Category Archives: Interesting

Tangible Happiness

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Sasha Dichter's blog is fast becoming a favorite. His take on the "intangible dividend" of happiness:

Of course it’s hard to measure, of course it is squishy and self-reported, but if we’re ever going to get anywhere we have to have the comfort and confidence to say out loud that things like human dignity, pride, and yes happiness are the whole point, the only point really, and that everything we’re doing is aimed at loose proxies to those results – what could be more real or concrete than that?

Just think how much we’ve punted on this issue, if we’re really honest with ourselves.  We’ve come to a point where we’re saying with a straight face that if we put a lot of money into the impact investing sector and that money realizes a healthy level of financial return then we’ve had success.  That puts us about seven degrees removed from actually understanding if anyone is better off, happier, freer, more proud or connected or more able to realize their potential, if someone is more likely to realize justice if they’re wronged or less likely to fall back into poverty if they get sick.

Name That President

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If you had to guess the president to whom the following quote belongs, who would it be? Reagan? Kennedy? Roosevelt?

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach. We need enthusiasm, imagination and the ability to face facts, even unpleasant ones, bravely. We need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer. We need the courage of the young. Yours is not the task of making your way in the world, but the task of remaking the world which you will find before you. May every one of us be granted the courage, the faith and the vision to give the best that is in us to that remaking!

If you guessed Roosevelt you'd be right, but which one?

Lonely Highways

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My commute from home in Lewisville to work in Greensboro is spent primarily on I-40 and almost every day I pass the spot where a decomposed body was found today. As a pretty avid fan of mysteries (I grew up reading the Hardy Boys, became a fan of the Spenser novels in college, and have long been a devotee of Ross Thomas, Gregory McDonald, Elmore Leonard, etc.) it has occurred to me as I drive the highway that although thousands of people pass by every day, it's rare that anyone walks those grounds and thus the wooded areas between the exits would make a pretty good place to hide a body or many other kinds of wrongdoing. 

Along the same route there are also dozens of bridges and multiple creeks, and in at least a couple of spots it's pretty easy to imagine how someone could run off the road in the middle of the night and, if no one else is in sight when it happens, not be discovered for a very long time. We tend to think of those kinds of stories as happening in the Everglades or in rural, mountainous areas, but the nature of our interstates being what they are it can easily happen just about anywhere.

Food for thought during the drive home, eh?

Pooplant

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So what could sound worse than a fecal transplant? A DIY fecal transplant at home:

Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn’t give her a piece of someone else’s intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband’s bacteria. [He] mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon.

The transplant was a success — the patient’s diarrhea cleared up within a day and did not return… Khortus was able to demonstrate that we can move colonies of microorganisms from one person to another.

With an estimated 10,000 different species of bacteria living in our bodies, and with bacteria outnumbering cells ten to one, this discovery may have implications for health care more generally. And if the fecal transplant treatment is any indicator, it could lead to fewer doctors’ visits, too. Why is that? Because as this scientific study notes, bacteriotherapy for CDI can be done at home.

 

Collapse of the Authority-Media Complex

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Eric Garland has written a thought-provoking piece about why the celebrity "big-thinkers" are starting to be called on the carpet:

It would be positively idiotic to somehow blame Messieurs Lehrer, Gladwell, Zakaria, Ferguson and others like them for the hot mess of American leadership over the last couple decades. However, their brand of “thought leadership,” it must be said, did wonderfully in a world of authority for its own sake. People still needed to feel as if they were talking to somebody who knew what was going on, lest they sink into a horrific depression realizing that nearly all sectors of American leadership failed catastrophically all at once. Media properties were looking for towering figures who could stand up across a wide variety of platforms, as billions of dollars of content sales were now concentrated into the hands of a few companies: Disney, Time Warner, News Corp, CBS, and others who owned publishers, TV, radio and more. Speaking agencies had to fill keynote spots for the billions of dollars of conferences held every year, and having superstars is a way easier sale than actually finding the right speaker for each occasion. (You want to talk international security? Great, here’s Thomas Friedman. You want to talk international business competition? Great, here’s Thomas Friedman. You want to talk about renewing American potential? Have you heard of Thomas Friedman? He’s very influential, you know. Only $50,000, too.)

If you notice the career arcs of those who attained success against the teeth-gritting backdrop of constant leadership failures, you’ll notice that none of these high-minded intellectuals tend to rock the boat too much. Gladwell, for example, has been pre-eminent in the world of publishing for more than a decade, a period of time covering all of the collapse of character and values I have described above. Can you name a single controversial opinion the man has taken? Has he ever gotten up in the grill of anyone who might hesitate before shelling out his $75,000 speaking fee? I actually think Gladwell is a good writer, but as far as the paragon of intellectual virtue in the Western world for the last decade, shouldn’t some part of the last decade’s clusterfuck have struck him as worthy of spending a little built-up credibility and inspired him to call some people out on the carpet? I don’t mean a Network/Howard Beale cri-de-coeur, I mean maybe some minor article recognizing the dramatic drop in results from our leadership, something in tune with the times. Lord knows he could have always regained some ground with a nice book on how people get successful. Fear of starvation was not holding him back.

The piece is pretty extensive and Garland does a great job of looking back at the last 30-ish years to explain how we came to this point in our culture where we are being led by folks who really don't know what they're talking about, much less what they're doing.

The Problem with the Internet

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In an interview with Mother Jones author Michael Chabon describes the problem with the internet:

MC: Well, no. It's because I love the internet and it has been incredibly useful and I have made discoveries that have been immeasurably crucial to my work—things I don't know how I ever would have found out otherwise, that are perfect, just what I need for whatever I'm doing. And with that very truth is the pretext for all the bad stuff. Because I have gotten so much out of it that I can always justify or rationalize it to myself. I'll think, "Oh I'm just going to take three minutes to find out who made the spark plugs that were used in Mustang airplanes that they used during World War II." Two hours later, I'm, you know, looking at the Partridge Family fan site or something like that, and listening to "I Think I Love You."

MJ: [Laughs.] It's called procrastination.

MC: It's more insidious, because you're being incited to it. Procrastination is something you doyourself. You know: "I gotta sharpen these pencils before I start. I got 20 pencils, they're looking kinda dull." Well, the pencils aren't calling you and alluring you and inviting you and offering you anything. They're just sitting there. You're the one who's procrastinating. The internet is actively trying to get you to stop working.

Look! Sparkly things!

Memory

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Scott Adams, he of Dilbert fame, writes about his terrible memory and it sounds oh so hauntingly familiar:

In school, I could force myself to remember topics for tests, but it only lasted as long as the test. At home, we have a lot of conversations about what I might have heard or said at some specified time in the past and it almost never sounds vaguely familiar. Sometimes it feels as if someone else lived my life until this very moment and now I'm taking over.

The way I perceive the act of creativity while it happens in me is as a process of forgetting, not a process of creating. The mind is not capable of having zero thoughts, so when you flush whatever is in your head at the moment it creates a sort of vacuum that sucks in a new thought. In my case, that process of forgetting and then sucking in a new thought happens continuously. My memory isn't "sticky," so what comes in slides right back out in a nanosecond. Sometimes a new thought is worth writing down, which I either do right away or lose it forever. Usually the new idea is random garbage and it passes quickly, making room for the next idea. My mind feels like a slot machine that I can't stop pulling. Sometimes the diamonds line up, but not often.

When in Rome

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There's a backyard game that is very popular and involves two boards with holes cut in them and bean bags. The game requires tossing the beanbags into the holes and is played much like horseshoes. When I was growing up in Northern Virginia that game was called Bean Bag Toss, but here in North Carolina people call it, um, Cornhole.

Now, I've heard the term cornhole before, but it was always in reference to a decidedly unpleasant act perpetrated on certain parts of the anatomy found on a person's posterior side where the sun don't shine. And of course those of us who are of a certain age remember Beavis & Butthead's Cornholio.

Until moving to North Carolina I'd never once heard Bean Bag Toss called Cornhole, but one day at a picnic a seemingly normal guy sidled up to me and asked me if I'd "like to Cornhole." I was slightly taken aback, to say the least, and before slugging the guy I decided it would be prudent to find out exactly what he meant so I replied by saying, "Huh?" He figured I didn't hear him, and luckily when he repeated himself he added the verb "play" to his sentence and pointed at what I thought of as a Bean Bag Toss game set up in the yard. Greatly relieved I proceeded to play a smashing game of Bean Ba-, uh, Cornhole.

Years later I was still uncomfortable calling the game Cornhole and at work I'd insisted on referring to the game as Bean Bag Toss since I thought other people might make the same mistake I had. Slowly it dawned on me that I was probably the only person in the Piedmont Triad who had a problem with "Cornhole" so I caved and started calling it that at work functions.

*Side note: You'd be amazed how often people play Cornhole at work functions.*

Unfortunately while I was attending a trade show in Boston earlier this summer I referred to a bean bag game in someone's booth as Cornhole; if I'd had a camera I could show you how people must look at flashers.

BTW, I think this confusion is quickly becoming a thing of the past, especially since there's now an American Cornhole Organization. Still if you're at all unsure of your audience I'd highly recommend the eminently more accurate moniker of Bean Bag Toss.

Slow Money

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Responding to a piece in the New York Times about bypassing Wall Street with investment dollars,  AVC's Fred Wilson describes how he and his wife have abandoned Wall Street and have concentrated on investing in businesses they can feel, touch and understand:

We are in cash, real estate, venture capital, and private investments centered around our neighborhood and city (retail, restaurants, etc). Other than cash, we are invested in things we can touch and/or impact and understand.

As Ron talks about at the start of his piece, the never ending blowups on wall street are eroding confidence in that system. It certainly has eroded our confidence in that system. So we are staying out of it for the most part.…

And he describes a movement he calls Slow Money described in this way:

“Let’s just take some of our money and invest it near where we live in things we understand, starting with food,” as the movement’s founder, Woody Tasch, puts it. He describes returns as being in the “lowish single digits,” ranging from roughly 3 percent to a few percentage points higher…

As one system seems to be failing on a regular basis, it makes sense that there are new systems that operate differently that are emerging. 

Wouldn't it be sweet justice if the titans of Wall Street were put in their place not by the toothless-so-far government regulators, but by the free market they so stridently defend but seem to only believe in if it's rigged in their favor?