Building on failure

Adam Savage, one of the two heads of the show “Mythbusters”, talks about his job, and how two major failures have affected and shaped everything he has done since them. Very interesting and thought provoking.

Adam’s failures.

MIT Open Course – Intro to Philosophy

MIT has a number of neat and interesting courses – professor’s notes & lectures – which they call Open Courseware. This link is to their Intro to Ancient Philosophy, a course given by Berkeley Professor Alan Code in the 1980’s.

Schadenfreude

An interesting column in the NY Times about people rejoicing in the unhappiness of others. In this case it isn’t you and I and our concern about our jobs and our bank accounts, our retirement and our 401(k), the joy and glee is in the demise of the once great and wealthy who have been instrumental in bringing on this economic crisis. In specific he mentions Hank Greenberg’s fortune plummeting from $15.8 billion to $911 million.

On balance, Mr. Greenberg developed his fortune over 40 years of leading the insurance company AIG from being relative average to a position of leadership in the industry. After the board forced him into a position in a backwater in the company they began investing in the sub-prime market – over his strenuous and sometimes public objections. So, much as we might enjoy seeing some of these fat cats being reduced to dining on cat food with the rest of us, Hank Greenberg’s reduction to comparative poverty is the fault of others.

Yes, you could make arguments that he could have moved his fortune to other investment tools, and indeed you would be right. But a man who spent his life building a company has a hard time leaving it.

You could also argue that if he felt the board was acting improperly he could have voted his displeasure with his pocketbook, and again you would be right.

But you also have to admire a guy who stands with his people, and falls with his people. And when his fortune imploded, he complained not about his own fortune, but for the losses his people suffered.

DISCLAIMER: I really have nothing to disclaim: I have never worked for AIG or any of its subsidiaries, nor am I related to the Greenbergs.

Life, or something like it

I saw this graffiti on life and thought it was pretty funny.

Then I thought about it and thought it was sad. How hollow. But, regrettably, all too often how true. What are you doing to be different? To make a difference?

Unknown web sites

Well, obviously someone knows about them or we wouldn’t be able to share them with you.

Maybe this should be little known websites with some big potential, but that is a bit on the wordy side – not a good sound bite.

But instead of working through a list of ways to say it better (and flowers won’t help here), here is PC Magazine’s Top 100 Undiscovered Websites.

A few of the ones that caught my eye include:

• Coding Horror on coding horror stories
• Web Designer Wall on trends and tutorials
• Phone Arena on phone technical info, review, opinions (which I need because I’m in the market for a new phone)
• Gazelle where you can buy and sell electronic gadgets (help defray the cost of being an early adopter, or get a good deal on a slightly use almost breaking edge piece of technology)

And the list could go on and on for, well, 100 sites! The variety is really quite broad.

Bite Me: How snakes got their fangs

Ah! To be back in school where these kinds of questions received some respect!

But seriously, how did snakes get their fangs? Which came first, the poison or the hollow teeth? What about the retractable teeth part, when did that come in?

This article from LiveScience attempts to answer that very question of how snakes got their fangs.

Meet My Attic

is the title of a series of articles from the Washington Post on organizing those really messy places in your home. In this case it’s the author’s attic; in mine it would be my garage and basement. (Which are not entirely my fault, I hasten to add!)

Regardless, most of us need help getting organized and cleaned up: where to start, how to proceed, just general encouragement along the way. This series has been very helpful, and I am slowly applying their principles to some areas of my life and house, and will soon be expanding that to the dreaded garage and basement areas.

Millionaire club becoming less elite

That’s right, there are more and more millionaires. This year 600,000 people joined the once exclusive club. And their average wealth also increased.

The only thing that makes poor me feel better is that $1 million today is not as much as it was in 1995: $1 million in 1995 would be worth $1.3 today. Poor me would be happy with that $.3 million difference!

For more stats about millionaires, along the lines that 1 of every 3 millionaires lives in the US, read the full article.

Dangerous airports

No, not LAX or Boston, though those have had their problems. We’re talking about seriously dangerous airports. Like the famous one on St. Maarten’s where the 747s land virtually on the beach, then throw out parachutes to stop in time.

This article was in the London Times, but had no pictures so I sleuthed around and came up with this site. (Some of the verbiage is the same, so I wonder who borrowed from whom?) After all, if we’re talking dangerous airports it would be good to see what kind of danger they’re talking about.

Like landing on the beach. Well, yeah, they’re landing on the beach, but it isn’t some little 50 yard wide thing, it’s more like a sand flat exposed at low tide, so the sand is always hard.

And then there’s the one where the runway was extended by building on pylons. I’m picturing orange traffic cones or something like that, which doesn’t make any sense of course, but it’s more like building a beach house on telephone poles. Big, concrete telephone poles.

And the airport at Gibraltar running smack into that famous cliff was a figment of my imagination. It really passes by Gibraltar, but extends into the sea on both ends. Well, I guess it extends into the Med on one end and the Atlantic on the other.

But you want to see pics of these dangerous airports, not my imaginings of what they might look like.

Elephant art

This series of photos of an elephant drawing an elephant – no lie! – raised some curious questions.

• Is it used to seeing other elephants used as mounts and bulldozers and tractors? The elephant it is drawing has a cloth over its back like you see on circus elephants, with perhaps a little seat for its rider. What does it think about that? Does it do other pictures of elephants not wearing the cloth or the seat?
• Do elephants see color? I would say so because in the picture the elephant makes reasonable use of colors. (But if the elephant used only shades of blue, would that mean that it had been trained by Picasso?)
• Why is the elephant using red in some areas of the picture?
• Is this from memory, or was it using a model? No, really, I’m serious. Was there another elephant out there it was looking at, or was it making a painting of one of its friends? Or maybe just drawing an “elephant” like school kids draw “people”.
• If the elephants lived in stalls like horses do, would this elephant be able to put the pictures of its friends outside their stalls? OK, that’s kind of like the question above, kinda related, but also pushing the question of “model” and familiarity a bit further.
• Can the people who work with this group elephants tell the elephant’s elephants apart? In other words, are the elephants the elephant paints recognizable to people? What about other elephants?
• What might this be able to tell us about an elephant’s perception of itself and other elephants? For example, in the first picture we can infer that the elephant started by drawing the trunk, though the trunk was later modified as we get down toward the last picture. How important is the trunk in the elephant self-view? What about relative sizes of the head and body?
• Do other elephants recognize the elephant in the painting?
• Do other elephants paint? Is there an “Indian School of Elephant Art” in the same way that there was a Chicago School of Art back in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s? (At least I think there was something know as the Chicago School in painting.

Lots of questions, perhaps some of them silly, but what can I say, that’s just who I am.