On problem solving..................

Walking, on its own, is already great for your brain. It gets the blood flowing, lowers stress hormones, and makes you look like one of those mysterious, deep thinkers who stride purposefully through parks. But when you pair walking with my powerful “What If” hack, your perambulations transform into something far more powerful.

Here’s how it works:

1.   Start walking. This is the easy part.

2.   Instead of spiraling into despair about your unsolvable problem, introduce a single, magical question: “What if?”

That’s it. Those two words are the key.

-Hugh Gallagher, from here

No baseball............................?

 

.................................................impossible.

arguably the most important battle.......

 .............................in the history of the United States.

Ah, the fine art of reasoning..............

What if............................

A small, inconsequential experiment. But I wonder: If instead of giving speeches, making promises, or berating opponents during their town hall meetings and political rallies, what if our politicians asked the question: “What are your hopes for America for 2020?”

And then listened to the answers.

-as cut-and-pasted from here

Implications..........................

Chris Lynch plays a game us history majors love to play—what if?

What if.....................................

     The question that drives this book is, how would our relationships change, and how would we change, if we approached every situation with the intention of listening first?  What if we approached our relationship with God as listeners?  What if we viewed our relationship with nature as one of listening?  What if we approached our relationships with our ears rather than our mouths?  What if we sought to listen to our emotions before we preached to them?

-Adam S. McHugh,  The Listening Life:  Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

Working hard......................

..............................................................................at being funny.

On the importance of.....................

....................."Devil's advocates".  Full post here.  Conclusion here:

It’s a scourge to be led by a great man, then, unless the great man is open-minded and big hearted enough to encourage others to take issue with his thinking. If not, the collective military mind closes. Doubt dissipates when it’s needed most—in the topsy-turvy realm of violent interaction among combatants determined to impose their will on one another. An institution unable or unwilling to entertain second thoughts about its assumptions or reasoning is an institution that has set itself up for failure. So it was for the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Midway. So it could be for today’s U.S. Navy, or any other institution.

Certitude is the bane of group decision-making. Physicist Richard Feynman beseeches researchers to “leave the door to the unknown ajar,” even when a scientific law appears settled. That’s doubly true for military and naval bureaucracies. After all, martial science is never settled. We should all be doubters—and seek out skeptics of Feynman’s ilk to poke holes in our schemes. Whether his input is right, wrong, or somewhere in between, the devil’s advocate invigorates strategic and operational discourses—subjecting proposals to penetrating scrutiny and bolstering the final product.

thanks craig

Hmmm..........................

“Yes, and imagine a world where there were no hypothetical situations.” 
-Jasper Fforde, First Among Sequels

Almost always worth asking.......................

thanks

Never really thought about it that way.....

thanks Eric

Speculation..............................

In case we ever needed reminding about how much we don't know, here comes the Phaistos Disc. Discovered in 1908 by an Italian archaeologist digging in a Minoan palace in Crete, the fired-clay disc is stamped with glyphs on both sides.  Based on the location of the discovery, it was estimated that the Phaistos Disc dates to 1700 BC.  What does it mean?  This is where the fun begins:  "Most experts believe the symbols have some sort of hidden meaning, theorizing that its message may have been a geometric theorem, a board game, a prayer, or a mythological story.  Some experts speculate that the pictograms may have been use phonetically, in a manner similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics.  However, no other samples of the script have been found and efforts to decipher the text have proved unsuccessful.....Some experts contend that the employment of reusable characters to make an reproduce a body of text means that the Phaistos Disc represents the earliest known example of ancient movable type printing."   Adding to the fun, at least one expert believes the Phaistos Disc is a hoax.

The quotation used above was taken from Scott Christianson's 100 Diagrams That Changed The World

What could possibly go wrong.........

The Oracle Google evolves:

What does it mean that Google really is trying to build the Star Trek computer? I take it as a cue to stop thinking about Google as a “search engine.” That term conjures a staid image: a small box on a page in which you type keywords. A search engine has several key problems. First, most of the time it doesn’t give you an answer—it gives you links to an answer. Second, it doesn’t understand natural language; when you search, you’ve got to adopt the search engine’s curious, keyword-laden patois. Third, and perhaps most importantly, a search engine needs for you to ask it questions—it doesn’t pipe in with information when you need it, without your having to ask.

The Star Trek computer worked completely differently. It understood language and was conversational, it gave you answers instead of references to answers, and it anticipated your needs. “It was the perfect search engine,” Singhal said. “You could ask it a question and it would tell you exactly the right answer, one right answer—and sometimes it would tell you things you needed to know in advance, before you could ask it.”

full essay here

thanks craig

Oops..............................

Don't you miss "do-overs"?.........