Saturday, March 10, 2018
Friday, March 9, 2018
Some smart thoughts......................
..........................................................about the housing market.
P.S. Have I told you lately we have some wondrous, wooded, building lots available? If you want to help solve the supply problem, we'll sell you one.
Love him or hate him.................
.......................................................................this is a great line.
Fifty years ago................................
The Rascals...................................................People Got To Be Free
Thursday, March 8, 2018
Happy Songs..........................
Any Major Dude With Half A Heart posts a list of twenty songs that will raise your spirits. Works for me. The following is #18 on the list:
Mood Mosaic.................................A Touch of Velvet - A Sting of Brass
Why can't a good story (and a great movie)....
..................................just be a good story (and a great movie)? I suspect The Dangerous Economist wonders the same thing, but nonetheless, he posts a wonderful interpretation of the Wizard of OZ. Do read it, if for no other reason than as a stretching exercise. Here is a wee taste:
When Dorothy’s twister-tossed house comes to rest in Oz, it lands squarely on the wicked Witch of the East, killing her instantly. The startled girl emerges from the abode to find herself in a strange land of remarkable beauty, whose inhabitants, the diminutive Munchkins, rejoice at the death of the Witch. The Witch represents eastern financial-industrial interests and their gold-standard political allies, the main targets of Populist venom. Midwestern farmers often blamed their woes on the nefarious practices of Wall Street bankers and the captains of industry, whom they believed were engaged in a conspiracy to “enslave” the “little people,” just as the Witch of the East had enslaved the Munchkins.
Fifty years ago.................................
The Grass Roots...............................................Midnight Confessions
Not totally convinced that...............
......accurate explanations are all that easy, but this merits repeating:
"Coming up with explanations for past successes is easy but figuring out who the winners will be going forward never is."
-As concludes this Ben Carlson post
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Opening paragraphs..............
If you want to measure the world's emotional state, to find a mood ring large enough to encircle the globe, you could do worse than Twitter, Nearly one billion human beings have accounts, and they post roughly 6,000 tweets every second. The sheer volume of these minimessages - what people say and how they say it - has produced an ocean of data that social scientists can swim though to understand human behavior.
A few years ago, two Cornell University sociologists, Michael Macy and Scott Golder, studied more than 500 million tweets that 2.4 million uses in eighty-four countries posted over a two-year period. They hoped to use this trove to measure people's emotions - in particular, how "positive affect" (emotions such as enthusiasm, confidence, and alertness) and "negative affect" (emotions such as anger, lethargy, and guilt) varied over time. The researchers didn't read those half a billion tweets one by one, of course. Instead, they fed the posts into a powerful and widely used computerized text-analysis program called LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) that evaluated each word for the emotion it conveyed.
What Macy and Golder found, and published in the eminent journal Science, was a remarkable consistent pattern across people's waking hours. ...
-Daniel H. Pink, When: The Scientific Secrets Of Perfect Timing
Ed. Note: To read the Macy and Golder study, go here
Mood Rings.................
Here is more than you want to know:
A mood ring is a ring that contains a thermochromic element, such as liquid crystal, that changes colors based upon the temperature of the finger of the wearer. Most new rings come with a color chart indicating the supposed mood of the wearer based upon the colors indicated on the ring.
The mood ring was created in 1975 by two New York inventors, Josh Reynolds and Maris Ambats, who bonded liquid crystals with quartz stones set into rings.[1] They initially retailed for $45 for a "silvery setting" and $250 for gold, and first sold at Bonwit Teller,[2] rapidly becoming a fad in the 1970s.[3]
It is but a thin veneer...................
"One of the greatest mistakes we can make is to assume that a civilization that appears healthy cannot in fact be ill and fragile."
-Michael Wade
Listening...........................
"Experience can be an effective teacher. But, clearly, only some students listen to their teachers."
-Annie Duke
Fifty years ago..............................
Derek.........................................................................Cinnamon
1968 was a very strange year.
1968 was a very strange year.
The first part is......................
Tuesday, March 6, 2018
Got that right.............................
History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness, and man is equipped to respond in stereotyped ways to frequently occurring situations and stimuli like hunger, danger, and sex. But in a developed and complex civilization individuals are more differentiated and unique than in a primitive society, and many situations contain novel circumstances requiring modifications of instinctive response; custom recedes, reasoning spreads; the results are less predictable. There is no certainty that the future will repeat the past. Every year is an adventure.
-Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons Of History
On getting comfortable with uncertainty.....
Poker players live in a world where that risk is made explicit. They can get comfortable with uncertainty because they put it up front in their decisions. Ignoring the risk and uncertainty in every decision might make us feel better in the short run, but the cost to the quality of our decision-making can be immense. If we can find ways to become more comfortable with uncertainty, we can see the world more accurately and be better for it.
-Annie Duke, Thinking In Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All The Facts
Running............................
Have you ever noticed how easy it is to get some people to criticize themselves? All you have to do is praise them and they immediately tell you that the work wasn't that good or the dress is old or they've gained weight. By the time they have finished running themselves down, the person who uttered the praise regrets having done so.
If you are praised, say "Thank you!" Don't make the other person feel foolish for having complimented you.
-Michael Wade, as culled from All I Said Was: What Every Supervisor, Employee, and Team Should Know to Avoid Insults, Lawsuits, and the Six O'Clock News
Monday, March 5, 2018
Opportunity...........................
When we consider our feelings as only one part of us, instead of identifying ourselves completely with them, we can more easily avoid being blinded by their intensity. We can catch ourselves before we act inappropriately or sinfully. By being more and more conscious of what we are made of, we can act more and more wisely and with discretion. This is the only sensible and effective course for achieving a dynamic self-understanding and healthy self-control.
As a familiar saying has it, the difference between a hero and a coward is that cowards act because of their fear; heroes act in spite of their fear. When we acknowledge the whole spectrum of our emotions, how strongly we are influenced by them, and that our behavior does not have to be determined by them, we open for ourselves an opportunity to grow in virtue and mature in character that we cannot afford to pass up. Our self-understanding and our happiness depend on it.
Nevertheless, as essential as such interior work is, it does not constitute the end of our search for self-knowledge. We are not simply the sum total of every thought, feeling, virtue, and vice that we have ever had. Even if we were completely aware of them all, we must go further, because we still sense a deeper ocean of mystery within us. As we learn to channel our energies in positive and creative ways, this awakens in us the recognition that here also is where we meet a fountain of energies much greater than our own. Paradoxically, this is so only because we truly meet ourselves as we really are.
Without coming to know this mysterious reality at the center of our person, we will remain ignorant of what we an be. We will not fully know ourselves.
-The Monks Of New Skete, In The Spirit of Happiness
A search for meaning........................
...........................An essay on worship and "isms":
An awareness of our dependence upon that which is larger breeds the humility without which wisdom is not possible. It reminds us that our ego is just a small part of us, and is dependent upon – and easily influenced by – irrational, unconscious forces that are beyond our full understanding. We must be humble before the destructive capacity that exists within each one of us, and like the Roman slave, we must remind ourselves occasionally, that we are merely ordinary.
-Lisa Marchiano
via
Content...........................
"Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I'm in, therein to be content."
-Helen Keller
Hate it when that happens............
"As we watch out for the big things that may punch us in the nose the small ones are tying our shoelaces together."
-Michael Wade
Fifty years ago..............................
On the television..............................................................The FBI
Sunday, March 4, 2018
A gift....................................
Even
After
All this time
The Sun never says to the Earth,
"You owe me."
Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.
Weighing...............................
Separate your "must-dos" from your "like-to-dos" and don't mistakenly slip any "like-to-dos onto the first list. ...
Anything is possible. It's the probabilities that matter. Everything must be weighed in terms of its likelihood and prioritized. People who can sort probabilities from possibilities are generally strong at "practical thinking"; they're the opposite of the "philosopher" types who tend to get lost in the clouds of possibilities.
-Ray Dalio, Principles
Fifty years ago..............................
Clarence Carter..............................................................Slip Away
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