SimpleWeblog

moo gone

suddenly, my life is devoid of peanut butter and chocolate cows...

robo-dinner

fighting robots with dinner?

maybe i should go back to pittsburgh sometime...

(and don't miss the link to people for the ethical treatment of robots)

maybe

maybe it really is that simple.

using history to get rich

I still haven't read any of his books, but here's the summary of Jared Diamond's speech about how to organize businesses to get rich:

So what this suggests is that we can extract from human history a couple of principles. First, the principle that really isolated groups are at a disadvantage, because most groups get most of their ideas and innovations from the outside. Second, I also derive the principle of intermediate fragmentation: you don't want excessive unity and you don't want excessive fragmentation; instead, you want your human society or business to be broken up into a number of groups which compete with each other but which also maintain relatively free communication with each other. And those I see as the overall principles of how to organize a business and get rich.

He has some interesting examples, although in speech form they certainly come across as more anecdotal than real research. Not that I'm thinking about starting a huge business, especially one concerned about productivity...

jandek

I guess there is always hope of becoming an obscure musician whose cd someone might find in a bargain bin at a music store in noe valley...

tee vee

Sure enough, in the background of that scene of John Doe, there was "Bus Stop" by Arlo...

Chinese Menu

Continuing the theme, I guess, if I were to learn to read and/or speak chinese, it seems like learning to read menus might not be the worst thing to learn...

I always wondered why we didn't learn more food terms in my Japanese class.

School

If there had been a mandarin and english bilingual school where I grew up, maybe I could speak chinese right now...

Instead, I went to a grade school where I learned that certain teachers wouldn't believe me even when I told the truth, classwork was easy and that's all they really wanted out of you, and the teachers that really did care don't really have time to deal with people who aren't causing trouble... not to mention the social lessons I learned from the other students. But who wants to hear sad gradeschool crush stories?

Voting

Hey, it is that time to go vote. And if you live in California (and now Oregon?) you can go to SmartVoter and type in your address to find out the info for all your elections and propositions and such. Because maybe you can't find that big stack of information the government was kind enough to send you. If only they would email it to you, it would be easier to find...