Liz commented on my Conversationalist post that it’s often difficult to talk about things that are important and meaningful to us. I think it especially applies to esoteric things like a graduate student’s research, where 99% of the world doesn’t even know what it’s about, and doesn’t care. I’ve definitely had the same feeling – […]
Category: people
Idea functionalism
This isn’t quite coming together yet, but I’m so happy to be done writing for class that I want to write a blog post this evening, so bear with me. One bit of preamble – for the sake of this discussion, when I talk about truth, I am not talking about logical consistency, e.g. proving […]
Group flow
I was telling a friend about the Buffy singalong today and mentioned that one of the reasons it was so enjoyable was because everybody in the theater was a Buffy fanatic, or at least Buffy-fanatic-friendly. Because the show had sold out earlier in the week, only the fanatics had tickets. And that created a really […]
Competition
I went for a bike ride last Saturday. I rode on up to Central Park, and started cruising around the 6 mile loop there, which is closed to cars on the weekends so all I had to watch out for was slow-moving families. I’m cranking along, pedalling away so that I get a good workout. […]
Optimization Multiplicity
Religion fascinates me. I am not religious myself, but I sometimes yearn to be. It’s fashionable among the intellectual set to disparage religion, especially when the discussion is political, but having grown up in a religious town, I try to stay away from that (not always successfully). I knew lots of good people whose faith […]
Art and connection
In an amusing example of the way in which conversations can take unexpected turns, somebody on a mailing list I frequent posted the question “Are Xena and Buffy Really the Same Show?”. As a long-time Buffy fan, I immediately had to jump in to claim that they were not because Buffy was far superior. As […]
Multi-dimensional patterns
Okay, so I should be tooling. But I was just out to dinner with friends, and had a thought and want to jot it down so I can think about it later. I was trying to define what made people interesting to me. And the answer I came up with was that I liked well-rounded […]
Living in a viral world
Yesterday, Grant McCracken posted a link to a music video by a band called Ok Go. It’s an amazing video, where the four members of the band do an intricate dance involving eight treadmills. I’ve probably rewatched it five times, and it still consistently puts a smile on my face because it’s so endearingly goofy. […]
Taking the Blame
One of the threads running through my head recently is the importance of stepping up and taking responsibility. I’ve been noticing it in lots of places, in Seth Godin’s blog, in the book Lipstick on a Pig (where Torie Clarke’s first piece of advice is “Deliver bad news yourself, and when you screw up, say […]
Seizing The Moment
I have a series of posts that are all linked in some way in my head, and are all in various states of incompletion. I’m going to dive right in and start posting and hope that it comes together as I go along. Or maybe I’ll just confuse people. Last month, at the Yankees game, […]
