain, this R mode is like 80% of your brain's processing power. That linear mode, that L mode that we talk about, is much smaller, 10 to 20%, perhaps.
13:03
This is the bulk of what's going on, and this is very different. This is where intuition comes from. This is much more holistic thinking, looking at things as a whole. Again, going back to that idea of looking at things as systems, non-verbal. This side, this processing style likes to learn by synthesis instead of analysis.
13:26
So in L mode, you're used to analysis. You take something, you pick it apart, you look at the parts, you analyze it. This side, this mode, wants to learn by synthesizing, by putting things together. This is, well, let me build a prototype.
13:41
Let me write a couple lines of code. Let me build something. Let me try something. That learning by synthesis is associated with this side of the world. So this is kind of interesting. This is also where, like, your inner search engine comes from. So if I asked you, you know, some trivia question, some sports question,
14:01
or rock music, or what have you, and you know you know it, but you can't think of the answer right off, this will sort of submit a batch job in the background and go look through memory until it finds it. Now, there's a problem with these two modes of processing. They fight with each other a bit.
14:22
One blocks out the other, and they fight over memory. They can't both access memory sort of at the same time. Have you ever had that experience where you've had a very vivid dream, and you wake up, and you can remember every detail crystal clear, and what happens is you try to describe it to someone, right?
14:42
It gets harder and harder to remember. It kind of evaporates. Well, that's just kind of like bus contention, for lack of a better word, between these two modes. One side generated the visual imagery of the dream, and now you're trying to use the other mode to describe it by generating language, and they're not really cooperating quite in the way that you want.
15:04
So here's an interesting little illustration of these different processing modes at work. This is a GIF of a rotating girl dancing, dancer. Raise your hand if you see it going clockwise.
15:21
Raise your hand if you see it going counterclockwise. All right. So hands back for the clockwise folks. Think to yourself as you're looking at this, do some math facts for me. What's the square root of 256? 16. What's 16 plus 4?
15:40
20. What's 20 divided by 2? Is the girl changing yet? What's 2 plus 6? It's too simple for them. What's 16 squared? All right. Has it switched for anyone yet? Okay. Let's try the other people then. For the folks who see it going counterclockwise,
16:00
picture yourself on a nice beach with azure blue skies and calm waters and the beautiful crystalline surf and the sand. Really picture that. Is she changing yet? They're just not going to admit it or no one's awake yet.
16:22
In theory, okay, has this changed direction for anybody? Okay. Some people. The girl actually is not, you can look at the individual frames of the GIF and you cannot tell which way the figure's moving. There's only like six frames to the GIF and none
16:41
of them give a particular spatial cue as to which way it's going. So whether you perceive it as rotating clockwise or counterclockwise, that's all in your perception. And your perception will vary depending what mode of processing is more dominant in your head at this particular time.
17:01
If you concentrate on difficult math facts or something, you know, sort of linear, something L mode-ish like that, it will spin, make sure I get this right, counterclockwise. If your right mode is more dominant at the moment, the rich mode more dominant, it's going to spin the other way.
17:20
It's going to spin clockwise. And sometimes you're not even consciously aware of a switch. You can be sitting here looking at this and suddenly it starts going the other way or back or forward. Now some people I can make it go, you know, you can just chat with them and give them some math or give them some imagery and you can make it turn. It probably doesn't work first thing in the morning, but you know, give it a shot.
17:41
You can find this on the web. But it's just kind of interesting. There's another thing you can do with rotating your foot, whether it goes clockwise or counterclockwise, and it's driven off the same sort of principle. So there's some kind of weird stuff going on in your head there. What we'd like to do is try to capitalize on that.
18:02
Try to capitalize on these, you know, kind of strange, pre-conscious processes that we're not really aware of and harness that to our advantage. Talked about dreaming before. You know the story of how the sewing machine got invented? This was kind of wild. This fellow, Elias Howe, in 1845 was it?
18:24
Yeah. He was trying very hard to invent the first powered sewing machine. And he was having a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to get the needle to do what a needle has to do in a sewing machine. Go down, go back up, tie the loop. I don't know how to sew. Whatever it is it does.
18:41
He was having trouble with this. And he's working in his lab trying to invent this, trying to get it to happen. It's not happening for him. So one night, he has this terrifying nightmare. He's being chased through the jungle by headhunters. The kinds with spears, not like human resources. That would really be frightening.
19:02
So he's got these headhunters chasing after him with the spears. And, you know, he wakes up in a cold sweat. He's trying to describe the dream as best he can while he can still remember it. And he remembers this strange detail. He said, you know, it was all like what you would see in, you know, National Geographic or whatever they had at the time. But the spears looked really weird.
19:23
They looked like kind of normal spears, but they had a hole in the tip. Almost like you could pass a string through it. Ah. And he solves the problem of the sewing machine. A regular sewing needle, I'm told, has the hole at the back for the thread.
19:41
A machine needle has it at the tip. And that was his big insight that led him to develop the sewing machine, which he got a patent for in the U.S. in 1845. So what happened here? Well, he'd been doing the experiments. He'd been working on this stuff. And somewhere in that gray, gooey mass that was his brain,
20:02
somewhere was the flash of insight, the idea, the notion that, hey, you need to put the hole at the other end. That's the secret. Or at least something to try. It's a good idea. But he wasn't aware of this consciously. This was just kind of brewing in the soup up here. So what happens is this R-mode processing has this idea,
20:23
but how does it get it to you? The R-mode can't generate language, but it can generate visuals. So you get the nightmare. You get the dream with this kind of weird little feature in it that if you pay attention, it's like, aha, it's a clue. A clue my brain is trying to give me.
20:42
So it turns out there's some stuff like this that you can kind of capitalize on and try and take advantage of it. This goes in order from the weirder and less supported to the more concrete and absolutely works. We'll start on the weirder side. There's a fellow who claims image streaming is a really good technique.
21:02
And I've had people from talks tell me this works great for them. Your mileage may vary. But the way this works, you start off, you want to ask yourself a question or pose yourself a problem and close your eyes. This is great to do at work. You know, put your feet up on the desk, close your eyes for a little bit.
21:20
And typically you'll see an image float across your screen of vision, your imagination. So what you want to do, first of all, is describe it out loud, actually using your voice. Don't just say the words in your head because that activates different neural pathways. You actually want to use your voice to describe it. So just to get the picture here, you've got your eye closed at work
21:43
with your feet on the desk and you're talking to yourself. Regardless of that, whatever the thing you saw, try to imagine it with all five senses, if possible, or at least as many senses as possible. Your brain at one point is kind of stupid. If you describe an image, even if it was fleeting, you saw some image
22:04
of something and it's gone. If you start to describe it in present tense, it's as if your brain's like, oh, that's still here. It's still around. It kind of drags it back a bit. The same thing with imagining it in multiple senses. By activating these different sensory pathways, you kind of build a deeper connection to it.
22:21
You kind of hook onto it a little bit better and describe it in present tense, even if the image is gone for the same reason. And if you start doing this for a while, you start to, you know, it's not quite lucid dreaming, but it's something along those lines where you start noticing things that maybe your brain's trying to tell you, that are percolating in your preconscious soup.
22:42
Some percentage of the population, 10, 20%, could do this all day long and never see an image, just not wired that way. You can stare at a bright light, rub your eyes, get the phosphine effect, go stare at the sun, no, I didn't say that, something like that. And it's sort of the same idea.
23:01
The source of the image isn't particularly important. It's your brain's struggle to interpret it. That's where the fun comes in, as your brain tries to figure out what is this weird scene that I'm seeing here. Another way of kind of tackling this problem is just free form journaling
23:21
or writing, and this is an interesting thing just in the number of strange places I've seen this idea pop up. I've seen this in executive retreats, in master's and business administration courses, master's courses. You see it in author retreats and author writing workshops,
23:42
and the idea is you get up first thing in the morning before having coffee, before having a shower, before reading Twitter, before Reddit, before anything, and the very first thing you do is write out three pages of whatever longhand with an old-fashioned pen or pencil, not typing.
24:04
We'll see why in a bit. You write out a couple pages longhand and don't censor anything. Whatever stupid idea comes up, just jot it down and do it religiously and do it every day. So in one of the executive retreats, they pulled this technique out,
24:22
and one of the CEOs is like, I paid money for this course. Are you kidding me? This is the stupidest thing I ever heard of. They're like, well, just do it anyway. He's like, OK, I got nothing to say. I'm like, fine, just write out for three pages. I have nothing to say. So he does. He writes out that. This goes on for a couple days. A week later, he comes back and says, you know what?
24:42
I was wrong about that. He was starting to get really interesting content coming out. He was getting marketing plans, new ideas, fresh things, just started kind of spilling out, as it were. So it took him a week to do it. Some people reported they get this right away. Again, your mileage may vary.
25:02
There's a lot of other ways to kind of get around this problem. This is Thomas Edison, who invented the light bulb in 1879. Prolific inventor, came up with a lot of stuff, tried a lot of ways to get to electricity and the light bulb and various other inventions. And he had a peculiar habit, a peculiar technique
25:22
for seizing on ideas that his preconscious was trying to deliver to him. He would take a nap in the middle of the day with a cup in his hand filled with ball bearings, little round spheres of metal, BBs, in his hand. And the idea is he'd fall asleep. And as he'd fall asleep, he would drop the cup of BBs
25:43
onto the floor and it would clatter and make this horrific noise. And I'm sure his housekeeper really appreciated this as well. So he'd be just drifting off, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. All the BBs would land. He'd wake up and immediately go and jot down the first thing that was on his mind.
26:02
Interesting. Worked for him. So there's other ways at approaching problem solving. That's one way of sort of harvesting things that might be brewing in your stew. The other thing to kind of look at is jiggling thoughts loose if they're stuck. And there's a great book called A Whack on the Side
26:21
of the Head by one Roger Van Osch. And at first I thought this was a book on how to do customer service. But no, this is a way of looking at problems differently. He has suggestions like, you know, looking at a problem and trying to look at it in reverse.
26:41
So instead of, you know, trying to fix a bug by making it not happen, think of the ten ways you can deliberately make it happen. And that might shed some insight on the process. Exaggerate it. You know, the bug just does this. Well, what if it did all of this? What can you learn from that? Combine ideas.
27:00
Rearrange them. Ask why. All these sorts of things to kind of jiggle loose what you're thinking about. He talks probably more importantly about these kind of mental blocks or locks that prevent you from seeing the solution. Things such as believing there's only one right answer, which is rarely true after sort of, you know,
27:20
primary school arithmetic. It's very rare you get just one right answer. Thinking that something's not logical. 80% of your brain's processing power is not logical. If you're married or have a significant other, did you go through a logical process to select them? Did you go through a checklist and an Excel spreadsheet? And if you did, I'd like to talk to you afterwards
27:42
because that's kind of, that's kind of funky. No, of course not. We are not logical beings. We don't work that way. And so on and so on. So he's got these various mental locks to look at. And some of the examples were just sort of interesting when you look at other ways of looking at things. For instance, he gives this little test.
28:00
This is from the book where he says, if I take away six letters from this figure, what common English word is left over? No fair any other words. What common English word is left over if I remove six letters? And I guarantee to you, you are looking at this, you're thinking about this the wrong way.
28:22
He was being very literal. You remove six letters. And I see you were not used to thinking it that way. As soon as you say, ooh, it's a puzzle, you bring all this kind of baggage to the table thinking, oh, it's random, it's any six letters, it's blah, blah, blah, all this kind of stuff.
28:40
And he's got other examples that this great sort of six year old joke, what do John the Baptist and Winnie the Pooh have in common? A middle name. Yeah, if you're six, it's funny. The point is, we're not used to thinking in this context,
29:01
we're not used to thinking that concretely. We're looking at, okay, what's the symbolism behind it? What's the this, what's the that? We're bringing all this other stuff to the table when in fact, it's just a very concrete, very simple, stupid joke or concept. We're just kind of looking at it the wrong way. So this brings us to the magic of,
29:22
in classical literature, the idea of an oracle, lowercase o, not the big scary oracle, the lowercase o. So what would happen is you'd go to the magic oracle and it would give you some impenetrable statement and you'd have to go back and ponder it.
29:40
And it's interesting how this works. I mentioned before, the R mode in your brain is kind of responsible for pattern matching and searching your memory. So what happens is when you're faced with something like one of those images that you see from rubbing your eyes or you're faced
30:01
with some Chinese fortune cookie statement or something from an oracle that doesn't really make sense on the face of it, what your brain has to do is kind of take that and widen out its search parameters. It's like, okay, I don't know what in the hell you're talking about. So we're just going to start combing through everything,
30:20
anything that might possibly be a match. So something like a Zen koan works this way, right? You say, one hand claps, what sound does it make? Or commonly translated as what is the sound of one hand clapping? You feed that into your right mode search engine and it's like, what? That's stupid, that makes no sense.
30:41
What are you talking about? All right, well, we just broaden out the search parameter and start looking through everything. So it's kind of a way of broadening what your subconscious processes are examining and trying to come up with. And the mathematician, Henry Poincare, I'm sure I massacred that, my Norwegian's worse,
31:01
he used to do this. He would be working on a math proof and get to a kind of certain point on it and get stuck and not know how to solve it. So he would sort of put it all down and he'd go for a walk, just a walk out into his garden somewhere around and halfway through the path, he'd be like, oh, I didn't try whatever, I didn't think of that.
31:22
He'd run back, jot it down. Oh yeah, that works. Look, you just get to the next step, stuck again. Out you go. Now the key when doing that, you don't go out there on the walk and go, God, I gotta solve this. Guys, what is X? What is X? Why can't I find X? It's right there. Why can't I do this? You know, blah, blah, blah. That's not the way to do it. The way he described it was,
31:42
you want to hold the question lightly in your mind. So you don't start thinking about a television show or what kind of beer I want for dinner tonight or this sort of thing, but you just kind of hold it lightly back there like, yeah, I think about that. But mostly you're concentrating on the walking and what this does,
32:01
it kind of gives that overzealous chatty L mode, which tends to block out the R mode processes. It gives it something to do. You know, it's thinking about walking. Left, right, is this platform gonna fall if I get to the edge? You know, it kind of gives it something to do and that frees up the R mode
32:21
to kick stuff over the fence. So you've probably experienced this yourself. If you've been coding or working on a design problem or some kind of bug and you're just really stuck and you can't figure it out, you can't figure it out, you give up in desperation and you slam the computer, you storm out, you're walking down the hall, you're walking out to go home.
32:41
And what happens when you're like halfway out somewhere? Ah, I didn't set X to zero or whatever it was. The idea pops into your head. Well, that's this kind of phenomenon. As it turns out, the worst place to be if you want to be inventive or creative, the worst place you can be is in front of the keyboard.
33:02
Why is that? Well, what happens is you're sitting there typing and working on letters and curly braces and symbols and this sort of stuff. Your brain gets locked into favoring L mode style processes and it shuts out the R mode completely. It's just locked in this. This goes back to the pair programming example.
33:20
The driver who's sitting there typing gets locked into this kind of symbolic manipulation mode and all these other processes don't get a chance to actually fire or work. Whereas the navigator's sitting there, they're not typing, they're looking around, they are more free to let these other processes come into play.
33:41
So, as a consequence of this, first of all, when you are stuck on a problem, step away from the keyboard. That's the best thing you can do. Secondly, this presents us with a bit of a problem. Because these preconscious processes are sort of asynchronous and not under our direct control
34:01
and because they're more likely to fire when we're not at the computer, what that means is that we're gonna be somewhere else when the great idea comes to us. You're gonna be mowing the lawn, doing the dishes, on the hammock, in the pub, at the restaurant, on the bus, the train, the car, whatever.
34:22
You're gonna be somewhere else when this pops into your head. And we need to do something about that. So, what happens is, everyone has these kinds of great ideas but they come to you at random times. So, few people actually bother to keep track
34:41
of good ideas when it comes to them. Even fewer then act on it and then very few, given all that, actually have the means to sort of pull it off. So, to get up this ladder, at first, at least, you've gotta keep track of great ideas. Now, it turns out that the way your brain works, if you start keeping track of great ideas,
35:03
your brain will acclimatize to that. It's a self-organizing machine, right? So, if you start doing that, it's like, oh, you want this kind of stuff. I'll be on the lookout for that. I'll start finding more and more of that. Consequently, if you don't keep track of good ideas,
35:21
then your brain's like, I'm giving up. I'm gonna go into the back and watch old reruns of Lost or something. It's like, you know, eh, don't need to bother with it. So, it ends up that to get great ideas, you've gotta start keeping track of them and then you'll get more of them. So, what you need is what we lovingly call an exocortex.
35:44
Some place to keep ideas outside of your brain because your brain's pretty bad at keeping track of this sort of stuff. This is really like the number one idea that can get you ahead with something, is just simply writing down an idea whenever you have it.
36:01
So, that means you have to have something that's with you all the time. I carry around a little Moleskine notebook, one of the small ones, and a Fisher Space Pen. This is the kind that will write upside down in a boiling toilet should the need arise. Not that I've tested that.
36:21
That's the marketing claim. But you know, it's small and it's with you all the time. I know folks who carry index cards in their back pocket. You can use your iPhone or something, being aware of the dangers of sort of having to type to get a note in. One fun thing you can do, especially if you're driving or your hands aren't free,
36:42
is use your cellular or your mobile and leave yourself a voicemail with whatever your idea, your insight, your notion might be. And if you've got a system like some of them out there where it'll take and transcribe your voicemail into email, you call yourself, leave yourself a message, get to your office, get to your computer.
37:01
Here's your great thought transcribed for you in your inbox. You can copy and paste it and stick it somewhere and then work with it later. So there's a lot of ways to kind of get around this. Some of them are a little fancier than others. This is kind of a cool idea. This has been around for years. A website called pocketmod.com
37:20
where you can pick out the style to make like this little foldable booklet out of a single page of A4 or eight and a half by 11 paper. And you can tell it if you want lines or grids or tables or what have you. And with a couple of cuts, it folds up and makes this great little booklet. You can stick in your pocket,
37:41
that in the stub of a pencil and you're good to go. Cheap as dirt, but it's with you all the time. It's disposable. For stuff online, if you stumble across stuff and you want to save it, something like evernote.com, it's probably a good place to stick resources so you don't lose them.
38:00
Because what happens is we have this tendency to say, oh yeah, I'll remember that. You know, you wake up in the middle of the night with a great idea, I'll remember that in the morning. Not gonna happen. Does not happen. Doesn't work that way. You gotta jot it down. I'll find that website again. I never do. They're effervescent. Jam it in here. Do something with it to keep it.
38:23
So that's one way of looking at thinking and learning of trying to harvest stuff that our brains are trying to tell us. That's kind of working on the output side of it, if you will. So now I want to talk a little bit about the input side of the equation. What can we do to make learning
38:40
a little bit more efficient, more effective? Hopefully none of this is anything shockingly new to you. Hopefully this is all stuff you've maybe stumbled across once before, but is just a good reminder. If it is shockingly new, write it down. So the first thing to be aware of is,
39:00
as a learner, you're trying to learn a new library, framework, language. I hear Elixir's really cool. You're trying to learn something new. There's different ways of learning, different learning modalities. Classically, they start off saying there was three types of learners, visual, auditory, or kinesthetic.
39:21
This guy named Gardner came up with seven different intelligences, seven different ways. They ended up adding more, even onto that later. It doesn't particularly matter. Obviously, if you like coming to lectures like this and you learn best from this kind of thing, you're probably more an auditory learner. You like hearing it.
39:41
If you need to read it, you need to see it. That's more visual. If none of that works for you and you just want kind of experience with it, you want to play with it, you want to try it out, that leans more toward the idea of kinesthetic or experiential learning. They're all valid. Nobody is just one of these.
40:00
I mean, you can learn by any of these methods, but for you in particular, one or more of these might be more efficient than the others. So if you haven't figured that out yet, that's kind of worth a try. Well, let me go to a couple conferences, read a couple books, try some stuff out when it's brand new without reading about it or hearing about it, and see what works best.
40:23
And then you can focus on that saying, okay, well, I know I need to hear it, so let me get the book on tape, let me listen to the podcast, whatever, and concentrate on that as opposed to perhaps trying to read it. Having said that, sometimes that can just be a luxury because 90% of the stuff that we need to absorb
40:43
is only going to come to us in written form. It's going to be an article, a book, something on the web, and you have to read it anyway. So that's interesting. How do you read? Does it matter? Do you just start scanning it with your eyeballs
41:02
and it just fills in, or are there better ways to approach reading perhaps? Turns out there are. There's a variety of kind of reading summary techniques, for lack of a better word, that all sort of boil down to this same kind of workflow here.
41:21
This popular one's called SQ3R because the steps in English at least comprise an S, a Q, and three R's. And the idea is, the first thing you do is survey the whole work. You know, it doesn't matter whether it's a paper book or an ebook or an article on the web,
41:41
you just kind of scan the whole thing. Look at the table of contents if it has it, chapter summaries, section summaries, kind of get your head around the whole thing without delving in too deeply yet, just to kind of get a sense of the scope, where it's going, you know, what you want out of it. And then note any questions you have.
42:00
Is this going to teach me about exception handling? Will I actually understand what a monad is after this? Will I understand, you know, how to curry something, whatever it is. Note the questions down. Don't do anything else with them yet, just kind of write it down. Then go through and read the piece in its entirety, front to back.
42:20
When you're done with that, then try to start to recall, try to remember stuff, try to do it. And this gets really kind of interesting. You know, you can read, for instance, a book on a programming language and say, oh yeah, yeah, I get it. You do this, you do that, it uses brackets for this and curly braces for that, and yeah, I understand it. Okay, now go try and type hello world
42:42
or something from scratch. Oh yeah, hmm, now wait, now wait, how did that go again? Trying to recall it and actually use it turns out to be more powerful than rereading it and reading it again. So, you know, in the old days, they used to say that cramming for a test
43:01
should all be about rereading the material. Turns out it doesn't work that way. It's much more efficient to test your recall of the material. That's what strengthens all the neural connections is trying to retrieve the information. So something you really want to memorize, you want to emphasize the recall of it. And of course you don't know it,
43:21
you know, go back, okay, it's that. Now I'll need to test myself on that again later at some point. But concentrating on the recall is what really cements it into your memory. And then you expand on that, you review, you know, what you read, look at your notes, look at the questions you had noted down. Did it answer that? Yes, no, maybe. Oh, it talked about that, but now I don't remember.
43:42
Let me go back and look at that and so on. And what this does is this gets you this kind of flow from one set of processes to another. And that's really the secret. You know, back in the 60s and the 70s when they first discovered this kind of right brain, left brain dichotomy at the time,
44:02
you know, there was tons of books about, you know, right brain cooking and right brain tennis and right brain this and yada, yada, and it's stupid. Your brain doesn't actually work that way. What you need is to have both sets of processes cooperating. And in this case, this is actually a good example of doing something that starts off in a very broad, holistic fashion,
44:24
surveying the whole work, thinking of general questions over the whole thing. And then narrowing down to very traditional, linear L-mode sorts of, you know, make yourself a test and recall it and so on and so forth. And this kind of combination of activities seems to be much more effective
44:41
than any one set on their own. So that's the kind of thing we try to head for. So in a similar vein, how do you take notes? You're studying a new language, a new technology, a new framework. How do you take notes as you go along? Do you take notes as you go along? I find this kind of interesting.
45:00
I mean, in the old days, if you were like, you know, studying for university or something or a test, of course you would take notes in the class and do that sort of thing. But now you want to learn a new programming language. You want to learn Ruby. You want to learn JavaScript the right way. The good parts of JavaScript, that won't take long. You know, Elixir, Erlang, whatever. Do you take notes as you go?
45:21
Or do you just kind of read some stuff and mess around with it and try a few tutorials and oh, now what was that again? Now you want to take notes about it. And if you're trying to invent something, all right, you're trying to come up with a new design, some solution for the project you're working on, some exploratory thinking, great way to take notes.
45:42
Best way to do that kind of note-taking where you're learning something or where you're exploring a topic is with a mind map. And this is funny, let me just confirm a bias here. How many people in the audience right now are from the US, raise your hand. Good, okay, one relative, that's fine.
46:01
So everyone else is from Europe, okay. Raise your hand if you were exposed to mind maps anywhere in your educational process, grade school, primary school. Okay, less than usually, usually that's like 100%. And it's funny, because if I ask that question in the US and say, you know, have you ever heard of a mind map before? Crickets, nobody raises their hand.
46:21
They've never even heard of such a thing. And it's usually closer to 100% almost anywhere in Europe. It's like, oh yeah, we've had that. You know, we used that in school, so on and so forth. So I'll assume this is at least a little familiar to you. I just wanna go over a couple things. Does this look particularly tidy or neat?
46:41
Nope, this is a working document. This is something you scribble on when that asynchronous insight comes to you. Oh, look, this is related to that. Boom, you put a big swoop on it. It's very much a working document. This was part of the thinking and learning book that I wrote, and you eat lunch.
47:00
You leave this out on your desk. You eat lunch over it. I think that was mayonnaise, that was red wine. Not sure what that one was. You know, it's messy, it's organic, and that's the kind of tool you want for this kind of exploratory thinking. So you start with a mind map. You're jotting some stuff down, and then you wanna look at it and kind of work the mind map.
47:22
You wanna ask yourself, okay, I've gotten this so far. What else do I see? Are these things related at all? Is there something missing here? I've got this end and that end. Is there anything in here I should know about? What else do you know that you could possibly add to this? Well, I read this other thing the other day, but I don't see how it fits in.
47:42
Okay, draw it over here to the side. You'll work it out later. What else could there be? It's like, wouldn't it be really awesome if you could do this to that, and if this thing were related to that, you could tie this in. You know, what else do you imagine could be? And predominantly, you have all these kind of thoughts
48:02
floating out here, you're scribbling down. How are they related? Because just like in an object-oriented system, the objects aren't interesting. It's the relationship between them, the behaviors between them. That's what's interesting. And it's the same here. How do these things that I'm studying relate to each other?
48:21
How do they tie in? That's where you start to get some real learning. So this is very messy, very organic, very loose. You can of course get mind map software for your computer. Is it as useful? No, not particularly. You're getting back into that sort of L-mode symbolic lock.
48:42
This is a great way to keep track of research, perhaps. I did this for the book. It's like you can click on things. It'll take you to the original PDF file from some doctor somewhere or some webpage, but it's not a tool for exploratory thinking. But once you've finished that kind of exploratory phase and you need to kind of maybe
49:02
productize that information and work on it a little bit more, you want to look at a different style of Wiki. You want something now closer to the computer, something like a Wiki like Wikipedia uses, or even better than that, just something like an editor in a Wiki mode. You can do this with TextMate, with Sublime,
49:21
VI, Emacs. You can probably do it in Eclipse for all I know. It's just an editor mode that'll highlight camel case words and let you make new nodes very quickly. So as we said before, if you keep track of good ideas, you'll get more of them. And similarly, once you make a category for some kind of a new idea,
49:41
your brain's going to start looking for that specifically. It's like you put a filter in place. And this is similar to an idea called sense tuning, but once you start looking for something in particular, once you've got a place for it, your brain's like, oh, look, I see this over here. I see this over there. I see that here. And it gives you a place to put it.
50:01
Along the same vein, if you're trying to do this, expand this into more of a team environment, you can do something like this technique called affinity grouping. And the way this works is you get your team, get your bunch of folks together, you give them a little post-it sticky notes and markers, and they all jot down ideas, thoughts, whatever the topic at hand is,
50:20
and you stick them up on a whiteboard. Stick everyone's thoughts up there, and then you go through as a group and you rearrange them. You coalesce them. Okay, these ideas are all talking about this. These talk about that. And as it starts to coalesce, as it starts to coalesce, you can draw circles around them and arrows and start connecting them. And basically you've done a group mind map.
50:43
So it's an interesting way to kind of get multiple people involved on it. The overall thought here is that for these kinds of very loose, slippery thoughts, you need very loose tools. You don't want the tool to interfere with the thinking process. So if you try to do something like this
51:01
and then stick it into an outline in Word or something, it's going to kill you. Because as soon as you start typing and screwing around and then Clippy comes up and tells you something, you know, your idea is out the window. And in fact, I had an interesting conversation just a couple weeks ago with a fellow who makes hand-ground nibs
51:20
for fountain pens, old-fashioned fountain pens. And he was describing how you make a music nib for composers. And it's got special three tines and you file it differently and all this kind of stuff. And he says that they sell these to all the big composers in Hollywood and such, that they refuse to use anything else
51:41
when they're composing, especially at the piano. Because you want to be able to grab something and very quickly jot it down. And if you have to go type it into a music program like Finale or Sibelius or something like that, that extra effort of trying to feed it to the computer wrecks the thought. You start to lose it again, just like that dream you wake up from
52:01
and you're trying to describe it. It's such an effervescent thought, you just want to get it down quickly before you lose it. So they use these special fountain pens that make a quick blob and a little strike and all this kind of deal. I just thought it was sort of interesting. So now, some warnings and some advice on how the brain works.
52:21
One thing we are not built to do, but we think we are, is multitask. We suck at multitasking. We are not good at it. If you think of the brain as a CPU, there is no sort of save stack, restore stack operation. If you're working on something and you get interrupted,
52:42
you've got to pull all that information back one by one and build up where you were again. That's very expensive. And people think that you really can multitask and sometimes we'll take that to ludicrous extremes. I can watch TV and I can text and I can write code and I can read a book all at the same time or worse.
53:03
It doesn't really work that way. So a study, and I'll put that in air quotes, in the UK a couple years ago, suggested that if you constantly check your email while you're working on something, then your IQ will drop about 10 points. But at the same time, if you were to smoke a joint,
53:23
a marijuana cigarette, your IQ would only drop about four points. Whatever you do, don't do both. That would be bad. Another study suggested that some 40%, 20 to 40% of your workday can get lost
53:41
just by multitasking. That right out of the gate takes your eight hour day, if you remember what those were, down to a five hour day lost just from context switching trying to multitask. So what do we do about this? Rule number one, send less email
54:01
and you will receive less email. Make the phone call, walk down the hallway, look it up on the web. Every email you send is just gonna come bouncing back at you and maybe more so. Send less, you get less. Choose your own tempo for an email conversation. If somebody emails you and you bounce right back on it
54:22
and get right back to them, guess what? You've set the tempo for that conversation now. Every time that person emails you, they're gonna expect an instant response. I like to let emails age, like cheese or wine. It's like, oh, this was from Tuesday. That was a great vintage.
54:40
We'll just let that age a little bit and send it back when I'm damn good and ready to. Either way, and sometimes you can't. If the server's on fire, you gotta deal with it. But it's your choice. You can choose when to reply and you can set the tempo and the pace for that conversation. If it needs to be fast paced, great.
55:02
If it doesn't, don't do it. Don't context switch. That's just the danger of multitasking. You're working on one thing and oh, I gotta switch context and work on something else. Bang, you're dead. That's what you have to avoid. So getting things done, the David Allen cult slash method,
55:25
the way you do it, he's got these set rules. Any kind of input queue that you have to work, call it email, but it could be a paper job list or whatever else it is. You scan the queue once and only once.
55:41
From that, you do one of three things. You either answer it immediately, no, you assign it to somebody else, Fred take care of this, or you sort it into a pile. All right, these are bugs I have to fix. These are things I have to pick up on the way home. These are meetings I have to set up, whatever it is. You sort it into piles.
56:02
Then you go through and work each pile top to bottom. These are the bugs I'm working on now. I'm not rechecking the queue. I'm not checking email again. I'm working the queue in order. The other thing is not to ever keep mental lists. If you keep mental to do lists,
56:21
that's kind of like your memory in that case is sort of like dynamic RAM. It has to keep being refreshed. So you kind of have to keep all these CPU cycles burning to keep this list going in your head. I don't have that kind of bandwidth anymore. Write it down, get it out, put it in your exocortex, write it in a sticky note, something,
56:40
get it out of your head so you don't have that dynamic refresh going on. Set queues for task resumption. This is very clever. You're sitting there, you're in the flow, you're typing away, and your boss, somebody comes in to interrupt you. You see them standing there. You've got about a second and a half.
57:01
So you finish typing what it is you want to do when you come back. Finish adding the exception handler. Add this to the database. Whatever it is. It doesn't have to be English, but something you can recognize when you come back. A little note to yourself right there in the code. Just blah, blah, blah, here's what I need to do. Bang. Yes, what is it?
57:20
Okay, we have to do this. Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. We do this, we come back. What the hell was I working on? Oh yeah, it was this file, that's right. Oh, I gotta add the thingy. Okay, bang. You have facilitated that task resumption by leaving yourself a queue. Researchers have claimed great results at this of it being effective.
57:41
On a larger scale, set the interruption protocols for the team. When is it okay for your team members to interrupt you? When is it not? Do you put a little figure up on your desk saying I can't be interrupted right now. I've got the Darth Vader up. Do you set hours during the day? We will not, as a team,
58:01
we will not do email on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Or we will only do email from one to four or whatever it is. I don't care, pick something. But set that so everyone knows the rules and you have your uninterrupted time. But the biggest thing you can do, if you haven't done it already, if you want a productivity gain of 20 to 30%
58:22
without learning anything, get a second monitor. Why is that? What do you call Alt-Tab on Windows? Context switch. What do we say about context switching? Yeah, that's bad. Your brain's not good at it. That's horrible. You need the extra real estate
58:42
so you can have everything all at once. I have spaces on the Mac. There's equivalents for Windows. I set different sets of screens so that I have, it's all task-based. So all my communications is in one, coding in another, some other business functions in the others. I actually run dual screens, dual-headed,
59:03
so I can have sets of these things going on. It looks something like that. You can get, the Windows one is called Finestra Virtual Desktop, same kind of idea. But the idea is if you're working on one thing, that's all you wanna be bothered with. You don't want the other stuff interrupting you.
59:21
So to sum up, this all sounds great. Oh, I'm gonna start mind mapping. I'm gonna go tell my team to piss off on Tuesdays. I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. Yeah, yeah, that's great. It's gonna be harder than that. So have a plan, what you wanna do. Don't worry about doing something wrong. Worry about not doing something.
59:41
And realize that habits take time to form. Realize that what you believe about your brain will make it so because it's gonna rewire itself that way and take small steps. That's all I have for you today. This is my email address, my Twitter handle, my blog where I rant on these things.
01:00:00
Most of this material can be found in the Pragmatic Thinking and Learning book. Here's the other six that I wrote. Thank you so much for having me here today. Now before you go, I am bid, I am bade to remind you to evaluate this session with a green card in the bucket.
01:00:24
There's some other colors too, but you won't put the green card in the bucket. If you want to, you can add feedback or comments can be written on the cards. They're a little small, so you're going to have to write tiny, you know, great's a good comment. To do that, throw it in the bucket.
01:00:40
I've got two other talks today, not the next session, but the session after that I'll be talking about bugs in processing, bugs in your mind, which is kind of interesting. And then later on this afternoon I've got a talk on what the last 10 years of Agile haven't and have done for us. Hope you all have a great conference. Thanks.