1. Limit your friends. Not real-life friends, but social network and blogging and forum friends. Not that these can’t be good relationships, but having too many makes them meaningless. And each friend will take up a little bit of your attention — when you read their updates, click on their links, reply to their messages, look at their photos, and so on. The more you have, the more attention they’ll require. Limit them to just the essential.
2. Limit your feeds. Blog subscriptions, newsletters, other updates and news subscriptions and so on. Limit them to a handful of essentials, and let the rest go. The more you have, the more attention they require.
3. Limit your communication time. Going into your email inbox? Just give yourself 10 minutes to read, reply, delete, and get out. Going to do Twitter? Give yourself 5 minutes. Seriously, set up a timer. Don’t let these things take up all your attention.
4. Give up on news. It’s a never-ending cycle. And if you’ve paid attention to the news as long as I have (I’m a former journalist), you know it’s all the same, year after year. Unless your job depends on it, the news is usually a waste of your attention. Let go of the need to stay updated. Even if your job does depend on it, keep it limited.
5. Be brief. Write brief emails, tweets, updates, blog posts. With some exceptions, of course. But make brief your de facto. Read more.
6. Give your attention to the important. This is the crucial part: choose what you give your attention to, and do this choosing carefully. What is important to you? Writing? Photography? Design? Coding? Creating a new business that helps others? Your kids? Figure this out, and give this the majority of your attention.
7. Become conscious of your distractions. Once you’ve decided to focus your attention on the important, become more aware of distractions as they come up. Make note of them, and as you get the urge to be distracted, learn to pause, breathe, and return to the important.
8. Surround yourself with the positive. If you want your life to be positive, let the positive have your attention. This applies to blogs, people, projects, and more.

I especially like the one about giving up on news; it’s something I’ve been grappling with for years. I’m not yet ready, I’m afraid, but I feel like this evolution is inevitable.

Atlanta- Pat Robertson, the conservative Christian televangelist and host of the 700 Club said that the 8.8 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Chile yesterday  was the result of the nations pact with the Chupacabra, or goat-sucker, a devilish beast blamed for livestock deaths across Latin America.

“Something happened a long time ago in Chile, and people might not want to talk about it,” Robertson said. “They were under the heel of the democratically elected SOCIALIST regime of Salvador Allende …and they got together and swore a pact to the chupacabra. They said, ’We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the the man we elected president, and install a military dictatorship that will make thousands of ‘troublemakers disappear.’” ”True story,” he continued. “And the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another.”

It saddens me that people send this man money.

In a well-meaning attempt to be tolerant of other cultures and religions we often blithely subvert our values and morality, says Sam Harris, the outspoken critic of blind religious faith. We do this because we think that questions about good and evil or right and wrong cannot be answered definitively. But they can, he told a rapt audience at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference Thursday — and they should.

Harris is no stranger to the argument that, to put it more mildly than he might, religion does more harm than good. His 2005 New York Times bestseller The End of Faith attempted to draw a straight line from faith to human atrocities. His subsequent Letter to a Christian Nation took on the fierce pushback he received from writing his first book.

So it should come as no surprise that Harris ran with this theme at TED, expanding his argument beyond the faithful to the secular-leaning. Scientists and academics, who are wedded to facts and empiricism, he said, do something different when they talk about morality. “We value differences of opinion in a way that we don’t in other areas,” Harris said.

We know that there are fundamentally right and wrong answers to certain questions and issues, but do not trust our instincts, he said. These cast-aside tenets should respected and should be the basis of a universal morality, regardless of variations in cultures and belief.

The arrow of time is based on ideas that go back to Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the 1870s. He figured out this thing called entropy. Entropy is just a measure of how disorderly things are. And it tends to grow. That’s the second law of thermodynamics: Entropy goes up with time, things become more disorderly. So, if you neatly stack papers on your desk, and you walk away, you’re not surprised they turn into a mess. You’d be very surprised if a mess turned into neatly stacked papers. That’s entropy and the arrow of time. Entropy goes up as it becomes messier.

So, Boltzmann understood that and he explained how entropy is related to the arrow of time. But there’s a missing piece to his explanation, which is, why was the entropy ever low to begin with? Why were the papers neatly stacked in the universe? Basically, our observable universe begins around 13.7 billion years ago in a state of exquisite order, exquisitely low entropy. It’s like the universe is a wind-up toy that has been sort of puttering along for the last 13.7 billion years and will eventually wind down to nothing. But why was it ever wound up in the first place? Why was it in such a weird low-entropy unusual state?

Great stuff.