My comparative advantage (the craft of being nice :face_with_open_mouth_vomiting:馃あ) It鈥檚 not often you see your CFO holding back tears. It鈥檚 even rarer when the reason he鈥檚 doing so is because you鈥檙e being fired. No, I wasn鈥檛 part of a mass layoff or a restructuring or a merger or anything like that. I just wasn鈥檛 very good at my job. We all knew it and I had already been interviewing at other places....
Simone Biles. What a beast.
A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Sony & Rob Goodman Information is divorced from content. This was one of the fundamental insights leading up to Shannon鈥檚 work. Information is not about what you send, it鈥檚 simply about what you can send, or the set of things you can send. This is kind of amazing to me: developing the technologies that have given us so many platforms for expressing our weirdness and individuality was only possible by ignoring all of that stuff in the first place....
Conjectures and Refutations by Karl Popper Contrasts the Empiricists (the philosophers that saw truth as something stemming from natural observation) with the rationalists (those that believed truth is something to be found through intellectual intuition) His argument is that both of these camps are not really that different at all. They both believe truth to be something whole that can be obtained in full in one way or the other. 鈥淚t is plain, just look at these facts!...
Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson Introduction That followed Leonardo鈥檚 injunction to begin any investigation by going to the source: he who can go to the fountain does not go to the water jar. Themes Iteration and going deeper. The revisiting if the painting鈥檚 neck twenty years after the initial painting to correctly render the two sternocleidomastoid muscles after human dissection in 1510. Beginning from foundations. First you must paint the skeleton, then move outward....
2021-06-01 Reading The Honest Broker by Ted Gioia. And they do this for a very simple reason: their prestige is enhanced by making these connections. [鈥 the Honest Broker plays the long-term game, mate. He鈥檚 taking about getting things done as an outsider in China in the nineties, but reputation economies tend to be a vital and underestimated resource in the West too. Thorstein Veblen鈥檚 Theory of the leisure class - an update This is Rob Henderson鈥檚 idea that Ellie status is conveyed by displaying a certain set of beliefs in the same way that one might wear a certain hat or handbag or sports car....
Tristes Tropiques' by Claude Levi-Strauss Mankind has opted for monoculture From early in the book, perhaps from the introduction. I don鈥檛 recall precisely. Chapter 9 The ground that his observations cover is truly remarkable. In chapter 9, Guanabara, he goes from travelogue to France鈥檚 early colonial history in Brazil to urban design over the course of only a few paragraphs. He speaks of the way that places have ceased to shock and surprise in the way they once did before the sustained contact between colonial and native cultures....
Music Remember 01 by The Halluci Nation (formerly A Tribe Called Red), an indigenous Canadian hip-hop group based in Ottawa. Another indigenous Canadian musician, Willie Dunn wrote incredble folk songs about native history, culture and western civilization and politics. He has a great voice and his lyrics are 馃憣. Ballad of Crowfoot is a good place to start and one of his best known songs Mabe Fratti. Moving. A Guatemalan cellist making minimalist electronic cello music in Mexico City....
Confusion I am working through a task at work of reproducing a dataset using a long SQL script consisting of separate chunks of data manipulation and manual edits (to the data table, not the code). As often happens, documentation is less than perfect and I am left to figure out much of what I am doing in my own. This naturally leads to some confusion - what should I be looking for, how do I find an issue to correct, how should I correct the issue when I find it etc....
I put the questions to some friends of mine gathered for a barbeque today: how do we know what is proper social etiquette. Or maybe, the less boozhy way to put it is, how do we know how to behave around others? I often feel this most acutely when having people over for a meal, when it comes time to eat. I have been running around - chopping, toasting, tasting, roasting - and all of a sudden it鈥檚 time to eat and everyone is milling about, chatting, drinking and (hopefully) enjoying themselves, just as guests should be....