Quote from Fred Brooks

Fred Brooks wrote The Mythical Man-Month, and was recently interviewed by Wired.

Brooks: You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you’re forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality.

Article on Divorce

This is a link to an article by David Code, with some thoughtful insights on why destructive dynamics can develop in relationships.

A tragedy in four panels

If Calvin took Ritalin.

Utensil Bic pen caps

Just look at them.

How to earn the right to be heard

[H]ere's a quick list of a few ways to earn that right:

Be informed
Be rational
Pay your dues
Have a platform where a lot of people can hear you
Be an impacted constituent, not a gadfly
Represent a tribe of people with similar concerns
You've been right before
You're not anonymous
You have a previous relationship and permission to interrupt
Listening to you earns something of value

From Seth Godin

Envy

“Envy is the art of counting the other fellow’s blessings instead of your own.”
Harold Coffin

Microsoft Street Slide View

Tamar Gendler discusses her work

Yale Class of 1987: Tamar Gendler discusses her work on bloggingheads....: "      Tamar Gendler was recently on a blog/tv broadcast discussing some of her work.

Interesting Labor Statistic from Robert Reich

52,000 GM hourly workers remain in the United States – down from 468,000 in 1970.

From Robert Reich's blog article, The Great Decoupling of corporate profits from jobs.

Marathon Week 2

Week 2: so far, so good, althought I've already rearranged a few days. I try not to get all rigid about the workouts midweek because they seem fairly interchangable. M -- 3 mile run instead of resting, T -- 2.5 mile walk. W- off. If I do 3 mi runs on Th & Fri, I'll be back on schedule.

I was worried about the six-miler last Saturday, but it ended up being less of a problem than I had feared, esp. sore ankles.

Interval Arithmetic

According to one of its proponents, it's a big improvement.

Rules for Conversations -- active listening

From Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert comic strip.

1. The more dangerous or inappropriate the conversation, the more interesting it is.

2. Conversations about how people have or will interact are interesting, and conversations about objects are dull.

Annie Hall Marshall McLuhan Scene (short edit) Woody Allen

Happy Birthday, Marshall McLuhan.

Battle of intra-office notes

I care about fonts, but not as much as some people.

The problem with A/B Testing

Blog post from Jeff Atwood about how marketing studies don't create campaigns, they can only fine tune them. Excellent use of a movie reference to "Groundhog Day," as a way to make this point. Sample quote:

That's the problem with A/B testing. It's empty. It has no feeling, no empathy, and at worst, it's dishonest. As my friend Nathan Bowers said:

A/B testing is like sandpaper. You can use it to smooth out details, but you can't actually create anything with it.

Great thought experiment from For the Win

Cory Doctorow's latest work, For the Win, is not just for teenagers. Here's an example of the kind of thought experiment he presents:

You're in a strange town, or a strange part of town. A little disoriented already, that's key. Maybe it's just a strange time to be out, first thing in the morning in the business district, or very late at night in clubland, or the middle of the day in the suburbs, and no one else is around.

A stranger approaches you. He's well-dressed, smiling. His body-language says, *I am a friend, and I'm slightly out of place, too.* He's holding something. It's a pane of glass, large, fragile, the size of a road atlas or a Monopoly board. He's struggling with it. It's heavy? Slippery? As he gets closer, he says, with a note of self-awareness at the absurdity of this all, "Can you please hold this for a second?" He sounds a little desperate too, like he's about to drop it.

You take hold of it. Fragile. Large. Heavy. Very awkward.

And, still smiling, the stranger methodically and quickly plunges his hands into your pockets and begins to transfer your keys, wallet and cash into his own pockets. He never breaks eye-contact in the ten or 15 seconds it takes him to accomplish the task, and then he turns on his heel and walks away (he doesn't run, that's important) very quickly, for a dozen steps, and *then* he breaks into a wind-sprint of a run, powering up like Daffy Duck splitting on Elmer Fudd.

You're still holding onto the pane of glass.

Why are you holding onto that pane of glass?

What else are you going to do with it? Drop it and let it break on the strange pavement? Set it down carefully?

Tell you one thing you're not going to do. You're not going to run with it. Running with a ten kilo slab of sharp-edged glass in your hands is even dumber than taking hold of it in the first place.

Hal Higdon Marathon Training Week 1

We'll see if I can stick with it without getting injured. Based on a better-then-expected (sub 8 min) time in the Petit Road Race, I decided to take a stab at a marathon. Don't know which one I'll do yet, because there are so many weeks and chances to get injured between now and the end of the 18 week program, but it does lead right up to high season for marathons in the late fall. Expect weekly updates from the Hal Higdon program.

Ironic blog post

I suppose that a post about not spending so much time on the internet or connected to mobile devices is a little odd for a blog post, but it is such a good article from the New York Times I couldn't not link to it. Thanks to Lawrence Page for the reference.

The Beauty of Sorting

Quote of the Day

Isaac Asimov:

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'

10cc - I'm Not In Love - making of documentary

Mark Twain Essay

Concerning the Interview:

No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy.

Starlings Swarm

We will pay you $4.00 for One Hour of Your Time

The Classified ad that changed the world.
PTSD Therapy bills not included. Thanks, Stanley Milgram.

Commandments of Management

Excerpted from the NCO Creed.


1. The two basic responsibilities are "accomplish the mission" and "look after my people"
2. I will strive to remain technically and tactically proficient
3. All employees are entitled to outstanding leadership; I will provide that leadership
4. I will be fair and impartial when recommending both rewards and punishment
5. Superiors will have maximum time to accomplish their duties; they will not have to accomplish mine
6. I will exercise initiative by taking appropriate action in the absence of orders
7. I will not compromise my integrity, nor my moral courage

Nice Watches

A little over the top, and I'm scared to look at the prices.

Maybe I don't need to take Chinese After All . . . .

From Stratfor Editor interviewed in Yale's SOM bulletin.

Q: China is described in the book as a paper tiger. Why do you come to this conclusion?

China is 1.3 billion people. According to Chinese government statistics, 600 million of those people have a total household income of $3 a day or less. Another 440 million earn between $3 and $6 a day. What we would call middle class, people with a household income of $20,000 and above, account for only 60 million people in China. That's still comparable to a large country, like France, but it represents less than 5% of the Chinese population. China is an extraordinarily poor country. Most business people travel to that small part of China that contains the tiny middle class. And they extrapolate from that.

You always have to remember that China can't sell electronics or toys to people earning $2 or $3 a day. They have to sell those goods to the advanced industrial world. And if the advanced industrial world isn't buying, China is in tremendous trouble. When the United States or Europe stops consuming as much as they did before, you’re dealing with unemployment in a country where unemployment can yield malnutrition. What we're seeing right now is China introducing a massive security crackdown to try to control a situation of enormous unhappiness in China.

China is also holding extremely large dollar reserves. Japan in 1990 and the United States in 1929 held massive foreign currency reserves, which was a precursor to serious economic dysfunction, because when you are unable to metabolize that much money, there is something wrong in the virtuous cycle of exports, investments, and so on.

I'll leave you with one final figure. If the United States grows at 2.5% a year, China will have to grow at 8.25% a year simply not to fall behind the United States in absolute numbers. The idea that China will catch up to the United States within 10 years is just an arithmetic impossibility. And so China is a case where businessmen have bought into several propositions that were true 10 or 15 years ago, but are not true now. That shows the constant need to reexamine the premises on which you're building your investments.

Heuristics when arguing --

Adam Serwer, writing in the American Prospect -- "It's a good rule of thumb that anyone responding to a criticism by accusing someone else of enforcing 'political correctness' is factually incorrect. That's because if the actual facts of the criticism were in dispute, they'd dispute them."

from Scripting News.

There's an old saying among trial lawyers: When the facts are against you, argue the law. When the law is against you, argue the facts. When both the facts and law are against you, argue louder.

Chance favors the well-prepared

Plant nurseries in clover after finding four-leaf gene

Solitude and Leadership

Lecture delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October of last year by William Deresiewicz.