Big Sky Virtual Café

One of the biggest reasons why I run the Big Sky Virtual Café is to provide anybody who comes by with three things, three virtual menu items: Eye-Openers (Espresso Shots), Super Food Smoothies and Random Blends. What they are and what they’re made of is explained below - let’s just say that the ingredients are carefully distilled, quality concepts gathered up from places like cognitive science, game theory, psychology and neuroscience. The ingredients change nearly every day. Today’s offerings are right on the front page menu! They’re free.

I don’t think you really need to read any more. Virtual drinks - you’ll figure it out!

Still reading? Well then here is some more info about the café offerings. (You can look around the rest of the site too, but hit the menu items first, the rest can wait. Besides, most of the café can’t even be accessed without the menu items- no, seriously, it’s kind of a game that way).

And yes, I’ll just say it since most people ask … there IS a real Big Sky Café. It’s at the main entry pass to the Big Sky Mountains … but you definitely don’t need to know anything about that right now.

The Three Kinds of Shots

Eye-Opener Espresso Shots: These are things you can read quickly to get excited about learning. We figure you slam these back in 30 seconds and move on.

Super Food Smoothies: These have a little more substance to them. Usually a concept to think about - with a little definition. If you have a few minutes you can do some thinking about them.

Random Blends: With these we get creative and whip up some kind of combination of ingredients. We throw in some Eye-Openers, Super Foods and some other stuff. We figure we won’t need to serve the same combination twice - ever! We don’t know what they’ll taste like or what they’ll do - that’s why they’re free!

The Ingredients

We get find the ingredients for all three of these from around the vicinity of things like Learning, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Knowledge Engineering, Complex Systems, Game Theory, Journaling, Intelligent Learning Environments, Attention, Memory, Personality, Culture, Language, Aesthetics and Art

What for?

One of the fastest and most reliable ways to bolster our mental and emotional health is to spend some time focusing on what is cool, interesting and amazing in the world around us, ourselves and others. So we want to be able to just walk right in and have some of that whenever we want. The Big Sky Café is an experiment in ways to get fast access to some of these things ... right now. 30 seconds will give you something and longer will give you more.

We sound kind of confident, right?

We are. We think that the ideas found in vicinity of Cognitive Science, Neuroscience and Psychology can't help but to generate wonder, motivation and fun. And with the smallest of effort a lot of what is found there can be made to generate light, energy and potential, especially in terms of our personal experience of Learning, Self-Development and Happiness. In particular we think that wonder, motivation and fun arise naturally from a liberated, zoomed-out, view of Learning.

The cool things that can be seen from this view are actually pretty easy to share when you are standing there looking at them. And we think it's a good idea to create

That’s it in a nutshell. Go on, help yourself to a shot if you haven’t already. Then get on with your day. Don’t get bogged down! You can come back later.