The best way to dull fear is to practice repetition. The more times you are in an environment or situation you find scary, the less it will intimidate you.

Every time you put yourself in an intimidating situation, even if you don’t actually do much (i.e., you take a 4 inch lead fall onto a giant bolt on purpose after alerting your belayer, instead of…taking soaring, monster whippers onto a blue TCU as you nearly get through the crux of your project), you are STILL making progress, and you should be happy, and keep at it.

The first time I started trying to free El Cap, I was terrified! Actually, when I started working on the Salathe headwall, I was also terrified. But I gradually got used to all the exposure, and was able to relax (somewhat) up there. Just keep at it.

It is possible to have too much of a good thing, in excess most endeavors and possessions take on the characteristics of their opposite. Thus, pacifists become militants, freedom fighters become tyrants, blessings become curses, help becomes hindrance, more becomes less. Too much, too many, and too often of what you want becomes what you don’t want. This is true of possessions and even time.

A path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself alone, one question. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t it is of no use.

In case you’re wondering, I’m pretty damn happy with mine right now.

Certain of my favorite iPad and iPhone apps sync like this too. When I read a bunch of RSS items using NetNewsWire on my iPad, they’re marked as read on my Mac. Sitting at my Mac in my office, I can send a long article to Instapaper. I go downstairs, pick up my iPad, sit on the couch, launch the Instapaper iPad app, and a few seconds later, there’s the article I just added to my Instapaper queue. This is the sort of data flow that makes me feel like I’m living in the future — using multiple hardware devices to view, edit, and modify the same data. I don’t worry about where separate copies of my data exist. Conceptually it’s just there in the apps, and the apps do all the hard work of pushing and pulling changes made on other clients.

(From the excellent Daring Fireball iPad Review.)

We still have a long way to go to really make this perfect (sharing files is still hard), but computing is starting to get to the point where the device fades away and finally lets you focus on what you want to do.

As lone as God and white as a winter moon, Mount Shasta starts up suddenly from the heart of the great black forests of California.

You would hardly call Mount Shasta a part of the Sierras; you would say rather that it is the great white tower of some ancient and eternal wall, with here and there the white walls overthrown.

It has no rival! There is not even a snow crowned subject in sight of its dominion. A shining pyramid in everlasting mail of frosts and ice, the sailor sometimes, in a day of singular clearness, catches glimpses of it from the sea a hundred miles away to the west; and it may be seen from the dome of the capitol 340 miles distant. The immigrant coming from the east beholds the snowy, solitary pillar from afar out on the arid sage-brush plains, and lifts his hands in silence as if in answer to a sign.

One idea that could be transferred from squatter cities is urban farming. An article by Gretchen Vogel in Science in 2008 enthused: “In a high-tech answer to the ‘local food’ movement, some experts want to transport the whole farm shoots, roots, and all to the city. They predict that future cities could grow most of their food inside city limits, in ultraefficient greenhouses… A farm on one city block could feed 50,000 people with vegetables, fruit, eggs, and meat. Upper floors would grow hydroponic crops; lower floors would house chickens and fish that consume plant waste.”

Conversely, the notion that the developments that make up history are primarily a series of chance events seems equally odd to me. Why fight over ideas, select governments, build armies, fund research, promote literacy, create art, or write histories if all we are doing is twiddling our thumbs while chance developments sund us bouncing around like the physicist’s particles? How can anyone deny strategic behavior and its consequences when we are surrounded by it in almost everything we do?

To be sure, the world as we know it could have swung one way or the other. That’s why neither the past nor the future follows an inevitable path. There are always chance elemnts behind which ways things, but those cahnce events rarely decide the future.

The vast majority of people have goals. They want to work out; they’d like to eat healthier food; they have their eye on a new job; they want to start their own company; they’re trying to become better parents. They want to change and they want to improve. Yet, while they talk about this, within themselves they usually remain the same, year after year. So how do you change? One way is to make minor adjustments over the course of a lifetime. Another is the transition that occurs in response to the death or near death of a loved one. And then there are those individuals such as myself who want to change dramatically and relatively quickly. Born with limited ability, we achieve this by saying that we’re sick and tired of living a regular existence, and we stop outside the ordinary by knowingly putting ourselves in life-threatening situations, facing adversity like we’ve never done before.