What is “time”? What dimension is it? And can it be controlled?

These are some of the questions posed in a BBC documentary called “Time Trip”, a look at the idea of time travel. These scientists talk about “stopping time” or that “time travels at different speeds” depending on how fast you’re traveling. The idea that time can be manipulated seems like they’re overlooking the simplest and most obvious solution.

Time is just a word. It was made up to refer to events before now and after now. Time isn’t a dimension that you can manipulate. There’s now and that’s it. Now is the only “dimension” of time that we can manipulate and we do it real-time.

Keep it simple stupid. The only place time travel is going to happen is in the movies.

Most ideas don’t just come out of thin air. They’re the result of knowledge and experience in a special line of work.

When you work in a certain field, you learn about what works and what doesn’t. Entrepreneurs in that field are able to take what they know about what doesn’t work and come up with new ideas to fix those problems.

For example, take a look at Noca. This company was founded by ex-Visa employees to fix the problems with credit card transaction fees. Coming up with good ideas is nothing special; it just takes a little knowledge and a little insight.

I’ve always wanted to write a book. Not a novel or tall tale, but something in nonfiction.

Writing a fictional book is one thing. Writing a book that will educate or help other people is another and I think that’s what interests me the most. Blogging kind of gives you that opportunity to dip your toe into the world of publishing and it can be a lot of fun.

If there’s something you’re passionate about, I say go ahead and write a book about it. Let other people know about your passion and you might be able to make a difference in someone’s life.

We put things off if we don’t feel the consequences. So how do we break the habit?

Sometimes we don’t just procrastinate, we actually won’t do something if we don’t immediately feel the consequences. If I don’t brush my teeth tonight, will it matter? Tomorrow I’ll feel the same, but in the long run it might make a difference.

Besides a stricter brushing regimen, one way to make people realize those long-term consequences is to show them in real-time. What if your toothbrush tracked how often you used it and could digitally render an image on your bathroom mirror of how your teeth will look in 20 years? It’s not a pretty picture. But it might motivate you.

So if we can’t make people feel the consequences of putting something off, maybe we can help them realize those consequences by showing them.

It always seems like I get my best ideas when I’m in the shower. Strange, isn’t it?

It’s funny, in college I used to schedule my showers so that they would correspond with studying plans or while I was working on a hard problem. Whenever I came out of the shower, I almost always had a solution to the problem I was working on. Sometimes it’s hard to hold back from taking two showers in a day if I’m trying to solve several problems

I don’t know what it is though. Maybe the moist air and soothing water opens up some pathways in your brain that causes you to more clearly see the solution. It would be interesting to see if there are any studies on this.

Always carry a notebook around with you. You never know when you’ll come up with an idea!

A friend of mine always has his black notebook with him whenever he’s at home or on the road. Inside that notebook are countless ideas that popped into his head at one point or another. It’s a great way to go back over ideas you may have had, no matter how stupid they were.

Even though “a windshield wiper mechanism for eyeglasses” and “a George Foreman device for baking cookies” may never come to fruition, you never know… one day one of those ideas may end up contributing to the formation of a business

Everyone talks about Facebook being the world’s social operating system. They couldn’t be any more wrong.

This isn’t a revolution. This is what I envision as the next step in the design of operating systems. It’s what I refer to as the “social” operating system… a real operating system like Windows or OS X. Except that this operating system, I call Sobuntu, is designed with the “social graph” in mind.

In Sobuntu, the account you log into on your computer is your social profile, shared through a protocol possibly similar to OpenID. Your account profile knows things like your interests, birth date, etc. Everything on your computer can be shared with certain friends, groups, etc. by changing the properties of those files. Every shared file has a set of wall posts that your friends can comment on. And the activities of your friends can be seen through a “system feed” that’s integrated on your desktop.

There’s more, but I think you get the idea. There’s no reason social networking must exist solely on the web. Let’s take a leap forward and put it on the desktop.

Even when you’re in front of people you don’t know, it’s okay to make a fool of yourself. Really!

I don’t recall where I heard this or who I heard it from, but whenever I’m with a group of people I don’t know, I never worry if I make a fool of myself. “You’ll never see those people again, so who cares?” I always say that to myself after I do something stupid. It gives me a sense of relief.

So if you just tripped over yourself in the grocery store and fell flat on your face and are worried about what everyone around you is thinking… stop worrying! You’ll (probably) never see them again, so who cares!

The oven can be a great tool when you need a little help

In 2006, I dropped my cell phone into a pool (don’t ask). While I usually would have immediately turned it on (destroying it), per the advice of my dad I opened it up, turned on the oven and baked my cell phone. Why? Well, the dry heat will dry every tiny corner of the phone that you couldn’t reach otherwise. It saved my phone for a while until I could get a new one.

In another chance opportunity, earlier this year I threw the clear plastic part of my smoothie maker into the dishwasher. Unfortunately, the heat caused the top of the plastic to morph into a non-circular shape. The oven, of course, came to the rescue again. Be careful if you try this. I turned on the oven, threw in the plastic, and waited for it to become soft so that I could re-morph the top into a circle.

It turns out there’s a MacGyver in all of us

Studying in high school and college was hard. There is so much information to know and the teacher might ask anything. Here’s a technique I used throughout my entire academic career.

Taking a page from Blink (a really great book), thin slicing refers to “our ability to gauge what is really important from a very narrow period of experience”. So, if my test covered 5 chapters, I spent a few hours reading them, noting any important information and typed it in a “study guide”. This would compact 200 pages into maybe 10 pages of important information. I would then only study those 10 pages, a thin slice of the whole.

“Thin slicing” let me focus on what’s important and ignore the rest. I think it worked well and you may even find it useful in other parts of your daily tasks.