A thought struck me this morning on my BART ride into work, in response to Carse’s talk. He describes infinite games as where the point of playing is to continue to play. Doesn’t this describe childhood? Over Christmas break, I was visiting some friends with kids, and I was playing Uno with their four year […]
Category: thoughts
Managers Not MBAs, by Henry Mintzberg
Amazon link I read about this book in the Economist, and the concept intrigued me. I’ve been in the business world long enough to develop the typical technologists’ disdain for MBAs and their lack of domain knowledge and emphasis on numbers that are probably meaningless. I was looking forward to reading this book to gain […]
Sources of Power, by Gary Klein
Amazon link Subtitled “How People Make Decisions”, this book attempts to explore the process of decision-making from a perspective far outside the normal business-world-oriented theories. In business school, people are taught that the right way to make a decision is to define the problem, generate a list of possible solutions, evaluate all of the possible […]
More thoughts on gifted education
I’ve rambled about education before, particularly with regards to gifted education. But I’ve never been bashful about repeating myself. So here we go again. Here’s a thought experiment that a friend posited a couple weeks ago. From a purely academic point of view, how long would it take a smart kid, working at their own […]
Predicting 2008
A friend of mine commented that Jeb Bush was a strange emissary to send to southeast Asia to oversee disaster relief. My friend also wondered why Colin Powell was along, given that he left the administration recently. My immediate thought was that the Republicans were giving Jeb a higher profile statesmanlike image to boost his […]
Creationism
I don’t know why I let it get to me. But the arguments of creationists just aggravate me so much whenever I see them that I feel compelled to post about it. This morning’s aggravation was a result of coming across a link to a pointed criticism of an article by Phyllis Schlafly, where she […]
Information Carnivore followup
As usual, Beemer had an interesting response to my last post. I was going to respond on LiveJournal, but decided to use my privileged position on the blog itself. Bwa ha ha ha. More people read it this way. Yeah. Not that readership matters. Because I’m more interested in the discussion. But if more people […]
Information carnivore
Sometimes posts start with no more than a good post title. Like this one. Actually, okay, this post started with some thoughts I’ve been having about different ways of perceiving and handling information. It’s something that’s been in the back of my mind for a while. In fact, one of my first rants on this […]
Social context in the Monkeysphere
I’m going to cheat here, and respond to one of Beemer’s comments in the blog itself rather than with another comment. Mostly because he brought up some points I wanted to address but hadn’t gotten around to. This is what I meant when I mentioned that I had a whole big ball of ideas that […]
Truth vs. Context
Beemer had an interesting response to my last post, which he called Truth vs. Context, and I’m going to steal that for the title of this post. As a warning, I have a ton of ground to cover, and this entry is probably going to span at least four posts, if not more. Just the […]
