Saturday, February 28, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
customer experience
"A willingness to fail, a willingness to be misunderstood, and a willingness to be long-term oriented."
- Jeff Bezos [born 1964] explaining Amazon's success.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
simplify
Hans Hoffman [1880-1966] identified Elysium [top image] as his own favorite work.
Hofmann came into his own when he was in his 70s and 80s. Robert De Niro's parents met at a Hofmann class. Hoffman's considered by some as the most important artist/teacher of the last several hundred years. Push-Pull. Space. Plasticity.
An earlier reference to De Niro's father here.
wikia.com
Non-profit Wikipedia.org founder Jimmy Wales [born 1966] talks about his for-profit Wikia.com website here.
success secrets
One of Turner's 45,000 bison. Image source here.
- Ted Turner [born 1938], Call Me Ted, pp. 259-260
An earlier reference to Turner here.
stand up
"Go back far enough in any great man's life, and you will eventually get to the stuff he did or said before he was great or even a man ... Trying to define a person's current self by their past self is the worst kind of gotcha. Our mistakes from the past are just that—mistakes, and most of the time it was necessary to make them in order to become the wiser person we then became ... Yes, if only hindsight could come without having to mess up first. And believe me, I have the platform shoes to prove that one."- Bill Maher [born 1956], New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer, p. 170
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
boneyard
Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona: $30 billion worth of mothballed fighters, bombers, surveillance aircraft, helicopters.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Reputation Index
RIM ranks 2625 out of 5787 in a Vanno algorithm monitoring companies in the press.
An earlier reference to RIM here.
Monday, February 23, 2009
social climber
"There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory."
- Marcel Proust [1871-1922]
Sunday, February 22, 2009
why some are better at math than others
"Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6. Read them out loud. Now look away and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again.
If you speak English, you have about a 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly. If you're Chinese, though, you're almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two-second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers— 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6 —right almost every time because, unlike English, their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds."
- Malcolm Gladwell [born 1963], Outliers: The Story of Success, pp. 227-228
An earlier reference to Gladwell here.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
on the fringe
M Boileau Au Cafe, 1893
trouble solver
"Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems."
- René Descartes [1596-1650]
An earlier reference to Descartes here.
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Call Him Ted
"When I suffer a setback, I don't think of myself as losing, I'm simply learning how to win." [Call Me Ted, p. 149]
- Ted Turner [born 1938] whose accomplishments include winning the America's Cup when he was thirty-nine, donating $1 billion to the U.N., owning the most land of any private citizen in the United States.
Friday, February 20, 2009
espionage
Alec Leamas
What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not! They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?From the 1965 screenplay adaptation of John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
strategic thinking
"A military analogy is to turn the map around to look and see how the enemy views the problem and to attack the enemy's strategy rather than the enemy's tactics."
- Military Advisor to President Obama Craig Mullaney
American Awareness
Gangster Al Capone and his son having baseball autographed by player Gabby Hartnett [Charles Leo Hartnett] from Capone's front row seat at Cominsky Park stadium on September 10, 1931.
- Al Capone [1899-1947]
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
best carver in british history
St. Paul's Choir, London
- Grinling Gibbons [1648-1721] was discovered as a chippy [carver] in the dockyard of Deptford by Sir Christopher Wren’s friend John Evelyn [1620-1706].
An earlier reference to Wren here.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Moral Hazard
If you bail someone out of a problem of their own creation, what incentive will they have to behave properly in the future?
Monday, February 16, 2009
difficult life
Vincent van Gogh [1853-1890] in a letter to his brother:
Dear Theo,Thank you for the money, the paints and the canvas. With your help, I go forward. I feel the force to work growing daily within me. Do you realize, Theo, that what I'm doing is new? And the paintings of the Old Masters—do you ever see a man or woman at work? Do they ever try to paint a laborer? Or a man digging? They didn't. And for good reason, because work is so hard to draw. To paint these people means to be with them in the fields day after day and by their firesides at night. Since the rains came, I became absorbed in the weavers; they make such good subjects. The old oak wood darkened by sweating hands and the shadows of the looms and the grey mud walls. All these months I've been trying to find a pattern, trying not so much to draw hands as gestures. Not so much faces as the expressions of people. Men and women who know the meaning of toil. I want to make clear that these people sitting round a meal of potatoes in the evening, have turned the soil with the very hands they put in the dish. That they have honestly earned their food. I want to paint something that smells of bacon sloot and steam. Something that is the good dark color of our Dutch earth.
From the 1956 screenplay adaptation of Irving Stone's 1934 novel Lust for Life.
Vincent van Gogh's Psychiatric assessment here.
a voice for nature
Dr. Steven Pinker argues that significant innate behavioral differences exist between individuals and between men and women. Discussing child-rearing, he says that children's characters are shaped by their genes, by their peer group and by chance experiences; parents cannot mold their children's nature, nor should they wish to, any more than they can redesign that of their spouses. Those little slates are not as blank as they may seem.
Hundreds of studies have measured correlations between the practices of parents and the way their children turn out. For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on. Most of the parenting expert industry and a lot of government policy turn these correlations into advice to parents, and blame the parents when children don't turn out as they would have liked. But correlation does not imply causation. Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate. Until those studies are replicated with adopted children, who don't get their genes from the people who bring them up, we don't know whether the correlations reflect the effects of parenting, the effects of shared genes, or some mixture. But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo. In developmental psychology it's considered impolite even to mention it, let alone test it. [Source: Edge]- Dr. Steven Pinker [born 1954] on the ways genes shape human behavior. More here.
Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Five Stages of Grief
1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance
- a model developed by Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross [1926-2004]
An earlier reference to Denial here.
a young revolutionary
CHOICES
If i can't do
what i want to do
then my job is to not
do what i don't want
to do
It's not the same thing
but it's the best i can
do
If i can't have
what i want . . . then
my job is to want
what i've got
and be satisfied
that at least there
is something more to want
Since i can't go
where i need
to go . . . then i must . . . go
where the signs point
through always understanding
parallel movement
isn't lateral
When i can't express
what i really feel
i practice feeling
what i can express
and none of it is equal
I know
but that's why mankind
alone among the animals
learns to cry
- Nikki Giovanni [born 1943]
Saturday, February 14, 2009
overdiagnosis
Overdiagnosis of bipolar common in substance abuse
January 17, 2009, NEW YORK, NY—Many people who abuse substances and experience mood instability may be overdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, new research suggests.
Researchers with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine said that among people with substance abuse disorders, mood instability and high-risk behavior may suggest the presence of bipolar. But they said active substance abuse makes it more difficult to diagnose bipolar among people with mood complaints.
The study looked at people admitted to a private inpatient clinic for substance abuse and mood disorder problems and found that only a third of those with suspected bipolar actually met the criteria for diagnosis. Those who did were older, were more likely to have past suicide attempts, and abused fewer substances.
The researchers concluded that caution must be exercised when attempting to diagnose patients.
The study, which appeared in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry electronically ahead of print, was titled “Over-diagnosis of bipolar disorder among substance use disorder inpatients with mood instability.”
January 17, 2009, NEW YORK, NY—Many people who abuse substances and experience mood instability may be overdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, new research suggests.
Researchers with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine said that among people with substance abuse disorders, mood instability and high-risk behavior may suggest the presence of bipolar. But they said active substance abuse makes it more difficult to diagnose bipolar among people with mood complaints.
The study looked at people admitted to a private inpatient clinic for substance abuse and mood disorder problems and found that only a third of those with suspected bipolar actually met the criteria for diagnosis. Those who did were older, were more likely to have past suicide attempts, and abused fewer substances.
The researchers concluded that caution must be exercised when attempting to diagnose patients.
The study, which appeared in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry electronically ahead of print, was titled “Over-diagnosis of bipolar disorder among substance use disorder inpatients with mood instability.”
Blogonomics
Daniel Lyons concludes that while blogs can do many wonderful things, making huge amounts of money isn't one of them:
Last year the total spent on blog advertising in the United States was a mere $411 million, according to researcher eMarketer. That represents only a sliver of the $23.7 billion spent on U.S. Internet ads last year, which is itself only a fraction of the $276.8 billion spent on all forms of advertising in the U.S. By 2012 blog ad spending will reach $746 million, while overall online ad spending will hit $32 billion, eMarketer says. More money was spent on e-mail advertising last year than was spent on blog advertising—yet you don't see anyone touting e-mail as the next big billion-dollar media business. Technorati, a blog researcher, estimates that bloggers who run ads earn an average of $5,060 per year. Don't call the Ferrari dealer just yet.The entire article is here.
Shocker: Unethical Doctor
TAMPA -- A University of South Florida dean is being investigated after surveillance video captured him taking a red bike from the loading dock of the Johnnie B. Byrd, Sr., Alzheimer's Center and Research Institute.
Dr. Abdul Rao, senior associate vice president for research at USF College of Medicine, said he took the bike on Monday to help a "nearly homeless'' friend and intended no harm.
The story continues here.
Friday, February 13, 2009
wealthy trees
"Everybody says I'm a genius, but I don't have any money and it's all a mess."
- Cambridge University educated Nick Drake [1948-1974] who was on antidepressants and living with his parents.
bullfights and bistros
Mike Campbell
I should have thought you'd have loved being a steer, Robert.Robert Cohn
What do you mean, Mike?
Mike Campbell
Well, they lead a sort of quiet life. They never say anything important, and they're always hanging around. I should have thought you'd have enjoyed that. Aren't you going to say anything?- Peter Viertel's 1957 screenplay adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises.
Steer: a young ox, especially one castrated before sexual maturity and raised for beef.
An earlier reference to Hemingway here.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Irritable insides?
That need to evacuate your bodily innards immediately? Perhaps you have some iteration of Crohn's disease.
syncopation
Frank Stella [born 1936], Hyena Stomp, 1962
- From the Tate Modern display caption, September 2004
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