Heard last night: “Joe’s a nice guy, but he’s not honest.” Hearing this I noted my current understanding of nice already included honest. But apparently that’s not true for everyone….
July 7, 2006
Letting Go of Outcomes
Over the past ten years I’ve become much more “process-oriented.” Part of this learning comes from my work—as a consultant I’m often in situations where I don’t know very much about the specific content, but contribute to change based on looking at the larger system. I used to say that a focus on process leads […]
July 5, 2006
USA, Today
Long Sunday deconstructs the meaning of 9/11 in the US psyche. Billmon compares current US politics to those of Spain in 1936. Brianstorms reminds us of the Bill of Rights.
July 3, 2006
Finds Neither Support nor a Passive Population
Former Special-Ops guy John Robb writes Global Guerrillas, “an open notebook on the first epochal war of the 21st Century.” The latest post, An Attack On Iran = Catalyst Of Chaos summarizes his current thinking on Iran, and the implications for the US. The economic/societal wave: state failures. A gulf monarchy falls. Successful terrorist attacks […]
July 1, 2006
Nano-Enabled Advances
Email from Amazon alerted me to this new book: Nanotechnology Applications And Markets, by Lawrence Gasman, $79. Discover nanotech opportunities the smart way with the first “down to business” market analysis that separates commercial reality from hype and gives you the tools you need to forecast nanotech’s impact on any company. This professional-level book spotlights […]
June 29, 2006
Narrative Selection Bias™
Doug and I had an interesting exchange in the comments that’s worth bringing to the front page. I pulled a quote from a blog post and out of context the quote had a different meaning. A reader could get the wrong idea. So this is a formal disclosure statement that Notio is extremely biased. I […]
June 28, 2006
An Absolutely Honorable Choice
The Happy Feminist: But I will say it here, loud and proud. I work full-time for a living and I will continue working full-time for a living. I will work full-time for a living if I have children. I will work full-time for a living if my husband gets a $500,000 a year job. I […]
June 25, 2006
Truly Making a Difference
Dave Pollard often gives detailed and passionate voice for my intuitive and information-overloaded thoughts. Today is no different. So progressives need to acknowledge that, unless they devote most of their time and energy to activities other than electing and lobbying politicians, they will continue to accomplish nothing. Indeed, they will accomplish less than nothing, since […]
June 23, 2006
Notable Quotes
From this week’s New Yorker: Fine Tuning: Reassessing Radiohead Radiohead has much in common with the Grateful Dead, including passionate fans who follow the band from city to city, trade bootleg recordings of shows, puzzle out the meanings of the band’s cryptic lyrics, and (in Boston, at least) dance badly while smoking expensive-smelling weed. But […]
June 16, 2006
Squeezing the Middle Class
An as-usual well-researched article from the Economist: The rich, the poor and the growing gap between them. The one truly continuous trend over the past 25 years has been towards greater concentration of income at the very top. The scale of this shift is not visible from most popular measures of income or wages, as […]
June 16, 2006
From the Mouths of Babes
What do 1st and 2nd grade students wish for? Mostly the same things you and I do. Excerpt: * I wish thar was mor peas in the world * I wish pepol wloud be treted farly * I wish evey body could go to scool * I wish to have more fun * I wish […]
June 12, 2006
Making Money on the Internet (cont.)
Video blogging is hot. Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft for PodTech.net (whose servers are so overloaded they can’t even load a homepage). And then, he mentions this: Yesterday I was talking with Amanda Congdon, one of the co-founders of Rocketboom. Her videoblog is now seeing about 300,000 viewers a day. That’s, what, a year or […]
June 12, 2006
Lunchtime Reading
As a service to my loyal readers, here is a fun instructional for your work-dodging moments this Monday. HOWTO make the perfect fruit salad and get laid, by Mark Pilgrim, as the Sarcastic Gourmet.
June 9, 2006
The Difference Between Heaven and Hell
I’m at the Consumer Cooperative Management Association conference in Atlanta. This morning Peter Couchman from the Midcounties Co-operative in England (near Oxford) presented a (probably well-known) parable during his keynote address. I paraphrase: There once was a highly developed Buddhist guru who had the ability to transport himself to any place in the universe. He […]
June 8, 2006
Mission Accomplished
The critics have weighed in on the Zarqawi news: * greg.org: Wow, if there was any doubt about where the contemporary art market is going, they were dispelled this morning at Christie’s Baghdad, where the US Government paid a record-setting $286 billion–plus $240 for framing–for this portrait of the dead Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. […]
June 8, 2006
Mapping Dialogue
Fantastic 86 page research report on the fundamentals, forms, and usage of ten different dialogue approaches. [via Chris.]
June 8, 2006
Never a Still Moment
To give you a flavor of the multi-media nature of modern baseball, here is a short video clip of the national anthem from the game last night. Notice the thin horizontal video screens over the third-base line (and presumably over the first-base line where we were sitting). The effect of these was to have motion […]
June 8, 2006
Home of the Braves
Thanks to my friends at CDS, I was able to enjoy The National Pastime tonight: The Atlanta Braves vs. the Washington Nationals at Turner Stadium in Atlanta. I uploaded 15 photos to Flickr. There’s so much to say, and it’s so late to say it. Even though we were outdoors, watching a live event, it […]
June 6, 2006
Tufte’s “Beautiful Evidence” About to Ship
Very interesting thread on complex bookmaking. Start around March 9 to pick up the recent info. He’s self-published 1.2 million books since 1983, and the detail with which he prints these books is unbelievable. Highlights from the link above: * We await a test printing of some of our color tints (e.g., hows does 2% […]
May 31, 2006
Nature Abhors a Vacuum
Fast Company on changing your behavior: If you want to change something in your life, it’s common to try to stop the behaviors you don’t like. While this certainly seems logical, it seldom works. The reason is simple – it unintentionally creates a vacuum where the old behaviors used to be. And since nature hates […]