via
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
Some sentences just make you go.....
...............hmmmm. Walking speeds increasing by 10%? Wondering who did that study? Could it be just more youngsters living downtown? Inquiring minds want to know.
"We are in principle accessible anywhere, at any time; we can be texted, emailed, tagged: “The world today is faster, more scheduled, more fragmented, less patient, louder, more wired, more public.” There is not enough downtime. So Lightman argues in his brisk, persuasive essay. His snapshots of the relevant social science portray the grim effects of over-connection in our digital age: young people are more stressed, more prone to depression, less creative, more lonely but never really alone. Our time is ruthlessly graphed into efficient units. The walking speed of pedestrians in 32 cities increased by 10 percent from 1995 to 2005."
-Kieran Setiya, as culled from this Idleness as Flourishing essay
Tuesday, October 23, 2018
Fifty years ago........................
Simon & Garfunkel..............................A Hazy Shade of Winter
Uncommonly............................
"To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality in fact is."
-Carl Jung
Honor.............................
“We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement.”
Immense.....................
“He never seemed to grasp the immense mutability of human nature, nor to appreciate that behind every nondescript face lay a wild and unique hinterland like his own.”
-J. K. Rowling
Narratives..............................
“If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.”
-Oliver Sacks
Monday, October 22, 2018
On the narcissism of small differences....
But if everyone is demonizing the other, then everyone is the enemy to someone.
We end up spending our time fighting each other instead of fighting for the things that really matter. We end up focusing on the current thing while something more important shrinks away in the background.
-Seth Godin, from this post. Could have cut and pasted the whole post. Do go read it.
Take a guess at how this turns out........
In 1985 Dr. Philip Tetlock embarked on a mission to find out whether experts could predict future events. Over a span of 20 years, he interviewed 280 experts about their level of confidence that a certain outcome would come to pass. Forecasts were solicited across a wide variety of domains, including economics, politics, climate, military strategy, financial markets, legal opinions, and other complex fields with uncertain outcomes. In all, Tetlock accumulated 28,000 forecasts from these experts.
You may grade the accuracy of your guess here.
Betting versus predicting...........
Is Warren Buffet a Guru? Maybe. But he would say no. He would say that he has a process in place that guards against magical thinking, like predicting the direction of the market. He analyzes companies better than most, and he makes huge bets on the ones he thinks will be winners in the future. But he's betting - he's not predicting. There's a difference.
-T. Erik Conley, as cut and pasted from here
Fifty years ago........................
Gary U.S. Bonds.............................................I'm Glad You're Back
"particular happiness"...............
 |
| Benjamin Rush, Charles Willson Peale, 1783. |
But Benjamin Rush made quite a first impression. He was tall, lean, and handsome with active blue-grey eyes and an aquiline nose. His long blond-brown hair, tied back in a loose ponytail, accentuated his most prominent feature: an uncommonly large head. To some, the size of his skull bespoke "strength and activity of intellect." while others viewed him as having a head overfull of ideas he couldn't keep to himself.
Unlike the pedigreed doctors who had trained him in America, Scotland, England, and France, Dr. Rush was a medical and political prodigy from a middle-class family on the humbler side of Philadelphia. He had lost his father, a gunsmith, at the age of five, leaving him and his five siblings to be raised by their mother, who opened a package good store and tavern just down the street from Benjamin Franklin's print shop and post office. But because of young Rush's astonishing mind - besides total recall, he had what he referred to as the "particular happiness' of being able to synthesize and humanize disparate ideas into searing rhetoric - he had finished school at thirteen, graduated from the College of New Jersey (now known as Princeton) at fourteen, finished medical training in Edinburgh and London at twenty-two, and began practicing and teaching medicine at twenty-three. He was still single in his late twenties because his family had convinced him it would be bad for his career to marry before thirty.
-Stephen Fried, Rush: Revolution, Madness & The Visionary Doctor Who Became A Founding Father
About The Truth..................
"Temperate, sincere, and intelligent inquiry and discussion are only to be dreaded by the advocates of error. The truth need not fear them..."
-Benjamin Rush
Sunday, October 21, 2018
Don't forget....................
"Long-term focus is great. But the long run is just a collection of short runs that need to be managed."
-Morgan Housel, as lifted from here
Fifty years ago.............................
Gene and Debbe.................................................................Playboy
Cooperate.........................
Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results; bad thoughts and actions can never produce good results. This is but saying that nothing can come from corn but corn, nothing from nettles but nettles. Men understand this law in the natural world, and work with it; but few understand it in the mental and moral world (though its operation there is just as simple and undeviating), and they, therefore, do not cooperate with it.
-James Allen, As A Man Thinketh
On the ownership of data...............
We have had thousands of years of experience in regulation the ownership of land. We know how to build a fence around a field, place a guard at the gate, and control who can go in. Over the past two centuries we have become extremely sophisticated in regulating the ownership of industry; thus today I can own a piece of General Motors and a bit of Toyota by buying their shares. But we don't have much experience in regulating the ownership of data, which is inherently a far more difficult task, because unlike land and machines, data is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, it can move at the speed of light, and you can create as many copies of it as you want.
So we had better call upon our lawyers, politicians, philosophers, and even poets to turn their attention to this conundrum: how do you regulate the ownership of data? This may be the most important political question of our era. If we cannot answer this question soon, our sociopolitical system might collapse. People are already sensing the coming cataclysm. Perhaps this is why citizens all over the world are losing faith in the liberal story, which just a decade ago seemed irresistible.
-Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Saturday, October 20, 2018
As a financial strategy...............
........................buying lottery tickets is an awful idea. If you wish to invest in daydreams, however, there is nothing better. After all, somebody eventually wins.
As wise men have said...............
........................................having more money will just make you more of what you already are.
It has always been a mystery to me......
"Maybe the biggest risk for most people is assuming they know exactly what happens next."
-Ben Carlson, as culled from here
Opening paragraphs...................
As a child, I had a number of strong religious beliefs but little faith in God. There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them. I believed implicitly in the existence of God; I also believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the efficacy of the sacraments, the prospect of eternal damnation and the objective reality of Purgatory. I cannot say, however, that my belief in these religious opinions about the nature of ultimate reality gave me much confidence that life here on earth was good and beneficent. The Roman Catholicism of my childhood was a rather frightening creed. James Joyce got it right in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: I listened to my share of hellfire sermons. In fact Hell seemed a more potent reality than God, because it was something that I could grasp imaginatively. God, on the other hand, was a somewhat shadowy figure, defined in intellectual abstractions rather than images. When I was about eight years old, I had to memorize this catechism answer to the question, "What is God?": "God is the Supreme Spirit, Who alone exists of Himself and is infinite in all perfections." Not surprisingly, it meant little to me, and I am bound to say that it still leaves me cold. It has always seemed a singularly arid, pompous and arrogant definition. Since writing this book, however, I have come to believe that it is also incorrect.
-Karen Armstrong, from the Introduction to A History Of God: The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam
A few thoughts.........................
“I sought to hear the voice of God and climbed the topmost steeple, but God declared: "Go down again - I dwell among the people.”
“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.”
Angles............................
Satyagraha, literally translated as “holding fast to truth,” obliged protesters to “always keep an open mind and be ever ready to find that what we believed to be truth was, after all, untruth.” Gandhi recognized early on that societies with diverse populations inhabit a post-truth age. “We will never all think alike and we shall always see truth in fragments and from different angles of vision,” he wrote.
- Pankaj Mishra, as excerpted from this essay
Friday, October 19, 2018
Makes perfect sense to me............
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
-Douglas Adams
via
It wasn't all that long ago..........
...........that "housing starts" were a key driver for the U. S. economy. Some people (me) will tell you that we probably should have had a mild recession in +/- 2003. To avoid that, and to keep the number of housing starts growing, politicians expanded the pool of eligible home buyers by including those who couldn't afford one. We all paid the price for that decision in 2007-2009. Just didn't know that the home construction rebound would take this long and be this slow.
enlargeable chart may be found here
Fifty years ago......................
The Lettermen.......................................Goin' Out of My Head, etc.
Thursday, October 18, 2018
On pushing through...................
The way one brings people together to do this is the key. This is what is what most people call "leadership." What are the most important things that a leader needs to do in order to get their organizations to push through to results? Most importantly, they must recruit individuals who are willing to do the work that success requires. While there might be more glamour in coming up with the brilliant new ideas, most of success comes from doing the mundane and often distasteful stuff, like identifying and dealing with problems and pushing hard over a long time.
-Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work
What if.............................?
It's pretty obvious that one should keep away from the wicked and two-faced as much as possible - the jealous friend, the narcissistic parent, the untrustworthy partner. At first glance Marcus Aurelius is reminding us to avoid false friends.
But what if we turn it around? What if, instead, we ask about the times that we have been false to our friends? Ultimately that's what Stoicism is about - not judging other people's behavior, but judging our own.
-Ryan Holiday, as lifted from today's entry in The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations On Wisdom, Perseverance, And The Art Of Living
Free............................
"You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment."
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin In The Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Want.......................do
The manifesto is this: Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use - do the work you want to see done.
-Austin Kleon, Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
Fifty years ago.......................
Jose Feliciano.....................................Here, There and Everywhere
Opening paragraphs...............
Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. Every person, group, and nation has its own tales and myths. But during the twentieth century the global elites in New York, London, Berlin, and Moscow formulated three grand stories that claimed to explain the whole past and to predict the future of the entire world: the fascist story, the communist story, and the liberal story. The Second World War knocked out the fascist story, and from the late 1940s to the late 1980s the world became the battleground between just two stories: communism and liberalism. Then the communist story collapsed, and the liberal story remained the dominant guide to the human past and the indispensable manual for the future of the world - or so it seemed to the global elite.
-Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
Life its ownself........................
“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.”
-Leo Tolstoy
On rest...................................
“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”
The Use Of Life
The Use Of Life
Fifty years ago.........................
Ella Fitzgerald...……...My Mother's Eyes/Try A Little Tenderness
Saturday, September 15, 2018
Fifty years ago...............................
Roy Orbison..................................................................Heartache
Friday, September 14, 2018
This is what smart looks like..........
"Getting into the habit of having no opinion on things you know nothing about is highly recommended. I try to follow this rule whenever possible."
-Tony Isola, from here
Fifty years ago.................
Fleetwood Mac.........................................Need Your Love So Bad
Thursday, September 13, 2018
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Ah, Grasshopper..........................
"We would be humbled to know how little of our daily work matters. At the same time, we would be surprised to learn which of it matters enormously."
-Michael Wade
Seems unlikely.....................
The world since 1914 has developed in ways very different from what I should have desired. Nationalism has increased, militarism has increased, liberty has diminished. Large parts of the world are less civilized than they were. Victory in two great wars has much diminished the good things for which we fought. All thinking and feeling is overshadowed by the dread of a new war worse than either of its predecessors. No limit can be seen to the possibilities of scientific destruction. But, in spite of these causes for apprehension, there are reasons, though less obvious ones, for cautious hope. It would now be technically possible to unify the world and abolish war altogether. It would also be technically possible to abolish poverty completely. These things would be done if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies. There were, in the past, physical obstacles to human well-being. The only obstacles now are in the souls of men. Hatred, folly and mistaken beliefs alone stand between us and the millennium. While they persist, they threaten us with unprecedented disaster. But perhaps the very magnitude of the peril may frighten the world into common sense.
-Bertrand Russell, from his essay "From Logic To Politics in Portraits From Memory and Other Essays. Russell (1872-1970) published this book in 1951.
It's the simple things.................
About a decade ago, two Harvard professors, David Cutler and Grant Miller, set out to ascertain the impact of chlorination (and other water filtration techniques) between 1900 and 1930, the period when they were implemented across the United States. Because extensive data existed for rates of disease and particularly infant mortality in different communities around the country, and because chlorination systems were rolled out in a staggered fashion, Cutler and Miller were able to get an extremely accurate portrait of chlorine's effect on public health. They found that clean drinking water led to a 43 percent reduction in total mortality in the average American city. Even more impressive, chlorine and filtration systems reduced infant mortality by 74 percent, and child mortality by almost as much.
It is important to pause for a second to reflect on the significance of those numbers, to take them out of the dry domain of public health statistics and into the realm of lived experience. Until the twentieth century, one of the givens of being a parent was that you faced a very high likelihood that at least one of your children would die at an early age. What may well be the most excruciating experience that we can confront - the loss of a child - was simply a routine fact of existence. Today, in the developed world at least, that routine fact has been turned into a rarity. One of the most fundamental challenges of being alive - keeping your children safe from harm - was dramatically lessened, in part through massive engineering projects, and in part through the invisible collision between compounds of calcium hypochlorite and microscopic bacteria. The people behind that revolution didn't become rich, and very few of them became famous. But they left an imprint on our lives that is in many ways more profound than the legacy of Edison or Rockefeller or Ford.
-Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made The Modern World
Tuesday, September 11, 2018
Sort of like blogging.....................
It's so important to have a hobby. A hobby is something creative that's just for you. You don't try to make money or get famous off it, you just do it because it makes you happy. A hobby is something that gives but doesn't take. While my art is for the world to see, music is only for me and my friends. We get together every Sunday and make noise for a couple of hours. No pressure, no plans. It's regenerative. It's like church.
Don't throw any of yourself away. Don't worry about a grand scheme or unified vision for your work. Don't worry about unity - what unifies your work is the fact that you made it. One day, you'll look back and it will all make sense.
-Austin Kleon, Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
Attraction..............................
The soul attracts that which it secretly harbors; that which it loves, and also that which it fears; it reaches the height of its cherished aspirations; it falls to the level of its unchastened desires, and circumstances are the means by which the soul receives its own.
Every thought-seed sown or allowed to fall into the mind, and to take root there, produces its own, blossoming sooner or later into act, and bearing its own fruitage of opportunity and circumstance. Good thoughts bear good fruit, bad thoughts bad fruit.
-James Allen, As A Man Thinketh
Ah, those Romans......................
The insightful and luckily nonacademic historian Tom Holland once commented: "The thing I most admire about the Romans was the utter contempt they were capable of showing the cult of youth." He also wrote: "the Romans judged their political system by asking not whether it made sense but whether it worked," ...
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin In The Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Opening paragraphs..................
Percolating down to us through a process of selective amnesia, recollections by contemporary admirers (and detractors), the story of Eamon de Valera's childhood and youth comes across as a combination of Aesopian fable and Lincolnesque progression from log cabin to White House, laced along the way with a liberal dash of what is known in Ireland as the "cute hoor" approach or, in less Rabelaisian societies, peasant cunning.
-Tim Pat Coogan, Eamon de Valera: The Man Who Was Ireland
Fifty years ago..............................
Jeannie C. Riley..............................................Harper Valley PTA
Monday, September 10, 2018
Is this a great country, or what..........?
The good people at P.E.T.A. convinced the makers of Animal Crackers that caging those wild animals was a no-good thing. Nabisco saw the error of their ways and redesigned the package, freeing the animals. It didn't take long for the Internet to spring into action.........................
 |
| Before |
 |
| After |
 |
| Reality |
Opening paragraphs...................
George Orwell was burdened from birth by colonial guilt. Motihari, in the state of of Bihar in northern India, was an unlikely place for this quintessentially English writer to be born. The town itself, on the broiling, dusty plains between the Himalayas and the Ganges River, was a rough colonial outpost, "pleasantly situated on the east bank of a lake," with a jail, a school, public offices crammed with mildewed files and the headquarters of a troop of the Bihar Light Horse. The local people barely survived by making cooking-oil, rugs and string moneybags. The place and circumstances of his birth were crucial factors in Orwell's life. He was brought up to believe in the righteousness of British rule in India, and in his late teens, became a colonial servant himself. But his heritage contained the seeds of its own destruction. He would later abandon this hateful job and condemn the evils of imperialism.
-Jeffrey Meyers, Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation
Simple............................
"Create a culture in which it is okay to make mistakes and unacceptable not to learn from them."
-Ray Dalio
Bewilderment......................
Love is the ark appointed for the righteous,
Which annuls the danger and provides a way of escape.
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition.
-Rumi
Fifty years ago............................
The Butterfield Blues Band...............................In My Own Dream
Sunday, September 9, 2018
Does he think we are deaf and blind.......?
Paul Krugman opines:
True, Kavanaugh is at least getting a hearing, which the tax bill never did. But he’s bobbing and weaving his way through, refusing to answer even straightforward questions, displaying an evasiveness utterly at odds with the probity we used to expect of Supreme Court justices.
Wow.
Do yourself a favor..................
...........by scrolling through the Astronomy Picture of the Day site on a regular basis. The only thing better than the pictures is reading their guess at what the picture really means. We are blessed to be living in the age of the Hubble SpaceTelescope.
Fifty years ago.............................
Marty Robbins...................................................I Walk Alone
Saturday, September 8, 2018
Reasons I like living in Newark and Licking County..........................
Reason 47A: The renovation and re-dedication of the "anti-flooding" totem pole.
The back story is here. Anyway, the totem pole has been MIA for the past several years. The wood totem pole was originally erected in 1962. Did you know that the average life span of a wood totem pole is about seventy years? After that, Mother Nature has her way. Rather than wait until it was too late to save the totem pole, some bright and caring folks (thank you, Dave Fryman!) decided to repair and rehabilitate it. It has spent the last two years first thoroughly drying out and then being brought back to its original glory. Today was the unveiling and re-dedication ceremony. Very timely since our county is receiving 3-6 inches of rain this weekend. More than 100 folks braved the rain to watch and listen. Lots of smiles.
A puffball populist.....................?
Actually, I despise Trompe, and am opposed to almost everything he is doing, but I’m not going to give the slightest satisfaction to his “progressive” opponents, whom I despise more. He is no reactionary, and no “conservative,” either, only a puffball populist; why would I like him? (Example: Trompe thinks everyone should have more money; I think they have too much already.)
He has unusual virtues in a politician, however. He is candid about his intentions, and is passing honest, however sloppy with the details; robust in his flattery, as too in his abuse. His self-seeking is open, not disguised. He is the dead opposite of a Machiavellian schemer. This is brave because, while it charms his stiff-necked supporters, the majority in any democratic electorate demand to be lied to. Should the entire media say one thing, and Trompe says another, I would think Trompe more likely to be telling (some aspect of) the truth.
-David Warren, as lifted from this post
Fifty years ago..................................
The Supremes....................Some Things You Never Get Used To
Mistakes.............................
"Everyone makes mistakes. The main difference is that successful people learn from them and unsuccessful people don't. By creating an environment in which it is okay to safely make mistakes so that people can learn from them, you'll see rapid progress and fewer significant mistakes."
"Mistakes will cause you pain, but you shouldn't try to shield yourself or others from it. Pain is a message that something is wrong and it's an effective teacher that one shouldn't do the wrong thing again."
-Ray Dalio, Principles
Probably both..................
I’m sure everyone would love to retire in their 50s, travel the world, and sip Mai Tais on the beach. Unfortunately, reality won’t match up with those expectations. This is why I believe we’re not necessarily facing a retirement crisis in this country, but an expectations crisis.
-Ben Carlson, as extracted from here
Uh-oh.............................
“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”
-Joseph Campbell
Friday, September 7, 2018
I don't always read Malcolm Gladwell........
..........but when I do, it's because he writes something like this:
A genius is a genius, Simonton maintains, because he can put together such a staggering number of insights, ideas, theories, random observations, and unexpected connections that he almost inevitably ends up with something great. “Quality,” Simonton writes, is “a probabilistic function of quantity.”
Simonton’s point is that there is nothing neat and efficient about creativity. “The more successes there are,” he says, “the more failures there are as well”— meaning that the person who had far more ideas than the rest of us will have far more bad ideas than the rest of us, too. This is why managing the creative process is so difficult.
Except the essential..................
“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comforts of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things -air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”
-Cesare Pavese
Fifty years ago......................................
The Moody Blues......................................The Best Way To Travel
And you can fly
High as a kite if you want to
Faster than light if you want to
Speeding through the universe
Thinking is the best way to travel
It's all a dream
Light passing by on the screen
And there's you and I on the beam
Speeding through the universe
Thinking is the best way to travel
We ride the waves
Distance is gone, will we find out?
How life began, will be find out?
Speeding through the universe
Thinking is the best way to travel
And you can fly
High as a kite if you want to
Faster than light if you want to
Speeding through the universe
Thinking is the best way to travel
A light from the shadows..............
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
-J. R. R. Tolkein, The Riddle of Strider
Maps.................................
“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
-Herman Melville, from Moby Dick, as he describes Queequeg's home island
Thursday, September 6, 2018
Fifty years ago..............................
Paul Revere and The Raiders.......................Don't Take It So Hard
Wednesday, September 5, 2018
This works pretty well......................
.........................................if you are a long-term thinker:
"I don’t fool a lot around with negotiations. If they name a price that makes sense to me, I buy it. If they don’t, I was happy the day before, so I will be happy the day after without owning it."
-Warren Buffett, as culled from here
Ah, science...........................
We’ve a new little report, piece of scientific research, telling us that cheese and red meat are good for us. This in entire opposition to everything governments have been telling us about diet for decades now. This telling us that government is a seriously bad way of doing anything.
-Tim Worstall, from here
Fifty years ago.........................
Wilson Pickett....................................................She's Lookin' Good
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
And we're making more every day.....
"The commercial real estate market is roughly the same size as the U.S. stock market."
-taken from here
Within......................................
In a justly ordered universe, where loss of equipoise would mean total destruction, individual responsibility must be absolute. A man's weakness and strength, purity and impurity, are his own, and not another man's; they are brought about by himself, and not by another; and they can only be altered by himself, never by another. His condition is also his own, and not another man's. His suffering and his happiness are evolved from within. As he thinks, so he is; as he continues to think, so he remains.
-James Allen, As A Man Thinketh
Fifty years ago.........................
The Cowsills.................................................................We Can Fly
Convictions.................................
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay Self-Reliance
Monday, September 3, 2018
You mean it's not "opposable thumbs".....?
The ability to engage in large-scale cooperative activity is what makes humans as a species unique. It is the secret of our success as a species. It is certainly the secret of the productivity of modern developed economies.
-John Kay, as culled from his recent review of Joseph Henrich's The Secret of Our Success
Copying............................
Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don't come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying. We're talking about practice here, not plagiarism - plagiarism is trying to pass someone else's work off as your own. Copying is about reverse-engineering. It's like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works.
We learn to write by copying down the alphabet. Musicians learn to play by practicing the scales. Painters learn to paint by reproducing masterpieces.
Remember: Even The Beatles started as a cover band.
-Austin Kleon, Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
Wait.....................What?...............
It is reasonable to ask how the mind could ever have made the ego. In fact, it is the best question you could ask. There is, however, no point in giving an answer in terms of the past because the past does not matter, and history would not exist if the same errors were not being repeated in the present.
-The Course In Miracles, Text: 4.II.1-3
Fifty years ago............................
Etta James.......................................................................Tell Mama
Sunday, September 2, 2018
Fifty years ago.................................
Ray Stevens.........................................................Mr. Businessman
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