The incentive of regret and avoiding it

I feel like I have a new approach to making decisions. Often, decisions seem straightforward and calculated to be something that works toward good results as well provides immediate satisfaction to some extent. Well, I have recently made decisions to take on short-term commitments in order to avoid feeling the regret of not making those decisions. That is, I have done things that I felt I did not want to do, but I thought they would make me a better person and provide an opportunity that later I would regret passing up, especially because they may have made me into the person I needed to be. This kind of makes sense, but it has struck me as a weird way of making decisions. Specifically, they were things I did in law school that I didn't have to do. Now I'm wondering if I'll take any jobs or other commitments that I'm not excited about for the sake of experience.

Invasive plants

Whenever I look up plants on the Internet, I often find out that things growing in the wild or domestically are deemed invasive. They come from Asia or Africa, and they proliferate much more rapidly than plants that are native to America. Often there are American counterparts to an exotic species that looks very similar. The invasive plants are said to be something to fight off or to never plant in your own yard. For instance, you'll see exhortations to never plant English Ivy, and it's even illegal in Oregon.

Well, this is America. Can't American values be applied to the ecosystem? We value competition and leadership. We like to find ways to work faster and more efficiently. If these vines and shrubs can come over from Asia and find ways to grow faster than their American cousins who look exactly the same, then I say let them. In America we like to adapt to change when change means progress, so the ecosystem can adapt, too.

The evolution of shrinking blogs

The posting of short status messages on services like Twitter is often called "micro-blogging." The messages are limited to 140 characters. In a ridiculous development I have seen a service called Adocu in which you can post only one word, and the website calls it "nano-blogging." If this is the trend, then I propose the next step to be "pico-blogging" in which you can only post a three-character code to communicate your status. After that there will be "femto-blogging" in which you can only post a single character. The logical conclusion will be "atto-blogging" in which you only set a flag, a one or a zero (on or off, yes or no). I don't see how we can miniaturize any further. Micro-blogging is wacky enough already.