"Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. "

"Think of it this way. When some folks go out of their way to show off their defiance and rebellion, others go out of their way to publicly squash such rebellion, to assert their dominance. But if you are not overtly rebellious, you can get away with a lot of abstract idea rebellion — few folks will even notice such deviations, and fewer still will care. So, ask yourself, do you want to look like a rebel, or do you want to be a rebel?"

"Most people are at a loss to be able to identify any useful connections between arts and sciences. This ignorance is appalling. Arts provide innovations through analogies, models, skills, structures, techniques, methods, and knowledge. Arts don't just prettify science or make technology more aesthetic

"Fostering innovation, in other words, isn't just a matter of improving the quantity or quality of math and science education. It's a matter of restructuring how we approach and teach all our subjects, from the liberal arts to math, science and engineering. And it means focusing as much on teaching how to combine those fields of knowledge and think in flexible, integrative, and creative ways, as we do on the subject matter itself. "

The sobering truth is that the dramatic artistic creations or intellectual insights we most admire for their striking "creativity" matter little for economic growth. Creative new clothes or music may change fashion, but are soon eclipsed by newer fashions. Large and lasting economic innovations, like steam engines or cell phones, are rare and tend to be independently "invented" by many people. One less visionary would matter little.

Instead, the innovations that matter most are the millions of small changes we constantly make to our billions of daily procedures and arrangements.

Dark Art combines the experience of a traditional thriller novel with a multimedia-fueled “out of book” narrative. Clues in the novel — and items that come with the novel, such as ID cards and photos — propel readers into an online experience where they become protagonists themselves.

Sometime in the next week - January 1st if you have that available, or maybe January 3rd or 4th if the weekend is more convenient - I suggest you hold a New Day, where you don't do anything old.

Don't read any book you've read before. Don't read any author you've read before. Don't visit any website you've visited before. Don't play any game you've played before. Don't listen to familiar music that you already know you'll like. If you go on a walk, walk along a new path even if you have to drive to a different part of the city for your walk. Don't go to any restaurant you've been to before, order a dish that you haven't had before. Talk to new people (even if you have to find them in an IRC channel) about something you don't spend much time discussing.

Besides dictating organizational forms, current law privileges the interests of investors and boards of directors, and has no recognition for co-creators who wish to collaborate to create shared value in virtual spaces, and who wish to make decisions as a group.

So imagine if a group of self-organized individuals could come together on the Internet to create valuable products and services – and to establish their own “operating agreement” among themselves, according to their specific goals — and yet still receive the benefits of “legal personhood” that corporations enjoy.

The venerable Jim March gave a fascinating presentation today at the Academy of Management meetings that dealt with the origins of novelty. He maintained that the process generating novelty is distinct from the creativity process. Novelty represents deviance from norms of appropriateness or expectations (similar to juvenile delinquency in nature). Creativity, in contrast, represents those acts of novelty that are deemed successful. Creativity is a rare form of novelty.

by Paul Graham

Finally the modern space age delivers a fully functioning graphic equalizer in a handy t-shirt format. Party like it's 2999 with the glowing display on the T-Qualizer that dynamically changes with any ambient sound or music.