nicks ponderings

This is the home for my ponderings of life. A public collection in my in-progress thoughts on everything. It started just about money but is hopefully expanding to cover all of my thoughts, and some new thoughts I haven't had yet.

Topics

• money - centered around the morality of money
• politics - something about politics I guess
• the future - what will become of this world (or humanity?)
• happiness - what is happiness and how do I get it
• lifestyle - how to live!
• energy - thoughts about energy
• religion - my thoughts on religion/atheism/humanism, scary!
• drugs - drug use/policy
• communications - how to communicate (with me)
• books - books I read, or am reading
• animals - some stuff mostly about veganism
• miscellaneous - other stuff, I don't know where to put yet

NAQ

(Never Asked Questions)

How do I comment?

Discussion happens over here - I love comments/questions, it motivates me to think more.

Why?

• writing my thoughts publically makes me write them a bit more carefully
• my thoughts are fuzzy and vague in my head, they become more real outside it (and may self desctruct in a cloud of stupidity)
• it provokes debate, which helps me refine the arguments: 1+n minds are better than 1
• I think I have something to say (we'll find out right?)
• I get sad at the state of debate in the world
  • news and media normally tell gossipy stories about anything but the underlying topic
  • in-person debate usually veers dramatically off-course and debates a well-worn set of less interesting topics instead
  • blogs or "point-in-time" publishing systems don't produce an always-up-to-date structured body of thoughts

Why on github?

The first few people I showed this to thought github is just for code, but:

• git itself (the basis for github) does nothing specifically for code, it's just a versioned tree of binary data
• tracking the progress of my thoughts/ideas through time should hopefully be facinating!
• it allows other people to contribute (should that be a good idea) or at least comment easily
• code people often don't ponder, and ponderers often don't code, perhaps if all the ponderers coded they would use github too
• it's free and works well
• writing in markdown is nice which github supports well, should I wish to turn it into a website, it's pretty trivial
• I use git/github for all my other writing (code that is) so it's handy to share systems

I was inspired by Ben Lupton's use of github for non-code purposes too:

• https://github.com/balupton/plant-vs-animal-products
• https://github.com/node-forward/mentors
• https://github.com/balupton/learnings
• https://github.com/balupton/meta