The Challenge of Indifference « Scott Berkun

I don't quite know what to make of Mr. Berkun yet (1), but I found this article very good.

Indifference, feigned or real, is such a pervasive part of North American culture (maybe just here in the Pacific Northwest, I don't know). I forget how surprising this was to me when I first came to the USA when I was 18.

Short excerpt follows, and the full article if you follow the link.

 

And as I stood there, I started to feel weird. Why am I the only one listening? Even though I knew it was right in the sense this is something alive and real and I can spare at least 30 seconds for that – it felt weird simply because no one else was doing it. Had there been a crowd around any one of these buskers, more people would stop to listen, simply because they could do it without having to stand out.

via scottberkun.com

 

(1) I've read one of his books, Confessions of a Public Speaker, and thought it was good and worth reading, and I've been reading his blog for several months. Still not sure what to make of him though.

Posted via web from johnweldon4 - posterous

The Secret of Great Bread - Let Time Do the Work - NYTimes.com

Mr. Lahey’s method is striking on several levels. It requires no kneading. (Repeat: none.) It uses no special ingredients, equipment or techniques. It takes very little effort.

It accomplishes all of this by combining a number of unusual though not unheard of features. Most notable is that you’ll need about 24 hours to create a loaf; time does almost all the work. Mr. Lahey’s dough uses very little yeast, a quarter teaspoon (you almost never see a recipe with less than a teaspoon), and he compensates for this tiny amount by fermenting the dough very slowly. He mixes a very wet dough, about 42 percent water, which is at the extreme high end of the range that professional bakers use to create crisp crust and large, well-structured crumb, both of which are evident in this loaf.

The dough is so sticky that you couldn’t knead it if you wanted to. It is mixed in less than a minute, then sits in a covered bowl, undisturbed, for about 18 hours. It is then turned out onto a board for 15 minutes, quickly shaped (I mean in 30 seconds), and allowed to rise again, for a couple of hours. Then it’s baked. That’s it.

via nytimes.com

I'm going to try this out! It will be my first loaf of bread I've ever made, and I'm expecting it to ROCK! :)

Posted via web from johnweldon4 - posterous

Brain-training games don't work

Alas, research published today in Nature indicates that the possibility of improving your general cognitive abilities by playing brain-training games is an empty promise. More than 11,000 volunteers were split into three groups: one who played brain-training-type exercises; a second practised more general cognitive tests; and a control group who just pootled around the internet answering random questions. They did this for six weeks, bookended by benchmarking tests of memory, reasoning and other standard tests of cognitive function.

All three groups displayed improvement in the tasks they were performing. But all three groups also showed only small and similar increases in the benchmarking tests, possibly simply the effect of repeating the test. Conclusion? Practising brain-training games will improve your performance on brain-training games, but that effect will not transfer to other aspects of brain function. They will not make you brainier, so you may as well just pootle around on the internet. As lead researcher Adrian Owen says: "You're not going to get better at playing the trumpet by practising the violin."

via guardian.co.uk

Ah... there goes that theory.

Posted via web from johnweldon4 - posterous

Team Hanselman and Diabetes Walk 2010

Two months before my 21st birthday I started peeing a lot. A LOT. Like I was drinking four 2-liter bottles of Sprite a day and was still thirsty beyond belief. We'd just had a family photo taken and I was 130lbs on a 5'11" frame (for those of you outside the US, that's thin.) I was wasting away and looked like death. My father, a Portland Firefighter and Paramedic for thirty years smelled the sugar on my breath and sent me right away to the hospital where my blood glucose level was higher than the meter could read...and it's supposed to be under 100mg/dl.

I spent that spring learning how to give myself shots, four a day, along with a regiment of pills. Twelve years later I have no side effects, knock on wood. Not everyone is that lucky. I recently went to a funeral of a high-school friend who was the exact same age and succumbed to Type 1 Diabetes.

via hanselman.com

I knew a young man who was just starting out in life; young wife and an adopted kid. He began experiencing similar symptoms, but it took less than a couple days between him realizing there was a problem and being dead.

Diabetes is a dangerous killer, and I want to see it stopped too.

Posted via web from johnweldon4 - posterous

Visual Studio 2010 C++ Project Upgrade Guide

Note that VS2008 has to be installed on the machine for the application to target 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5.

via blogs.msdn.com

Big gotcha; cannot use Visual Studio 2010 to target .NET versions prior to 4.0.

This means if you want to use the 2010 version, you have to either have Visual Studio 2008 installed also, or you have to target .NET version 4.0 and up.

Posted via web from johnweldon4 - posterous

Coordination Is Hard

The key thing to understand is: governance is hard, especially in a democracy.  Fundamentally, this is because coordination is hard.

It can be very hard for even a single owner to coordinate with a dozen subordinates that each coordinate with a dozen employees in an ordinary firm to achieve a simple clear goal like making and selling a simple product at a profit. Organizations fail at this task all the time, and for thousands of different reasons.  Most new organizations attempting this fail, and most that are succeeding now will fail in a few decades.  When they fail, they will fail so badly that it will not be worth trying to save them; better to throw them away and start anew.

Once one appreciates the difficulty of coordinating even small organizations, and that bigger coordination is harder, one can see why it can be extremely difficult to manage the vaster coordination required by government.  How can ordinary citizens continue over centuries to coordinate to support interest groups that coordinate to support politicians who coordinate to approve and manage policies that empower agency heads to coordinate to manage thousands of agency employees to achieve the vague incoherent goals of many millions of citizens?

via overcomingbias.com

This is from a new blog I've been reading. It's worth following the link to read the whole article.

Insightful perspective on governance, and the difficulty of concerted effort to achieve anything.

The author makes the compelling point that it would be wise for us to find ways to improve the effectiveness of our government, even if we believe in less government.

Posted via web from johnweldon4 - posterous

Command Hierarchies and System Resilience

It seems obvious that centralized, autocratic management hierarchies are brittle and that decentralized, democratic management hierarchies are more resilient to change.

In fascinating research from Yale, it turns out that in organisms, the more complex the organism is, the more decentralized and 'democratic' the management hierarchy is.

 

In most organisms, he says, master regulators control the activity of middle managers, which in turn govern suites of workhorse genes that carry out instructions for making proteins.

Details of the study were published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As a general rule, the more complex the organism, the less autocratic and more democratic the biological networks appear to be, Gerstein says.

...

In simple “autocratic” organisms such as E. coli, there tends to be a chain of command in which regulatory genes act like generals, and subordinate molecules “downstream” follow a single superior’s instructions.

But in more complex “democratic” organisms, most of these subordinate genes co-regulate biological activity, in a sense sharing information and collaborating in governance.

Organisms that have both qualities are deemed “intermediate.”

The interactions in more democratic hierarchies lead to mutually supporting partnerships between regulators than in autocratic systems, where if one gene is inactivated, the system tends to collapse.

via futurity.org

Amazing article.

Posted via web from johnweldon4 - posterous