G as in Good H as in Happy

Fun with Useful Acronyms

Will Wilkinson, for all our geeky behavioral-economics needs.

Naming the Nameless

December 31, 2005

Jacques Derrida on prayer, a two-hour lecture before a staggeringly erudite -- or at least mostly British-accented to the max -- audience.

To mention the Name of God is already an act of faith.... To name is to call.... Between the sceptic and the believer there is no contradiction.... Faith is at the same time a unique experience and something very common and universal...I try to dissociate unconditionality, and soveignty -- what one calls God, [from] absolute power, which nevertheless remains in the tradition.

And a "dangerous" discussion of Isaac on Sinai and Mohammed Atta, disallowing any religious justification for killing or suicide; as well as a careful delineation of "our experience as a living being" and its relationship to faith and Big Box religion.

A fine mind, imitated with varying success.

His rhetorical finesse is enviable: "If I were to try to improvise an answer to this very, very difficult question, it might be..."

Via a comment at Spleenville (see also the commenter's blog with its Free Spam Email Subject Line Suggestion).

Photo and discussion of Derrida's obituaries at interesting archaeological weblog, Traumwerk, out of Stanford.

Let Them Have and Eat Cake

October 29, 2005

Can'o'worms' recent Phrase of the Day was transcend not optimize. Excellent reminder, circling around formulations like false dilemma, either/or close, and You either sell them, or they sell you -- that is, they either buy your product, or you buy their reasons for not wanting / needing it, their applied worldview. It's useful to re-visit any important concessions, to back away and see just how much must be traded off, or not. And imagine, in negotiation, giving your adversary everything he wants and getting more yourself, too. Not always impossible, it is the fruit of Value-Added Thinking.

Something for Everyone

There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.

-- Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 149/430

We're Finally Seen Tiptoeing Down the Aisle The Wrong Way For the Last Time

We have a soft spot for the Anglican Church in general, and the Church of England in particular. Our entry into the blogosphere, and toward the perimeters of the Eastern Orthodox Church, rode on the ripples of our shock at the Current ECUSA Unpleasantness, and its scuttling of our expectation it would always be there with the historic Deposit of Faith, in fine Florentine wrappings.

For another installment of the saga of You Can't Get Here/Anywhere from There,...

Inventing Nada

Intriguing post on the origin of Zero, and the Babylonian sexagesimal numbering system.

Incentives Concentrate the Mind Wonderfully

August 10, 2005

Constant Reader noticed this, and suggests the embedded principle may offer an important key to a nation's productivity and creativity.

Americans may be no more competent or educated than some others, but because the social and economic system is free to offer incentives and deliver rewards -- often rewards even greater than promised or anticipated -- it is arguable that they, and other consistently productive economies, operate consistently closer to the maximum of their training and competency.

Economists would perhaps say there is a definable cost to the effort of using what we know, of closing the gap between default performance, and full-out attention and application.

It's Raining...

...hard in Austin this morning. Since Sr. Dilys wends his little roadster around hilly roads on the way to his daily breaking and mortaring of legal rocks, the morning eye-opener includes checking the weather via the radar map. And determining the trajectory of the storm, partly by checking the time on the map. 13:47 UTC means 8:47 a.m. in Central Texas.

UTC. UT, "Universal Time," or, as we here grew up calling it "Greenwich" or "Greenwich Mean Time." -wich is a street; a village; a castle; a dwelling; a place of work, even an exercise of authority. In this case, a green one. Universal is a cold abstraction, even an abstraction of abstractions, common to all purposes, conditions, or situations, and thus applicable to any. In-between specific and general, are the US geographical divisions, Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific Standard Time.

Time anchored to space. Language anchored to history, and geography. We are not prepared to collaborate in our thinking, to universalize and bleach a venerable verdant village, at the dividing line of so many things, into a blank abstraction providing fodder for the pounding or humming machine of some generic future. Especially since it's the same time, for all but extremely technical purposes. Greenwich is still the meridian from which the day is counted.

Now. Hot-pink crepe myrtle shedding translucent drops from massed green leaves at the end of the rain. Everywhere we look, we see the windows of a dwelling, a space of work, an opportunity to exercise authority over our world.

The Universal and Its technicians will take care of Itself. Us, that's our job.

Thomas Barnett's Newsletter

August 3, 2005

Cross-the-boundaries big-picture thinking that accommodates the telling detail is growing of necessity out of the information glut in which we flounder. Thomas P.M. Barnett burst into the scenario-thinking public eye with The Pentagon's New Map, taking a memetic rather than ideological, or idealistic anthropological look at globalization and the culture clashes into which the US has been drawn or blundered in the  21st century.

He has a blog, and a free newsletter we will be visiting to stay current and clear after the blogosphere's binary conventional wisdom palls and exhausts.

Here is down-to-earth correspondence with one of his readers:

Retreat from Tuesday Morning

August 2, 2005

Cultivating your creativity with a Mickey Mouse hat and pliers placed prominently upon the desk...

Via Creative Generalist

Update, via Mocoloco: There's a book, The Inspired Workspace: Interior Designs for Creativity & Productivity. Come on over to the garden loggia and let's talk about it!