I was gonna get a burger at Dairy Queen, but then I thought, how about I microwave a pre-cooked burger, toast a kaiser bun, pre-melt a slice of pepper-jack, add some Miracle Whip, Mrs. Dash, cayenne pepper, garlic salt, and stir-fried spinach.
That was definitely the better choice.
Ya know, if someone decided to stalk me, they’d do a web search on me, find my blog, read a few entries and decide “this guy isn’t as interesting as I imagined” and give up.
The other good effect would be that they’d increase my blog audience by 25% or so, briefly. When’s the last time USA Today had a 25% jump in readership?
Feed Your Reader is one of those nice little Firefox extensions that you know as soon as you wish you had it, that someone must have written it. It lets you send auto-discovered syndication links (RSS, Atom, etc. feeds) to an external reader rather than making Live Bookmarks. I like it. Thank you, Mr. Koziarski.
I have a number of interesting memories from my time at a ‘talented and gifted’ camp.
There was a personality profile test that they gave us. It was stupid. I know that whoever ran the camp thought they needed to measure stuff and thought that this was the way to do it, but that doesn’t change the basic fact.
My roommates and I, hardcore revolutionaries that we were, I mean, man, were we not moved to delay our destruction of the Old Order by another camp dweller who said she was going to study political science so that she could infiltrate the system and tear it down from the inside so give her 15 years to get something going (which time has expired, by the way, Jennifer!), and also she was a hottie, you would totally be waving our Little Blue Book in the air whenever a Peace and Conformance van was cruising your sector to document the myriad ways in which the Populi celebrate their beloved Master Triumvirate (of Which Steven is the Rockin’ Total Ruler, of Course), and Atari would still be the number one manufacturer of PCs and there would be no machine language before the 68k machine language, decided to game the system a bit.
One roomate used the random number generator on his calculator to get his answers. One just made pretty patterns on the bubble-sheet. My solution, which I now regard as inferior to theirs, was to just answer every sixth question or so.
I have noticed that the entire edifice of the quantification-obsessed educational system in the U.S. did not, indeed, come crumbling down since our display of raw, out-of-the-box intellectual power. I’m puzzled by that, but I suppose there will be other chances, like I can walk past a middle school at 3:15PM and tell some kid “You think your teachers are giving you ‘answers’, dude? When I was in school, they said ‘It’s called the Soviet Union, not Russia’, but now they’re telling you ‘There is no Soviet Union, but there is a Russia’, so why can’t they even get their propaganda straight”, and it’d blow his mind and, um, _then_ the entire edifice of the educational system would dissolve, I tells ya.
Hmm, I guess I’m an economist :-). See Marginalism (quoted below) and In slight praise of mediocrity.
Marginalism also leads one to question the old maxim that anything worth doing at all is worth doing well. Nobel Laureate James Buchanan has suggested that an economist can be distinguished from a non-economist by his reaction to that statement.
Speaking of books I’ve been reading: in tandem with “The Google Story”, I’ve been taking random dips into Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia. It’s a lot of fun and is giving me all sorts of new clues as to how to be a better me. Mixing the reading of the two books was a good thing, too.
I won’t bother ‘reviewing’ it for you. Take a look at Rob Brezsny’s site for excerpts from and more info on the book, and a bunch of other stuff. If what you see doesn’t register as “crazy” or “terrifying” to you, then proceed to the book.
Just read The Google Story. If you’re fascinated by Google from a technological, financial, or entrepreneurial perspective, it’s worth a read.
It’s clear that the authors really like Google, Larry and Sergey, so if you want ‘balance’, look elsewhere as well (clues for further research are provided).
To me, it’s a pretty inspiring yet somewhat sobering look at the process of taking a big idea and realizing it in a big way. I see lots of little lessons about things to try and not try, and ways to get away with pissing off the established order via execution of compelling ideas.
I get mildly annoyed when I hear people say “I’ll have the…” or (worse) “Gimme the…” when they’re ordering something at a restaurant. Seems like it fails to address the actual human who is taking the order. If they tended to have the word ‘please’ in there, it would significantly lessen my annoyance, because ‘please’ brings the other into it (not quite as well as “s’il vous plaît” does, though).
Though I have to say that “I would like…”, which is the phrase I most commonly use, doesn’t really address this issue either. I can’t recall if I tend to add ‘please’ or not. Anyway, I’ll have to watch myself and work on that a bit.
For your consideration,
Steven
I never really thought about it before, but colored bubbles aren’t a bad idea. Check out the PopSci article for a story of persistence, entrepreneurship, and chemistry.
OK, now I’m trying Spam Karma, since Bad Behavior didn’t do the thing that I wanted the thing to do. So, again, sorry for any service interruptions the actual human might experience. I mean, humans.