Month: January 2005

action vs activity

Action is what achieves our goals, moves our business and personal lives forward, produces what we want out of life and actually gets the job done. It is immensely rewarding but is also very likely to be difficult and challenging.
Activity is all the things we fill our lives with in order to avoid taking action. Strangely enough activity often looks better than action to our colleagues or even to ourselves. If you are an executive or run your own business then productive, focused thinking must be one of your action priorities. Unfortunately thinking often appears to be “lazy”, compared to making phone calls, dealing with email, attending meetings and generally rushing around

On my bookshelf

i have been reading quite a few books recently. i wish there was more time to review them in more detail. here is the list, for now:

the shield of achilles is a must read if you want to make sense of the shift from nation state to market state. substance of style has cute explanations of why we we have 520 different doorknobs to choose from at home depot, the ingenuity gap argues that problems get more complex faster than our ability to solve them evolves, the minds I is typical hofstadter material, mind hacks is an amusing intro to all things neuro, the mummy congress tells you more you ever wanted to know about dead bodies, and mapping the next millennium highlights the art in scientific visualization.

origins of wrestling?

Gladiator combat had become a martial art by the beginning of the first millennium. To amuse the crowds around the arena the gladiators would display broad fighting skills rather than fight for their lives. “Gladiatorial combat is seen as being related to killing and shedding blood. But I think that what we are seeing is an entertaining martial art that was spectator-oriented.”.

it would be interesting to pit the panem et circenses of those times against the ESPN of today. some starting points

Seatbelt Darwin Award

As laws become increasingly strict for seat belts, fewer people will respond positively by buckling up in response to the laws. There seems to be a die-hard group of non-wearers out there who simply do not wish to buckle up no matter what the government does. I belong to this group.

Evidently his words were far more prescient than any of us might have wanted, as an article in the 4 January 2005 Lincoln Journal Star reported that Mr. Kieper not only died in a car crash, but the tragic mishap that claimed his life was the very type of accident in which seat belts have proved so effective in saving lives by preventing passengers from being ejected from vehicles

Killer fashion

A recent decline in fatalities resulting from inner city handgun shootings can be credited to the thriving popularity of a flashy new gangsta-style shooting technique wherein the weapon is canted 180 degrees from its normal upright position. “Hollywood overkill of the sideways gangsta shooting method encouraged many modern hoods to look for a less trendy but equally cool-looking technique for offin’ someone. Over the last 3 months, holding a gun completely upside down has become the predominant method used by stylish gangstas whom, as they say, ‘be fixin’ to put a cap in a person’s dome.'”

fashion is a powerful weapon indeed.

Bridging the X-O-R impedance mismatch?

Cω looks like a worthwhile effort on the road to eventually unifying the dominant 3 data models of today, XML, objects and relational. at a first glance, it seems to sidestep some of the really hard problems by defining a zoo of new types to accommodate these 3 worlds. the eventual solution will have to do better than this, but it’s a start. groovy seems to have similar features for the java world.