haruki zaemon

Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be.

The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.

We must realize that, at its core, procrastination is about emotions, not productivity. The solution doesn’t involve downloading a time management app or learning new strategies for self-control. It has to do with managing our emotions in a new way.

Thirty years ago, President George H.W. Bush held up a baggie of crack on live TV, and said it had been seized right in front of the White House. The Uncertain Hour’s third season looks at how the policies launched that day continue to reverberate – even as the crack epidemic has faded into history.

But Bob Mueller has already told a remarkable story. He’s told it scattered through different court filings in a variety of cases, indictments, plea agreements, stipulations of fact. We decided to distill it, to organize it, to put it all in one place, to tell the story of the Russia investigation orally, to let a remarkable group of speakers read the speaking indictments that Mueller has issued.

In the 1960’s Jean Briggs, a Harvard graduate, traveled to the Arctic to live among the Inuit. She noticed much less anger in their culture than in western societies, so she documented Inuit methods for raising children. Speaking angrily to children is seen as demeaning - Inuit parents control their anger and figure out why their children are upset. They use traditional stories with a dash of danger to teach kids appropriate behaviours. And they use dramas - after a child misbehaves, they act out what happened along with the consequences of that behaviour.

As it turns out, by some phenomenon of carelessness, ambiguity, or groupthink, science popularizers have disseminated information based on a flawed assumption about the average distance between planets. Using a mathematical method that we devised, we determine that when averaged over time, Earth’s nearest neighbor is in fact Mercury.

A fun and fanciful, and a fitting tribute to the unique and engaging visual style.

Once and for all, a hamburger is a sandwich.

“We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,” he repeated. “A little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther.”

I think the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t feel bad about getting pushed over the edge by a “little thing,” nor should you get mad at people for not being able to handle “a little thing.” Because it’s usually not that someone wakes up on a perfectly fine day, healthy and happy, and step outside their door and get hit by a car, and the day goes from GREAT to SHIT in one step. It’s usually lots of little things that accumulate. And you don’t realize each of them piling on until you reach that limit. You especially don’t realize it when it’s someone else hitting that limit!

See, we just published the biography of Dr. Claude Shannon. He’s the most important genius you’ve never heard of, a man whose intellect was on par with Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton.

We spent five years with him. It’s not an exaggeration to say that, during that period, we spent more time with the deceased Claude Shannon than we have with many of our living friends. He became something like the roommate in the spare bedroom of our minds, the guy who was always hanging around and occupying our head space.

[…] this fetish with feedback is good only for correcting mistakes—in the rare cases where the right steps are known and can be evaluated objectively. And at worst, it’s toxic, because what we want from our people—and from ourselves—is not, for the most part, tidy adherence to a procedure agreed upon in advance or, for that matter, the ability to expose one another’s flaws. It’s that people contribute their own unique and growing talents to a common good, when that good is ever-evolving, when we are, for all the right reasons, making it up as we go along. Feedback has nothing to offer to that.

If you slice and dice workers, you don’t have a union. You have mashed potatoes. Some battles we fought. Some we lost.

When it comes to overloading our cognitive brains, the seven factors are: being outside of your circle of competence, stress, rushing or urgency, fixation on an outcome, information overload, being in a group where social cohesion comes into play, and being in the presence of an “authority.” Acting alone any of these are powerful enough, but together they dramatically increase the odds you are unaware that you’ve been cognitively compromised.