Don't assume....................................

“Don't assume, because you are intelligent, able, and well-motivated, that you are open to communication, that you know how to listen.” 
-Robert K. Greenleaf

cartoon via

.........bleeds daylight..................

Bare Naked Ladies....................Lovers In A Dangerous Time

Serving...................................

     The age of the "go-getter has passed.  He has been supplanted by the "go-giver."
-Napoleon Hill, as excerpted from Think and Grow Rich

Landshark..................................

via

Fifty years ago.....................................

Dr. Strangelove at the movies:  "ruling out human meddling"

Maybe, but at this age just hearing is presenting its own challenges.....

via

.............close to mine.............

American Flyer.......................................Back in '57

Counter-intuitiveness on display.............

If the same-old same-old is not your thing,  consider spending some time with Dan Pink's Flip Manifesto.  A wee sample:

Steve Swasey, Netflix's vice-president for corporate communication, says:  "Rules and policies and regulations and stipulations are innovation killers.  People do their best work when they're unencumbered.  If you're spending a lot of time accounting for the time you're spending, that's time you're not innovating."

The same goes for expenses.  Employees typically don't need to get approval to spend money on entertainment, travel, or gifts.  Instead, the guidance is simpler:  act in Netflix's best interest.  It sounds delightfully adult.  And it is - in every regard.  People who don't produce are shown the door.  "Adequate performance," the company says. "gets a generous severance package."

The idea is that freedom and responsibility, long considered fundamentally incompatible, actually go together quite well.

On genies and bottles.......................

Technology has delivered to us many fabulous gifts.  The fruits of technology have spurred dramatic increases in the healthiness of our species.  Magic algorithms located somewhere within the Intertunnel have made an incalculable amount of information (both true and false) available to the everyman.  The toys and tools of this age have gone way beyond time saving and labor saving and way finding.  So where does it all lead?   Us history majors are much better at looking at the past than figuring out the future.  For that we turn to Mashable and its recent post 7 Huge Tech Trends To Expect in 2014.  My favorite is Drone Wars.  Enjoy.

Bring back the draft...............?

If you were to say to yourself, "I only have time to read one essay about the state of our republic today, so I'm going to make it a good one," then I would say to you, "read Andrew J. Bacevich's essay, One Percent Republic."    Excerpt here:

"... in formulating basic military policy and in deciding when and how to employ force, the state no longer requires the consent, direct participation, or ongoing support of citizens. As an immediate consequence, Washington’s penchant for war has appreciably increased, without, however, any corresponding improvement in the ability of political and military leaders to conclude its wars promptly or successfully. A further result, less appreciated but with even larger implications, has been to accelerate the erosion of the traditional concept of democratic citizenship."

Fifty years ago...............................

The Beatles.................................A Hard Day's Night

Sentient money....................

Asked recently if money today is smarter, Greg Vilkin, managing principal and president of MarcFarlane Partners, said that, "Money today is more nervous than it has ever been."
-as excerpted from here

Unfathomed...............................

"Didst thou ever descry a glorious eternity in a winged moment of time?  Didst thou ever see a bright infinite in the narrow point of an object?  Then thou knowest what spirit means -- the spire-top, whither all things ascend harmoniously, where they meet and sit contented in an unfathomed Depth of Life."
-Peter Sterry

Opening paragraphs............................

Mitch Rapp stared at his reflection in the dusty, cracked mirror and questioned his sanity.  There was no shaking, or sweaty palms.  He wasn't nervous.  It was just a cold, calculated assessment of his abilities and his odds for success.  He went over the plan once more from start to finish, and again concluded it was likely that he would be severely beaten, tortured, and possible killed, but even in the face of such prospects, he couldn't bring himself to walk away, which brought him right smack dab back to that part about his mental health.  What kind of man willingly chose to do such a thing?  Rapp thought about it for a long moment and then decided someone else would have to answer that question.
-Vince Flynn,  American Assassin

In the good old US of A.......................

cartoons via

Need some work...............................

Bruce Hornsby.....................................The Changes

One of my new favorite blogs.................

is Joe Hanson's It's Okay To Be Smart.  If you haven't visited, try it out.  You gotta love somebody who loves Feynman.

The Whole Universe in a Glass of Wine

“A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all!”

-Richard P. Feynman

About those resolutions..................

via Ka-Ching!

Fifty years ago.............................

Beach Boys...................................................I Get Around

The ten best science fiction movies....................

..........as chosen by scientists. I've seen, and liked, most of them.  Without trying to be picky, my list would probably include The Day The Earth Stood Still with Michael Rennie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Woody Allen's Sleeper.   Full scientist-picked list is here.  Sample here

No. 5 Fantastic Voyage (1966)

A miniature spacecraft and crew are injected into a comatose scientist to remove a life-threatening blood clot, so that he can survive to share vital secrets. The movie's lavishly depicted workings of the human body garnered two Academy Awards and three additional nominations—and got James Giordano thinking about medicine at the tiniest scale. Now a professor of neuroscience at Georgetown University, Giordano examines the mechanics of the brain's response to pain. "The film has been a lifelong inspiration for me to work on developing neurotechnology," he says. David Carroll, director of the Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials at Wake Forest University, says that the movie's minuscule technology, although physically impossible, is echoed in his current work. "It's exactly what we are working on: Injecting nanobots that find a cancerous tumor, tell us when they have found it, and destroy it," he says. Now that's fantastic.