Category: Personal

From July 4, 1776 to Governmentium

A treat from Betsy Devine – somehow an appropriate counterbalance to today’s celebrations. Makes you wonder what the Founding Fathers (and Mothers for that matter) would make of what has transpired over the last 229 years.

Science ha-ha from my mailbox: Governmentium (Gv). Berkeley just announced the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element has been named “Governmentium”.

Governmentium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.

When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element which radiates just as much energy, since it has half as many peons, but twice as many morons.

Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. It can be detected, however, as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A reaction that normally takes one minute or less will require a week or more if contaminated by any Governmentium.

The half-life of Governmentium is 4 years. It does not, however, decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutron exchange places. In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. The characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration.

This hypothetical quantity is called “Critical Morass”.

Thanks for the funny email to Damian!

[Betsy Devine: Funny Ha-Ha or Funny Peculiar?]

BBC Gives Away Beethoven

What a wonderful gift from the BBC. I listened to the 3rd and 4th symphonies this afternoon on my flight to San Francisco. Looking forward to downloading the remaining symphonies when they are available.

BBC Gives Away Beethoven. The BBC rocks. Here they are giving away MP3s of all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies here for the week after they are broadcast. All the symphonies are performed by BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. Amazing stuff. Talk about public… [loose wire]

Thanks Dave!

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I’ll get this moved over to the margin shortly, but I wanted to make sure it got up here quickly. I’ve been depending on Dave’s innovations since the first version of ThinkTank shipped in the early 1980s. From outlining to blogs to RSS, the central concepts and tools in my day-to-day knowledge work all flow from the software innovations he has made happen.

I haven’t made a scientiifc study of the problem, but I’m pretty sure that few, if any, of the tools I use on a daily basis were developed and fielded by his critics.

Thanks Dave, thanks Richard.

Thanks Dave! and also thanks Richard:

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From Leave It Behind > Brian Bailey: Thanks Dave!.:

QUOTE

You’ll find a new addition to my site today – this simple, little badge:

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The badge is a link to Scripting News, the weblog home of Dave Winer. If you hover over the image on the site, you should see the following text:

My thanks to Dave Winer for his visionary role in the development of weblogs, RSS, podcasting, SOAP, XML-RPC, OPML, and outliners.

UNQUOTE

[Roland Tanglao’s Weblog]

One of those weeks

I have been feeling as though I’ve been slacking off in posting here lately. Right at the end of last month and the beginning of this, I felt I was just getting back into a decent rhythm. That should have been a clear warning sign.

It started with what seemed like a simple request to add some memory to my laptop machine. I’m working on a fairly complex cost modeling project at the moment and the smart guy doing all the hard work decided it was time for me to have a more detailed look at his work. This is his way of making me feel as if I were adding some value to the effort, but I’m not fooled. It turns out that the memory on my old laptop was maxed out. My simple request for a memory upgrade turns into an upgrade to a new machine. Our IT guys were great, but they also know that I tweak my machines to a fair-thee-well. They did the basic upgrade, but then I ended up spending the next several days rebuilding and reorganizing my working environment. Very educational and a much needed opportunity to clean up a lot of accumulated cruft, but several days where blogging was impossible and when I did get my blogging tools restored, there were 1500 unread posts waiting for me in my aggregator.

By now it’s the weekend. Now I could start blogging or I could take these two fellows to watch the Cubs beat the Red Sox 7–6 on Saturday. It wasn’t a difficult choice:

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The one with the new Mohawk is mine. The Monday after the Cubs game, I put him on the plane to skateboarding camp.

So finally, it’s off to my client and our financial model. I figure I’ll get to some blogging done in the hotel room after work. Instead I spend 5 hours in the emergency room at Mt. Auburn hospital learning about the joys of kidney stones (I had great sympathy for Dave Pollard’s experience a while back, now I empathize). The combination of drugs they put me on pretty much knocked me out for the next several days. I think we are finally back to some semblance of normal.

On Experience

This made me grin at least.

At the same time, if you get better and faster at recognizing your mistakes, that alone can help improve performance. I remember talking to my instructor a few years back as I switched from skiing to snowboarding. Her observation about both sports was that you could think of them as a series of controlled recoveries.

It’s only within the mythology of Soviet style planning (whether encountered during the Cold War or in a corporate environment ), that mistakes can’t be tolerated. If you’re quick and agile enough, you can recover from those small mistakes that you make every day. Step one in recovering from mistakes is recognizing them as quickly as possible (Step 0 is given yourself permission to make the mistakes you’re going to make regardless).

On Experience. On Experience —

“Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.”
— Franklin P. Jones

(via The Quotations Page) [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]

Generic meeting summary.

I’ve had reason to appreciate this sentiment far too many times in faculty meetings, partner meetings, and other settings where ego and brains fight for dominance. Worth remembering. Thank you Espen.

Generic meeting summary.

I think this goes for most meetings:

“[…] a […] faculty meeting is not over when everything has been said, it is only over when everything has been said by everyone. By my count, we’re about 2/3 done with the first criteria but only about 1/4 done with the latter.”

Not that I am not guilty of spurious (and oh so well formed) rambling overspecifications myself.

From ProfessorBainbridge.com via Infectious Greed.

[Applied Abstractions]