Turn that noise down

Epistemic closure applies to real life, too. Like when you think my music sucks.

No Heroes, No Apologists

It's a problem. Writers, philosophers, revolutionaries. How should we judge them? By their ideas or by their actions?

Cold

It is very cold this morning. -6 F (-21 C). The sunrise looked like the full moon in Autumn. There was fog all along the hillsides, climbing up the plateaus, and the ice crystals in the fog made large arching rainbows like spring rain. Driving to work, the cars moved over lunar roads covered in dried snow and evaporated ice. Everything was dry and cold and lifeless. Antarctic.

Your Workplace Is Boring, And Probably Very Sad

Regarding employers spying on their employee's computers:

Some argue that a little personal surfing at work actually makes employees more productive. Software "solutions" like BeAware (Corporate Edition) and the creepy Spector360 ("Who is arriving to work late and leaving early? Who takes long lunch breaks?") seem pitched to the David Brents of the world. The makers of the Spector360 will tell you that their product will "significantly reduce the amount of goofing off that has grown common in most workplaces (one hour per day per employee, on average)." What they won't tell you is that you're a jerk. If your employees are watching "Funny Cats 3" all day long, the problem isn't unfiltered access to the Internet. The problem is that your workplace is boring, and probably very sad.

Notes From The Bus

So life can take some weird turns. First off, I've been working in Boulder since early March, and commuting the 94 miles (one way!) in order to get there. The job is great. Very collegial. Lots of smart people. But in the current economy, it's very unlikely I'll be moving to Boulder in the near future. So, I've become a commuter. As I type this I am on a bus hurtling down I25, making use of the free WiFi and listening to Wilderness on my iPod. It's pretty much what I'd be doing if I were at home so it's hard to complain. In fact, I won't complain. I feel weirdly inspired by the weirdness of my days. Where once I was a static point (some might say stagnant), now I am a blur. Instead of working from home, doing the same thing day after day, going for days without leaving the house, now I am a blur. I am in constant motion. I eat the miles. I devour time.

Mind The Gap

I've been too busy to blog lately. Busy may not be the right word. Call it: occupied. I've been too occupied lately with other thoughts and concerns to blog, or care that I wasn't blogging. So it goes.

But things are slowly starting to turn around; slowly. And I have an interview in Boulder next week which is better than a punch in the neck. So. Anyway.

What did I miss?

The Superbowl

The Giants played a great game, no doubt about it. But it was the defense that made it all possible by holding the Patriots in check long enough for Eli and Co. to gain their footing. I think we saw two things: The Giants defense were the only team that could match-up with the Pat's offensive line (unlike say, the Packers and the Cowboys) and going undefeated is just too hard. What would have happened had the Patriots lost that game to Indianapolis way back in the middle of the season? Would they trade an undefeated season for the championship?

Lost is Back

The first two episodes have been more than entertaining. They've actually been really good. And perhaps it's because I've been watching them casually: unspoiled and unobsessed - and just letting things happen. The new characters are interesting as are all the flashbacks and flashforwards. John Locke continues to be the heart and soul of the show and Ben can still manipulate anyone and everyone whenever he chooses. It will be interesting to see what happens when the present catches up to the future (or will it be the past?)

Movies

I watched a bunch of new movies last weekend (on DVD), all of which were entertaining without being anything to get too excited about: Bourne Ultimatum, Knocked Up, Ocean's 13, and The Kingdom.

Actually the Bourne movie probably is worth another look for two fairly obvious reasons. One is the crazy overlap trick it pulls off where the first half of the movie takes place during the third act of the Bourne Supremacy. It's also interesting to think about Bourne as a character: a person who only exists when he is in motion, whose entire life is defined by his context and his enemies. When he is at rest he disappears from himself; becomes a nameless figure floating, floating, floating. Desire-less and free.

That's it for now.

Catching Up 1: Perseverence

I've been taking some time off while I try to sort out my next career move and keep pace with the devil's cauldron that is modern western capitalism. Some observations of the last many weeks:

Things fail more often than they succeed.

Businesses fail, restaurants fail, relationships fail. Opportunities don't pan out the way you expected them to. That guy who said he'd call you back about that thing, doesn't. That novel you've been working on isn't actually very good. More often than not, you're screwed, and you're life becomes a disjointed serious of fits and starts with no clear purpose or direction. All you can do is make a virtue of perseverance and try to make narrative sense of all your failures and successes. String them together in a long chain of cause and effect (even when there is none) until you make yourself feel better.

Right now I'm between jobs, facing an uncertain future, and being forced to sum up and evaluate what I've done so far. Sure it's just a resume, but it's also a little snapshot of all your choices and opportunities. Should I have gone into a different field? Should I have done more with my education? Should I have been able to see this coming way back in the 11th grade? How can I gorilla glue and staple gun all these job titles together? How can I putty in the holes in my education and technical know-how? How can I go out there and sell myself without feeling like a sell-out?

But this is not a "can" or a "should" problem. We persevere because we must. Because at the end of the day, it's all about what needs to be done. Live, survive, keep going. Fight another day. Most of the time we fail, we retreat, we reevaluate. But sometimes, maybe next time, we succeed.

Failure = Success? Let's Hope So

This is the kind of week I'm having. I'm reading self-help advice on overcoming failure. This is from MSN's Esquire page:

That's why you have to drop to one knee and propose to the girl you're pretty sure you love. That's why you have to send out your résumé, even though your job is just fine. That's why you have to climb that 14,000-foot mountain. It won't always work out. You may get divorced. Or fired. Or frostbitten. But the alternative is a life of vague disappointment.

When that nagging little voice pops up, wondering what's going to happen if you fail, just ignore it. Yes, it's hard. As humans, we're programmed for loss aversion. But money is just money. Your job is just your job. Your life - the adventure of your life - is all you really have that's yours.

When things go wrong, when you're sliding toward an unavoidable crash, don't panic. In those long seconds before the impact, look around and figure out how you entered into this mess. Think about how you'll frame the story a year from now, over a few beers. Can you come up with an honest version that ends, "So in a funny way, it was the best thing that ever happened to me"?

True all true. Nothing ventured nothing gained and all that. But failure still means you failed. You can't whitewash it. Or at least I can't.

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Listening to: NPR - Animal Collective Live, 10-01-2007
via FoxyTunes

Werewolves of Edinburgh

Family lore:

Nisbet, A System of Heraldry, vol 1, p. 335, Nisbet discusses werewolves:

"I shall, therefore, end here with four-footed beasts, only mentioning one of a monstrous form, carried with us; its body is like a wolf, having four feet with long toes, and a tail ; it is headed like a man, called in our books a warwolf, carried by Dickison of Winkleston, azure, a warwolf passant, and three stars in chief argent : so blazoned by Mr. Thomas Crawfurd, and illuminated in several books ; which are also to be seen cut upon a stone above an old entry of a house in the Cowgate in Edinburgh, above the foot of Libberton's wynd, which belonged formerly to the name of Dickison, which name seems to be from the Dicksons by the stars which they carry."

Dramatica Explains the Happiness Gap

The New York Times has an article on the growing happiness gap between men and women. Men are apparently happier. Who knew?

The surveys assessed men and women based on how unpleasant they found various tasks during the course of their day:

Not surprisingly, men and women often gave similar answers about what they liked to do (hanging out with friends) and didn’t like (paying bills). But there were also a number of activities that produced very different reactions from the two sexes — and one of them really stands out: Men apparently enjoy being with their parents, while women find time with their mom and dad to be slightly less pleasant than doing laundry.

There all sorts of ways to explain the gap: changes in societal norms, have-it-all-ism, second shift-ism, etc. These certainly have the look and feel of truth.

Now, in the deep-theory behind Dramatica, there are two way of solving problems and assessing one's progress: linear (moving from one step to the next to the next) and holistic (balancing many things simultaneously). According to the theory, linear thinkers are primarily (though not necessarily) male and holistic thinkers are primarily (though not necessarily) female.

So in the course of a day men are able to move from one task to the next, and their sense of satisfaction is based solely on the task at hand. If they have 10 things to do they focus on just one and ignore the other 9. This is where we get the stereotype of the man who happily sits watching TV while the leaves go unraked, the fence goes unpainted, and the kids go un-fed.

Women on the other hand move through their day trying to balance each of their 10 tasks within the overall fabric of their lives. If 1 thing is going poorly, it diminishes her satisfaction with the other 9 and vice versa. This is where we get the stereotype of the superwoman trying to be a success at everything simultaneously.

If one is asked to report their level happiness on isolated activities, what they are really being asked is how happy are they solving problems linearly. My feeling is that men will tend to report greater happiness because the survey plays into the problem-solving style they are more comfortable with. If the questions put more emphasis on their ability to balance work, life, and leisure, you might get a different response.

The Brazen Careerist

I've just discovered Penelope Trunk's career advice at Yahoo. I thought her tips were pretty benign until I started reading the angry and hostile comments left by the vast majority of the readers.

Here are some of her tips for workplace etiquette:

1. Forget the exit interview.

An exit interview won't help you, and it'll probably create bad will. If you have people to thank when you leave a job, do it at lunch. If you have ideas for how to improve the company, offer to consult. Of course the company will decline, because they don't care. Otherwise you wouldn't be quitting, right?

Stop focusing on the exit interview and focus on how to quit like a pro. When you get a new job, your old boss is part of your new network. It's up to you to make sure that parting ways goes as smoothly as possible so that you can shepherd this person into your network of supporters.

2. Don't ask for time off, just take it.

When you need to leave work for a few hours or a few days, you don't need to ask for permission -- you're an adult, after all. Make sure your work is in good order and send an email to the relevant people letting them know you'll be gone.

This will seem discourteous to older people, who expect you to ask rather than tell. So be sure to give a reason why you're cutting out. People like to know they matter and where they stand.

3. Keep your headphones on at work.

If you use social media tools, you're probably good at connecting with people and navigating office politics -- good enough that spending all day at work with headphones on won't hinder you.

If you don't know what what social media tools are, then you're probably not innately good at making connections and need to take those headphones off before you're crushed by office politics.

From what I can tell, her advice is really geared toward 21st century knowledge workers. People who are capable of being their own means of production and aren't reliant on vast corporate infrastructure to do their jobs. These are people who just need a phone, an internet connection, and their own wits to be successful.

My guess is that this doesn't necessarily apply to most people. If you work in retail, you have your shop and your inventory and your suppliers. If you're a doctor, even a surgeon pulling down six figures, you are dependent on the hospital and the hospital staff to supply you with all the things you need.

The knowledge workers of the future, on the other hand, are completely independent and work in fluid environments. Their boss isn't down the hall, she's in an office in London or Mumbai, or he's traveling to the customer's office in Toronto this week, Sydney the next. The idea that one's job is to supervise others, or that one needs to be supervised is for people whose lives or jobs are stuck in the 20th century. The people I've seen be successful are the people who take charge of themselves and their work and aren't easily pushed around. If they are doing X, and their boss says Y, they push-back rather than submissively changing tracks.

If that's the sort of thing that will get you fired, then you don't have a career, you just have a job. And you're probably in the wrong one.

Design For Life

This is a brilliant comment to a rather pedestrian article on the idea of a world without human beings (best portrayed in the show The Future Is Wild). From Slackie Onassis:

Given that 99% of all that's ever lived on Earth has gone extinct eventually, we should probably be more humble, less vain. But that's not a very marketable sentiment, when contrasted with 1) Capitalism, 2) Consumerism, and 3) Christianity -- which hold, respectively, that 3) Man is uniquely valued in the cosmos by a Creator, and that 2) we're entitled to everything, and that 1) whatever can't be priced, bought, or owned isn't worth having, anyway. Those sentiments will only hasten our extinction, likely by our own hand.

I don't know if they'll hasten our extinction, but these are definitely words to understand and live by accordingly. Capitalism is our system of value. Consumerism is our path to fulfillment. Christianity is our justification for everything.

What more do you need to know?

Weather Delays and other Urban Legends

Man do I feel naive. Having just returned from a cross-country trip by air, I was actually surprised to read the latest "Ask the pilot" at Salon. Here's all you need to know:

Your attention please: With scattered exceptions, there is no such thing as a weather delay. They are traffic delays. Your flight was not late because of the weather. It was late because there are too many small airplanes carrying too few people, end of story.

There are too many regional airlines (ie, those little commuter jets you see everywhere) clogging up the skies. It's not the thunderstorms. I'm kind of shocked that this isn't news.

Steampunk Socialites

The New York Observer coins a new term, "New Vicotorians", in a lifestyle article on the return of Gen-Y Millenials to more traditional views on marriage. The New Vic world centers around child-bearing, cooking, gardening, knitting, nesting and other modes of bourgeois domesticity that the boomers thought they'd successfully done away with.

...recent years have seen a breed of ambitious, twentysomething nesters settling in the city, embracing the comforts of hearth and home with all the fervor of characters in Middlemarch. This prudish pack—call them the New Victorians—appears to have little interest in the prolonged puberty of earlier generations. While their forbears flitted away their 20’s in a haze of booze, Bolivian marching powder, and bed-hopping, New Vics throw dinner parties, tend to pedigreed pets, practice earnest monogamy, and affect an air of complacent careerism. Indeed, at the tender age of 28, 26, even 24, the New Vics have developed such fierce commitments, be they romantic or professional, that angst-ridden cultural productions like the 1994 movie Reality Bites, or Benjamin Kunkel’s 2005 novel Indecision, simply wouldn’t make sense to them.

Unfortunately, the article eventual devolves into yet another touchstone for female marriage panic. Girls musn't be spinsters in the New Vic world. And after all, isn't this just a new take on 80s era yuppie-ism?

Still, until everyone gets bored of playing house, I look forward to steampunk being the next major fashion trend for these Neo-Victorians and their trendy homes. With mid century modern on its way out, what would be better than Jules Verne inspired espresso makers, mp3 players, hd televisions, and cell phones?

Slow Return

I got home Tuesday night from a week-long 4th of July trip to Ohio, but I have not quite gotten back up to speed on the blogging. Colorado is blissfully cool and overcast after a week of hot and humid midwestern summer days. Still, Buckeye country has its occasional upsides and I can't say I regret the time spent.

A Cautionary Tale

Now this is scary:

About a dozen years ago, an old friend of mine was told by his daughter that she was going to get married. This suited him fine, but he balked at pouring untold thousands of dollars down the drain of a full-dress wedding. "I'll tell you what," he said to her. "I'll give you a choice: You can have a wedding, or you can have $30,000 to help you get started on your new life." Without a moment's hesitation, she astonished him -- and me, too, when he told me the story -- by replying, "I'll take the wedding."

It's like watching Deal or No Deal. Take the cash you fool!

Things I Believe

Sometimes it's important to keep track of things like this.

• I believe in extra-terrestrial life, but I do not believe we have found it yet (or they us)
• I believe our concept of "God" should be taken metaphorically
• I believe in evolution and the process of natural selection
• I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone
• I believe Al Qaeda destroyed the WTC with two airplanes
• I believe Pete Rose gambled on his own team
• I believe consciousness is grounded in the brain
• I believe William Shakespeare wrote all of the plays attributed to him
• I believe human beings contribute to global warming
• I believe that the ability to understand the world is what gives it meaning
• I believe torture is unethical and serves no practical purpose
• I believe in liberal democracy, personal freedom, and social responsibility
  

Love Stinks

This week's Savage Love is so honest, so direct, so perfectly stated that there is really nothing else that ever needs to be said or written on the subject again. Ever.

Even he gets bored of talking about it (y'know), and provides a pithy and very positive review of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.