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Sorry I have been away from this blog for a while. I just moved, and the fun still has not stopped. Boxes are piled everywhere, the kitchen is not unpacked at all, and heck if I know where the towels and washclothes are. I’ll be back after I dig out.
But, I should comment on Comcast, both the good news and the bad. First, the bad news: even though I told the customer service rep when I called to tell them I was moving that every time in the past when I have moved Comcast has screwed things up, and even though he assured me he had taken care of everything for me this time . . . you guessed it, it got screwed up. I waited two hours when I had far better things to do, and Comcast never showed up to set up my service.
I’ve always liked the title of the series of technology help books called “The Missing Manual.” The accurate and perceptive premise is that manufacturers rarely provide as much guidance as you would like for the sophisticated technology they have sold to you. These books, written by a third-party expert, help you get the most out of your purchase, and teach you all kinds of tricks to make it easier to understand and use.
So, this title caught my attention — Your Brain: The Missing Manual. Very clever. I didn’t buy my brain, but it sure is a complex tool that I wish I knew how to use better, and there’s no user’s guide, either. I haven’t read this book, so I can’t comment on it, but I am curious about it and will look into it.
I don’t often write here about sports stories, but I like stories that have a good message, and this one does. If you’re not a Phillies or baseball fan, Jimmy Rollins is a superstar shortstop who won the Most Valuable Player award two years ago. Yet in yesterday’s game he failed to run hard to first base, thinking the ball he’d hit was going to be easily caught for an out. When the ball was dropped, he had squandered a chance to be on second base instead of first.
The story here is not baseball or sports — it’s about taking responsibility for your actions no matter who you are. It’s also about management — Charlie Manuel yanked Rollins out of the game as punishment, sending a clear message about accountability. And then it’s about how you act when you get chastised publicly.
He took his medicine. Jimmy Rollins took his benching yesterday like a man, like a teammate, maybe even like the leader he purports to be.
Given the depths to which America’s image has sunk globally, this was refreshing news.
LONDON, June 4 — For much of the world, Sen. Barack Obama’s victory in the Democratic primaries was a moment to admire the United States, at a time when the nation’s image abroad is in tatters.
I got my first detailed, in-depth look at the problems of the industrial farming complex when I read Michael Pollan’s eye-opening book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (which I highly recommend). This NYT editorial cites two reports, one by the Pew Charitable Trust and one by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
As new reports make it clear, the efficiency of industrial animal production is an illusion, made possible by prisonlike confinement systems.
It’s sad but true. Anti-intellectualism is rampant. As Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, explains in her NYT column, “Best Is the New Worst,” the word “elite” has been completely distorted for partisan purposes.
The word “elite,” once an accolade, has turned poisonous in American public life, as both the left and the right have twisted it into a code word meaning “not one of us.”
It’s a perverse thing to ridicule the attainment of education and expertise. I really have had a hard time grasping how this shift has happened. I guess I need to read Jacoby’s book. But for a nation that has an inherent (if arrogant) belief that it is the greatest in the world, why do so many of our people resent and distrust those among them who have acquired the knowledge required to make us succeed? read more | digg story
I’ve got to be careful or Valeria is going to think I’m trying to channel her blog but I’m a big fan of Benjamin Zander and I wanted to direct readers to her post about him, which includes the above video clip of him, as well. I saw him deliver a keynote presentation several years ago that I still consider to be one of the best I have ever seen (and I’m in the conference business, so I have seen plenty of keynotes).
Orchestrating Collaboration is the title of a talk Ben Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, gave at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year [the video is 9 minutes]. I read the Zanders’ book when it came out, in 2000. It is timeless. Long after we will be done pounding the meaning out of the term conversation, this book will continue to inspire generations of students of The Art of Possibility.
I finally got tired of seeing my LinkedIn progress bar stuck at 90%. The explanation offered said that if I recommended someone in my network, then it would go up to 95%. I kind of assumed that if I wrote two recommendations, it would get to 100%, and then I would feel a sense of accomplishment — a social networking task crossed off my “to do” list.
So, with my motivation all about me, I set out to recommend someone by looking through my connections on LinkedIn. I didn’t even get past the A’s before I saw someone worthy of recommendation. “This one will be easy,” I thought, and in just a couple of minutes I was done, having summed up succinctly what a great job this person had done for me in the past.
It doesn’t always seem that my brain is working better the older I get (anecdotal evidence I’ve observed might even suggest the opposite at times . . .), but the NYT says it is: “Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain.”
“If older people are taking in more information from a situation, and they’re then able to combine it with their comparatively greater store of general knowledge, they’re going to have a nice advantage.”
Nice to hear some good news, for a change, about aging brains.
“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”
Sorry I have been away from this blog for a while. I just moved, and the fun still has not stopped. Boxes are piled everywhere, the kitchen is not unpacked at all, and heck if I know where the towels and washclothes are. I’ll be back after I dig out.
I got my first detailed, in-depth look at the problems of the industrial farming complex when I read Michael Pollan’s eye-opening book, 
but I’m a big fan of Benjamin Zander and I wanted to direct readers to her 
