Manolis P

Homeland security signs - A parody

2011-11-27T13:45:00.001+02:00

This is a parody of the security signs from US Homeland security.

Attention: This is for fun! For the serious stuff, see http://www.ready.gov or the Department of Homeland Security athttp://www.dhs.gov

	If you have set yourself on fire, do not run.
	If you spot terrorism, blow your anti-terrorism whistle. If you are Vin Diesel, yell really loud.
	If you spot a terrorist arrow, pin it against the wall with your shoulder.
	If you are sprayed with an unknown substance, stand and think about it instead of seeing a doctor.
	Use your flashlight to lift the walls right off of you!
	To eliminate smallpox, wash with soap, water and at least one(1) armless hand under a faucet with no sink.
	Michael Jackson is a terrorist. If you spot this smooth criminal with scary eyes, run away now.
	People, animal corpses and the biohazard symbol are all at risk of being sucked into the time-tunnel vortex.
	Be on the lookout for terrorists with pinkeye and leprosy. Also, they tend to rub their hands together manically.
	If a door is closed, karate chop it open.
	If your building collapses, climb under your table and practice yoga postures.
	Try to absorb as much of the radiation as possible with your groin region. The current world record is 5 minutes, 12 seconds.
	After exposure to radiation it is important to consider that you may have mutated to gigantic dimensions: watch your head.
	If you've become a radiation mutant with a deformed hand, remember to close the window. No one wants to see that.
	If you hear the Backstreet Boys, Michael Bolton or Yanni on the radio, cower in the corner or run like hell.
	Your respiratory and digestive systems are optional. Cast them aside if you feel you no longer need them.
	If you are trapped under falling debris, conserve oxygen by not farting.
	Survive a biohazard attack by first standing, then begging on your knees, then rolling over and playing dead.
	Do not drive a station wagon if a utility pole is protruding from the hood.
	A one-inch thick piece of plywood should be sufficient protection against radiation.
	No pyromaniacs admitted.
	A quick family snapshot in front of the latest scene of a terrorist attack may became a treasured family keepsake that will preserve precious memories for years to come.
	That closet door in your bedroom leads to the gates of Hell. Don't go there.
	The middle of a terrorist attack is not an appropriate time to catch up on your reading or paperwork.
	If you see colors in the sky, grasp your throat and pretend to choke yourself. Girls go for that.
	If your intended destination is suddenly vaporized, consider pulling over and watching the cool light show.
	If the weather is overcast with dark skies, look for worms in the grass.
	After all life is gone, modern appliances will continue to run forever. Think about it.
	Your telephone may be a practicing physician. Look for a phone with no numbers on it.
	"Wash your hands" of traditional long distance telephone providers.
	Only the coolest irradiated citizens will be allowed into the 'underground' rave in the shelter.
	In case of emergency, the parking brake may be used as an adult novelty item.
	In time of war, real Americans eat red meat only! No wimpy fish or poultry, please.
	There is a reason you failed chemistry.
	Watch out for people who come out of white tents and try to steal the shirt off your back.
	If you are trapped with no hope of being found, amuse yourself in your final moments with shadow puppets.
	Radioactive materials come in 4 convenient sizes: - individual dose - family value size - neighborhood spray pump size - supersize!
	Satellite photos of Texas show the large embarrassing radioactive crop circle in Southeast Texas.
	When the looting begins remember to consider the weight/value ratio. Here we have a few examples of high value, low effort.

Taken from: http://www.safenow.org/

Evil girls - do the Math

2011-11-27T13:41:00.002+02:00

History: The Fourth Turning

2011-11-21T23:19:00.000+02:00

One of the most significant aspects of generational research for me is its predictive ability. The cycle of generations described by Neil Howe and William Strauss in their books (starting with “Generations“) has an amazing predictive ability. Their book “The Fourth Turning“, written in 1997, predicts many of the events we have seen in the last few years with amazing accuracy. But this is not astrology or soothsaying. The predictions are based in strong social science that shows how the character of generations creates specific changes in society. Information about turnings can also be found on the Lifecourse Website.

Howe and Strauss point out that there are four cycles in history, that they call “turnings”, which are very similar to the four seasons of the year. It begins with the “High”, similar to Spring, a period in which life is growing, the days are getting longer and optimism abounds. The last High in the US was between 1946 and 1964. The next turning is the “Awakening” which is like the Summer, a period where life flourishes in many forms, perhaps to the point that things are a bit out of control. Our last Awakening the Consciousness Revolution from 1995-1985 when everything our society was based on during the High was questioned. The third turning is the “Unraveling”, similar to the Fall, when life dies back, the days shorten and things feel chaotic and uncontrolled. The last Unraveling in the US were the Culture Wars from 1986-2005, when society fell apart as it answered the questions from the Consciousness Revolution. The fourth turning is the “Crisis” which is most like Winter. During the Crisis the seeds that have been planted in the fall must survive through the short, cold days and life is bleak and unforgiving. We are in the Crisis now, and it will likely last until 2025. Those that survive the Crisis will enjoy warmth and promise of the coming Spring/High.

So, at the core of modern history lies this remarkable pattern: Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era—a new turning—every two decades or so. At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly 80 to 100 years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction:

The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.
The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.
The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.
The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.

Each turning comes with its own identifiable mood. Always, these mood shifts catch people by surprise.

The Hole in Europe’s Bucket

2011-10-30T19:46:00.000+02:00

By PAUL KRUGMAN

From New York Times, 23 October 2011

If it weren’t so tragic, the current European crisis would be funny, in a gallows-humor sort of way. For as one rescue plan after another falls flat, Europe’s Very Serious People — who are, if such a thing is possible, even more pompous and self-regarding than their American counterparts — just keep looking more and more ridiculous.

I’ll get to the tragedy in a minute. First, let’s talk about the pratfalls, which have lately had me humming the old children’s song “There’s a Hole in My Bucket.”
For those not familiar with the song, it concerns a lazy farmer who complains about said hole and is told by his wife to fix it. Each action she suggests, however, turns out to require a prior action, and, eventually, she tells him to draw some water from the well. “But there’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.”
What does this have to do with Europe? Well, at this point, Greece, where the crisis began, is no more than a grim sideshow. The clear and present danger comes instead from a sort of bank run on Italy, the euro area’s third-largest economy. Investors, fearing a possible default, are demanding high interest rates on Italian debt. And these high interest rates, by raising the burden of debt service, make default more likely.
It’s a vicious circle, with fears of default threatening to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. To save the euro, this threat must be contained. But how? The answer has to involve creating a fund that can, if necessary, lend Italy (and Spain, which is also under threat) enough money that it doesn’t need to borrow at those high rates. Such a fund probably wouldn’t have to be used, since its mere existence should put an end to the cycle of fear. But the potential for really large-scale lending, certainly more than a trillion euros’ worth, has to be there.
And here’s the problem: All the various proposals for creating such a fund ultimately require backing from major European governments, whose promises to investors must be credible for the plan to work. Yet Italy is one of those major governments; it can’t achieve a rescue by lending money to itself. And France, the euro area’s second-biggest economy, has been looking shaky lately, raising fears that creation of a large rescue fund, by in effect adding to French debt, could simply have the effect of adding France to the list of crisis countries. There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.
You see what I mean about the situation being funny in a gallows-humor fashion? What makes the story really painful is the fact that none of this had to happen.

Think about countries like Britain, Japan and the United States, which have large debts and deficits yet remain able to borrow at low interest rates. What’s their secret? The answer, in large part, is that they retain their own currencies, and investors know that in a pinch they could finance their deficits by printing more of those currencies. If the European Central Bank were to similarly stand behind European debts, the crisis would ease dramatically.
Wouldn’t that cause inflation? Probably not: whatever the likes of Ron Paul may believe, money creation isn’t inflationary in a depressed economy. Furthermore, Europe actually needs modestly higher overall inflation: too low an overall inflation rate would condemn southern Europe to years of grinding deflation, virtually guaranteeing both continued high unemployment and a string of defaults.
But such action, we keep being told, is off the table. The statutes under which the central bank was established supposedly prohibit this kind of thing, although one suspects that clever lawyers could find a way to make it happen. The broader problem, however, is that the whole euro system was designed to fight the last economic war. It’s a Maginot Line built to prevent a replay of the 1970s, which is worse than useless when the real danger is a replay of the 1930s.
And this turn of events is, as I said, tragic.
The story of postwar Europe is deeply inspiring. Out of the ruins of war, Europeans built a system of peace and democracy, constructing along the way societies that, while imperfect — what society isn’t? — are arguably the most decent in human history.
Yet that achievement is under threat because the European elite, in its arrogance, locked the Continent into a monetary system that recreated the rigidities of the gold standard, and — like the gold standard in the 1930s — has turned into a deadly trap.
Now maybe European leaders will come up with a truly credible rescue plan. I hope so, but I don’t expect it.
The bitter truth is that it’s looking more and more as if the euro system is doomed. And the even more bitter truth is that given the way that system has been performing, Europe might be better off if it collapses sooner rather than later.

Seven Billion

2011-10-30T19:33:00.000+02:00

Around 31 October 2011, the United Nations estimates, the world’s population will reach seven billion.

The development, past & future:

3 Billion: 20 October 1959

4 Billion: 27 June 1974

5 Billion: 21 January 1987

6 Billion: 5 December 1998

7 Billion: 31 October 2011

8 Billion: 15 June 2025

9 Billion: 18 February 2043

10 Billion: 18 June 2083

The first billion people accumulated over a leisurely interval, from the origins of humans hundreds of thousands of years ago to the early 1800s. Adding the second took another 120 or so years. Then, in the last 50 years, humanity more than doubled, surging from three billion in 1959 to four billion in 1974, five billion in 1987 and six billion in 1998.

This rate of population increase has no historical precedent.
Can the earth support seven billion now, and the three billion people who are expected to be added by the end of this century? Are the enormous increases in households, cities, material consumption and waste compatible with dignity, health, environmental quality and freedom from poverty?
For some in the West, the greatest challenge — because it is the least visible — is to shake off, at last, the view that large and growing numbers of people represent power and prosperity.

This view was fostered over millenniums, by the pronatalism of the Hebrew Bible, the Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church and Arab thinkers like Ibn Khaldun. Mercantilists of the 16th through the 18th centuries saw a growing population as increasing national wealth: more workers, more consumers, more soldiers. Enlarging the workforce depressed wages, increasing the economic surplus available to the king. “The number of the people makes the wealth of states,” said Frederick the Great.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pronatalism acquired a specious scientific aura from social Darwinism and eugenics. Even today, some economists argue, incorrectly, that population growth is required for economic growth and that Africa is underpopulated.
This view made some sense for societies subject to catastrophic mortality from famines, plagues and wars. But it has outlived its usefulness now that human consumption, and pollution, loom large across the earth.
Today, while many people reject the equation of human numbers with power, it remains unpalatable, if not suicidal, for political leaders to admit that the United States and Europe do not need growing populations to prosper and be influential and that rich countries should reduce their rates of unintended pregnancy and help poor countries do likewise. With the globalization of work, the incentive for owners of capital today to ignore or not address rapid growth in the numbers of poor people remains as it was for the kings of yore: lower wages for workers at any level of skill offer a bigger economic surplus to be captured.
But just as pronatalism is unjustified, so are the dire — and discredited — prophecies of Thomas Malthus and his followers, who believed that soaring populations must lead to mass starvation.

In fact, the world is physically capable of feeding, sheltering and enriching many more people in the short term. Between 1820, at the dawn of the industrial age, and 2008, when the world economy entered recession, economic output per person increased elevenfold.
Life expectancy tripled in the last few thousand years, to a global average of nearly 70 years. The average number of children per woman fell worldwide to about 2.5 now from 5 in 1950. The world’s population is growing at 1.1 percent per year, half the peak rate in the 1960s. The slowing growth rate enables families and societies to focus on the well-being of their children rather than the quantity.
Nearly two-thirds of women under 50 who are married or in a union use some form of contraception, which saves the lives of mothers who would otherwise die in childbirth and avoids millions of abortions each year — an achievement that people who oppose and people who support the availability of legal abortions can both celebrate.
But there is plenty of bad news, too. Nearly half the world lives on $2 a day, or less. In China, the figure is 36 percent; in India, 76 percent. More than 800 million people live in slums. A similar number, mostly women, are illiterate.
Some 850 million to 925 million people experience food insecurity or chronic undernourishment. In much of Africa and South Asia, more than half the children are stunted (of low height for their age) as a result of chronic hunger. While the world produced 2.3 billion metric tons of cereal grains in 2009-10 — enough calories to sustain 9 to 11 billion people — only 46 percent of the grain went into human mouths. Domestic animals got 34 percent of the crop, and 19 percent went to industrial uses like biofuels, starches and plastics.
Of the 208 million pregnancies in 2008, about 86 million were unintended, and they resulted in 33 million unplanned births. And unintended births are not the whole problem. Contraceptives have been free since 2002 in Niger, where the total fertility rate — more than seven children per woman in mid-2010 — was the world’s highest. Women in Niger marry at a median age of 15.5, and married women and men reported in 2006 that they wanted an average of 8.8 and 12.6 children, respectively.
Human demands on the earth have grown enormously, though the atmosphere, the oceans and the continents are no bigger now than they were when humans evolved. Already, more than a billion people live without an adequate, renewable supply of fresh water.

Water shortages are projected to be significant in northern Africa, India, China, parts of Europe, eastern Australia, the western United States and elsewhere. Climate changes will increase the water available for agriculture in North America and Asia but decrease it in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. Similar stories could be told about land, overfishing and carbon and nitrogen emissions to the atmosphere.
Where is this taking us? The coming half century will see huge shifts in the geopolitical balance of numbers, further declines in the number of children per woman, smaller but more numerous households, an increasingly elderly population, and growing and more numerous cities.
The United Nations Population Division anticipates 8 billion people by 2025, 9 billion by 2043 and 10 billion by 2083. India will have more people than China shortly after 2020, and sub-Saharan Africa will have more people than India before 2040.
In 1950, there were nearly three times as many Europeans as sub-Saharan Africans. By 2010, there were 16 percent more sub-Saharan Africans than Europeans. By 2100, according to the Population Division, there will be nearly five sub-Saharan Africans for every European.
In some ways, the growth in the numbers of people matters less than the growth in the numbers of households. If each household has its own refrigerator, air-conditioner, TV and car, the average energy demand for a given number of people goes up as the average number of people in a household goes down.
The urban population of developing countries is expected to grow by a million people every five days through at least 2030, while the rural population falls. Many cities will eat into prime agricultural land unless they grow in density, not extent. And nearly half of urban population growth by 2015 will occur in cities of fewer than half a million people.
The coming revolution in aging is well under way in the more developed countries. It will go global in the next half century. In 1950, for each person 65 and older, there were more than six children under 15. By 2070, elderly people will outnumber children under 15, and there will be only three people of working age (15 to 64) for every two people under 15 or 65 and older. Pressures to extend the “working age” beyond 65 will grow more intense.
Is economic development the best contraception? Or is voluntary contraception the best form of development? Does the world need a bigger pie (more productive technologies) or fewer forks (slower population growth through voluntary contraception) or better manners (fewer inequities, less violence and corruption, freer trade and mobility, more rule of law, less material-intensive consumption)? Or is education of better quality and greater availability a key ingredient of all other strategies?
All these approaches have value. However much we would like one, there is no panacea, though some priorities are clear: voluntary contraception and support services, universal primary and secondary education, and food for pregnant and lactating mothers and children under 5.
These priorities are mutually reinforcing, and they are affordable. Providing modern family planning methods to all people with unmet needs would cost about $6.7 billion a year, slightly less than the $6.9 billion Americans are expected to spend for Halloween this year. By one estimate, achieving universal primary and secondary education by 2015 would cost anywhere from $35 billion to $70 billion in additional spending per year.
IF we spend our wealth — our material, environmental, human and financial capital — faster than we increase it by savings and investment, we will shift the costs of the prosperity that some enjoy today onto future generations. The mismatch between the short-term incentives that guide our political and economic institutions and even our families, on one hand, and our long-term aspirations, on the other, is severe.
We must increase the probability that every child born will be wanted and well cared for and have decent prospects for a good life. We must conserve more, and more wisely use, the energy, water, land, materials and biological diversity with which we are blessed.
Henceforth we need to measure our growth in prosperity: not by the sheer number of people who inhabit the earth, and not by flawed measurements like G.D.P., but by how well we satisfy basic human needs; by how well we foster dignity, creativity, community and cooperation; by how well we care for our biological and physical environment, our only home.

Orwell’s 5 Rules for Effective Writing

2011-10-30T18:51:00.000+02:00

George Orwell’s 5 Rules for Effective Writing:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
This sounds easy, but in practice is incredibly difficult. Phrases such as toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, an axe to grind, Achilles’ heel, swan song, and hotbed come to mind quickly and feel comforting and melodic.
For this exact reason they must be avoided. Common phrases have become so comfortable that they create no emotional response. Take the time to invent fresh, powerful images.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
Long words don’t make you sound intelligent unless used skillfully. In the wrong situation they’ll have the opposite effect, making you sound pretentious and arrogant. They’re also less likely to be understood and more awkward to read.
When Hemingway was criticized by Faulkner for his limited word choice he replied:
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree (Ezra Pound). Accordingly, any words that don’t contribute meaning to a passage dilute its power. Less is always better. Always.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
This one is frequently broken, probably because many people don’t know the difference between active and passive verbs. I didn’t myself until a few months ago. Here is an example that makes it easy to understand:
The man was bitten by the dog. (passive)The dog bit the man. (active).The active is better because it’s shorter and more forceful.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
This is tricky because much of the writing published on the internet is highly technical. If possible, remain accessible to the average reader. If your audience is highly specialized this is a judgment call. You don’t want to drag on with unnecessary explanation, but try to help people understand what you’re writing about. You want your ideas to spread right?
6. Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.
This bonus rule is a catch all. Above all, be sure to use common sense.These rules are easy to memorize but difficult to apply. Although I’ve edited this piece a dozen times I’m sure it contains imperfections. But trust me, it’s much better now than it was initially. The key is effort. Good writing matters, probably more than you think.

I hope you find these rules helpful, and through their application we’re able to understand each other a little bit better. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to read Orwell’s original essay. It contains many helpful examples and is, of course, a pleasure to read.

A Typology of Folktales

2011-10-14T12:43:00.001+03:00

The Types of International Folktales, the "ATU Catalogue" edited by Hans-Jörg Uther (2004).

ANIMAL TALES

Wild Animals 1-99
The Clever Fox (Other Animal) 1-69
Other Wild Animals 70-99
Wild Animals and Domestic Animals 100-149
Wild Animals and Humans 150-199
Domestic Animals 200-219
Other Animals and Objects 220-299

TALES OF MAGIC

Supernatural Adversaries 300-399
Supernatural or Enchanted Wife (Husband) or Other Relative 400-459
Wife 400-424
Husband 425-449
Brother or Sister 450-459
Supernatural Tasks 460-499
Supernatural Helpers 500-559
Magic Objects 560-649
Supernatural Power or Knowledge 650-699
Other Tales of the Supernatural 700-749

RELIGIOUS TALES

God Rewards and Punishes 750-779
The Truth Comes to Light 780-791)
Heaven 800-809
The Devil 810-826
Other Religious Tales 827-849

REALISTIC TALES (NOVELLE)

The Man Marries the Princess 850-869
The Woman Marries the Prince 870-879
Proofs of FidelitY and Innocence 880-899
The Obstinate Wife Learns to Obey 900-909
Good Precepts 910-919
Clever Acts and Words 920-929
Tales of Fate 930-949 .7;68
Robbers and Murderers 950-969
Other Realistic Tales 970-999

TALES OF THE STUPID OGRE (GIANT, DEVIL)

Labor Contract 1000-1029
Partnership between Man and Ogre 1030-1059
Contest between Man and Ogre 1060-1114
Man Kills (Injures) Ogre 1115-1144
Ogre Frightened by Man 1145-1154
Man Outwits the Devil 1155-1169
Souls Saved from the Devil 1170-1199

ANECDOTES AND JOKES

Stories about a Fool 1200-1349
Stories about Married Couples 1350-1439
The Foolish Wife and Her Husband 1380-1404
The Foolish Husband and His Wife 1405-1429
The Foolish Couple 1430-1439
Stories about a Woman 1440-1524
Looking for a Wife 1450-1474
Jokes about Old Maids 1475-1499
Other Stories about Women 1500-1524
Stories about a Man 1525-1724
The Clever Man 1525-1639
Lucky Accidents 1640-1674
The Stupid Man 1675-1724
Jokes about Clergymen and Religious Figures 1725-1849
The Clergyman is Tricked 1725-1774
Clergyman and Sexton 1775-1799
Other Jokes about Religious Figures 1800-1849
Anecdotes about Other Groups of People 1850-1874
Tall Tales 1875-1999

FORMULA TALES

Cumulative Tales 2000-2100
Chains Based on Numbers, Objects, Animals, or Names 2000-2020
Chains Involving Death 2021-2024
Chains Involving Eating 2025-2028
Chains Involving Other Events 2029-2075
Catch Tales 2200-2299
Other Formula Tales 2300-2399

Book recommendations

2011-10-14T12:38:00.001+03:00

When Christopher Hitchens got the Dawkins Award in Houston, was asked a variety of questions from the audience.
None appeared to elicit more interest than the one asked by eight-year-old Mason Crumpacker, who wanted to know what books she should read.

Hitchens’ quick list of recommended books and authors:

Dawkins’ Magic of Reality, Greek Myths, particularly those compiled by Robert Graves, anything satirical, all of Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (author of Infidel and Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations), PG Wodehouse (“for fun”), David Hume, and Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

How to tie a tie

2011-10-12T18:41:00.000+03:00

This is short, easy and very useful. If you wear ties, of course.

Byzantine Emperors

2011-08-16T13:26:00.001+03:00

This is an excellent site with concise information about all Byzantine Emperors, from 330 A.D. to 1453.

It is still under construction but already very useful.

http://www.byzantium.xronikon.com

Why is it called “rock n’ roll?”

2011-08-06T11:00:00.000+03:00

Is “Rocket ‘88” by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats the very first rock and roll record? The question has inspired debate among musicologists for years. Another equally contentious question: Where does the term “rock and roll” come from?

“Rock” is derived from the Old English roccain, related to the Old Nordic rykkja meaning, “to pull, tear, move.” The earliest recorded use of the term in literature can be found in the lullaby “Rock-a-bye Baby “ from 1805.

“Roll” is derived from the Latin rotula meaning, “small wheel.” The phrase “rocking and rolling,” a metaphor used by seamen to describe the motion of a ship, dates from the 17th century. Similar metaphors slipped into popular discourse, but one in particular became the inspiration for the genre’s moniker.

By the 1920s, “rocking and rolling” became a popular double entendre referring to either dancing or sex. Trixie Smith’s 1922 blues ballad, “My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll) may be the first use of the phrase in song.

Alan Freed, a disc jockey in Cleveland, Ohio used the phrase, “The Rock and Roll Session” to describe the amalgamation of rhythm and blues and country music he played during his show. As his radio show gained popularity, so too did the phrase.

And why is the “and” sometimes written as ‘n? That’s called an apocopation – the omission of the final sound of a word.

The Greek National Anthem

2011-03-27T20:56:00.000+03:00

The Hymn to Liberty is a poem written by Dionýsios Solomós in 1823 that consists of 158 stanzas, set to music by Nikolaos Mantzaros. In 1865, the first two stanzas officially became the Greek national anthem and later also that of the Republic of Cyprus.

Rudyard Kipling created this seven-stanza English translation, which was first published in the Daily Telegraph on October 17, 1918.

We knew thee of old,
     Oh, divinely restored,
By the light of thine eyes
     And the light of thy Sword.

From the graves of our slain
     Shall thy valour prevail
As we greet thee again —
     Hail, Liberty! Hail!

Long time didst thou dwell
     Mid the peoples that mourn,
Awaiting some voice
     That should bid thee return.

Ah, slow broke that day
     And no man dared call,
For the shadow of tyranny
     Lay over all:

And we saw thee sad-eyed,
     The tears on thy cheeks
While thy raiment was dyed
     In the blood of the Greeks.

Yet, behold now thy sons
     With impetuous breath
Go forth to the fight
     Seeking Freedom or Death.

From the graves of our slain
     Shall thy valour prevail
As we greet thee again —
     Hail, Liberty! Hail!

The Greek Fire

2011-03-27T20:50:00.000+03:00

A description of the Greek Fire according to Edward Gibbon in his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter LII.

In the two sieges [by the Saracens], the deliverance of Constantinople may be chiefly ascribed to the novelty, the terrors, and the real efficacy of the Greek fire. The important secret of compounding and directing this artificial flame was imparted by Callinicus, a native of Heliopolis in Syria, who deserted from the service of the caliph to that of the emperor. The skill of a chemist and engineer was equivalent to the succor of fleets and armies; and this discovery or improvement of the military art was fortunately reserved for the distressful period, when the degenerate Romans of the East were incapable of contending with the warlike enthusiasm and youthful vigor of the Saracens.
The historian who presumes to analyze this extraordinary composition should suspect his own ignorance and that of his Byzantine guides, so prone to the marvellous, so careless, and, in this instance, so jealous of the truth. From their obscure, and perhaps fallacious, hints it should seem that the principal ingredient of the Greek fire was the naphtha, or liquid bitumen, a light, tenacious, and inflammable oil, which springs from the earth, and catches fire as soon as it comes in contact with the air. The naphtha was mingled, I know not by what methods or in what proportions, with sulphur and with the pitch that is extracted from evergreen firs. From this mixture, which produced a thick smoke and a loud explosion, proceeded a fierce and obstinate flame, which not only rose in perpendicular ascent, but likewise burnt with equal vehemence in descent or lateral progress; instead of being extinguished, it was nourished and quickened by the element of water; and sand, urine, or vinegar, were the only remedies that could damp the fury of this powerful agent, which was justly denominated by the Greeks the liquid, or the maritime, fire.
For the annoyance of the enemy, it was employed with equal effect, by sea and land, in battles or in sieges. It was either poured from the rampart in large boilers, or launched in red-hot balls of stone and iron, or darted in arrows and javelins, twisted round with flax and tow, which had deeply imbibed the inflammable oil; sometimes it was deposited in fire-ships, the victims and instruments of a more ample revenge, and was most commonly blown through long tubes of copper which were planted on the prow of a galley, and fancifully shaped into the mouths of savage monsters, that seemed to vomit a stream of liquid and consuming fire. This important art was preserved at Constantinople, as the palladium of the state: the galleys and artillery might occasionally be lent to the allies of Rome; but the composition of the Greek fire was concealed with the most jealous scruple, and the terror of the enemies was increased and prolonged by their ignorance and surprise. In the treaties of the administration of the empire, the royal author suggests the answers and excuses that might best elude the indiscreet curiosity and importunate demands of the Barbarians. They should be told that the mystery of the Greek fire had been revealed by an angel to the first and greatest of the Constantines, with a sacred injunction, that this gift of Heaven, this peculiar blessing of the Romans, should never be communicated to any foreign nation; that the prince and the subject were alike bound to religious silence under the temporal and spiritual penalties of treason and sacrilege; and that the impious attempt would provoke the sudden and supernatural vengeance of the God of the Christians. By these precautions, the secret was confined, above four hundred years, to the Romans of the East; and at the end of the eleventh century, the Pisans, to whom every sea and every art were familiar, suffered the effects, without understanding the composition, of the Greek fire. It was at length either discovered or stolen by the Mahometans; and, in the holy wars of Syria and Egypt, they retorted an invention, contrived against themselves, on the heads of the Christians. A knight, who despised the swords and lances of the Saracens, relates, with heartfelt sincerity, his own fears, and those of his companions, at the sight and sound of the mischievous engine that discharged a torrent of the Greek fire, the feu Gregeois, as it is styled by the more early of the French writers. It came flying through the air, says Joinville, 22 like a winged long-tailed dragon, about the thickness of a hogshead, with the report of thunder and the velocity of lightning; and the darkness of the night was dispelled by this deadly illumination. The use of the Greek, or, as it might now be called, of the Saracen fire, was continued to the middle of the fourteenth century, 23 when the scientific or casual compound of nitre, sulphur, and charcoal, effected a new revolution in the art of war and the history of mankind

100 best opening lines

2011-03-20T23:21:00.001+02:00

1. Call me Ishmael. - Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
3. A screaming comes across the sky. - Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. - Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. - Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. - James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. - George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
10. I am an invisible man. - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. - Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
12. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)
14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)
15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)
16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. - J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. - James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. - Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)
19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. - Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759n1767)
20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. - Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)
21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. - James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. - Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. - Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. - Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)
25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. - William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
26. 124 was spiteful. - Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. - Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)
28. Mother died today. - Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)
29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. - Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)
30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. - William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)
32. Where now? Who now? When now? - Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)
33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree." - Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)
34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. - John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)
35. It was like so, but wasn't. - Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)
36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. - William Gaddis, J R (1975)
37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. - Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
38. All this happened, more or less. - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
39. They shoot the white girl first. - Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)
40. For a long time, I went to bed early. - Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)
41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. - Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)
42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. - Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)
43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; - Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)
44. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. - Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. - Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)
46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation. - Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)
47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. - C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)
48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. - Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. - Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)
50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. - Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)
51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. - Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)
52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. - Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)
53. It was a pleasure to burn. - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. - Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)
55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. - Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me. - Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. - David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988)
58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. - George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
59. It was love at first sight. - Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? - Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)
61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. - W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge (1944)
62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. - Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. - G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
65. You better not never tell nobody but God. - Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
66. "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die." - Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)
67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. - David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)
69. If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. - Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)
70. Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. - Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)
71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. - GŸnter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)
72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. - Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)
73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. - Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (1966)
74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. - Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902)
75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. - Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
76. "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. - Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)
77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. - Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. - L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)
79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. - Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)
80. Justice? - You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. - William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)
81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. - J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)
82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. - Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)
83. "When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing." - Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)
84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. - John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. - James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)
86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. - William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)
87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled. - Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. - Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)
89. I am an American, Chicago born - Chicago, that somber city —and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. - Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. - Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)
91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. - John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)
92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. - Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)
93. Psychics can see the color of time it's blue. - Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)
94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. - Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. - Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)

96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. - Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)
97. He - for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it - was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. - Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)
98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. - David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)
99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. - Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. - Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

The 100 Most Beautiful words

2010-12-28T15:22:00.000+02:00

The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English:
source: www.alphadictionary.com/articles/

Ailurophile	A cat-lover.
Assemblage	A gathering.
Becoming	Attractive.
Beleaguer	To exhaust with attacks.
Brood	To think alone.
Bucolic	In a lovely rural setting.
Bungalow	A small, cozy cottage.
Chatoyant	Like a cat's eye.
Comely	Attractive.
Conflate	To blend together.
Cynosure	A focal point of admiration.
Dalliance	A brief love affair.
Demesne	Dominion, territory.
Demure	Shy and reserved.
Denouement	The resolution of a mystery.
Desuetude	Disuse.
Desultory	Slow, sluggish.
Diaphanous	Filmy.
Dissemble	Deceive.
Dulcet	Sweet, sugary.
Ebullience	Bubbling enthusiasm.
Effervescent	Bubbly.
Efflorescence	Flowering, blooming.
Elision	Dropping a sound or syllable in a word.
Elixir	A good potion.
Eloquence	Beauty and persuasion in speech.
Embrocation	Rubbing on a lotion.
Emollient	A softener.
Ephemeral	Short-lived.
Epiphany	A sudden revelation.
Erstwhile	At one time, for a time.
Ethereal	Gaseous, invisible but detectable.
Evanescent	Vanishing quickly, lasting a very short time.
Evocative	Suggestive.
Fetching	Pretty.
Felicity	Pleasantness.
Forbearance	Withholding response to provocation.
Fugacious	Fleeting.
Furtive	Shifty, sneaky.
Gambol	To skip or leap about joyfully.
Glamour	Beauty.
Gossamer	The finest piece of thread, a spider's silk
Halcyon	Happy, sunny, care-free.
Harbinger	Messenger with news of the future.
Imbrication	Overlapping and forming a regular pattern.
Imbroglio	An altercation or complicated situation.
Imbue	To infuse, instill.
Incipient	Beginning, in an early stage.
Ineffable	Unutterable, inexpressible.
Ingénue	A naïve young woman.
Inglenook	A cozy nook by the hearth.
Insouciance	Blithe nonchalance.
Inure	To become jaded.
Labyrinthine	Twisting and turning.
Lagniappe	A special kind of gift.
Lagoon	A small gulf or inlet.
Languor	Listlessness, inactivity.
Lassitude	Weariness, listlessness.
Leisure	Free time.
Lilt	To move musically or lively.
Lissome	Slender and graceful.
Lithe	Slender and flexible.
Love	Deep affection.
Mellifluous	Sweet sounding.
Moiety	One of two equal parts.
Mondegreen	A slip of the ear.
Murmurous	Murmuring.
Nemesis	An unconquerable archenemy.
Offing	The sea between the horizon and the offshore.
Onomatopoeia	A word that sounds like its meaning.
Opulent	Lush, luxuriant.
Palimpsest	A manuscript written over earlier ones.
Panacea	A solution for all problems
Panoply	A complete set.
Pastiche	An art work combining materials from various sources.
Penumbra	A half-shadow.
Petrichor	The smell of earth after rain.
Plethora	A large quantity.
Propinquity	An inclination.
Pyrrhic	Successful with heavy losses.
Quintessential	Most essential.
Ratatouille	A spicy French stew.
Ravel	To knit or unknit.
Redolent	Fragrant.
Riparian	By the bank of a stream.
Ripple	A very small wave.
Scintilla	A spark or very small thing.
Sempiternal	Eternal.
Seraglio	Rich, luxurious oriental palace or harem.
Serendipity	Finding something nice while looking for something else.
Summery	Light, delicate or warm and sunny.
Sumptuous	Lush, luxurious.
Surreptitious	Secretive, sneaky.
Susquehanna	A river in Pennsylvania.
Susurrous	Whispering, hissing.
Talisman	A good luck charm.
Tintinnabulation	Tinkling.
Umbrella	Protection from sun or rain.
Untoward	Unseemly, inappropriate.
Vestigial	In trace amounts.
Wafture	Waving.
Wherewithal	The means.
Woebegone	Sorrowful, downcast.

A remark: at least 16 of these words are Greek!
Two of them ( Ailurophile, Petrichor) have a Greek etymology, but they are are not used in modern (nor ancient ) Greek. They have been manufactured rather recently in English, based on Greek words.
Moreover, 3 words from the rest (Murmurous, Umbrella) have a distant Greek origin.
The word Susurrous is present in modern Greek, but its origin is not Greek (it's Latin)

Top 50 Programming Quotes of All Time

2010-12-17T10:45:00.001+02:00

50. "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning."

- Rick Cook

49. "Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material."

- Alan Kay.

48. "Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen."

- Edward V Berard

47. "They don't make bugs like Bunny anymore."

- Olav Mjelde.

46. "A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant."

- Alan J. Perlis.

45. "A C program is like a fast dance on a newly waxed dance floor by people carrying razors."

- Waldi Ravens.

44. "I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone."

- Bjarne Stroustrup

43. “Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.”

- Eric S. Raymond

42. “Don’t worry if it doesn’t work right. If everything did, you’d be out of a job.”

- Mosher’s Law of Software Engineering

41. “I think Microsoft named .Net so it wouldn’t show up in a Unix directory listing.”

- Oktal

40. “Fine, Java MIGHT be a good example of what a programming language should be like. But Java applications are good examples of what applications SHOULDN’T be like.”

- pixadel

39. “Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline.”

- Bill Clinton

38. "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense."

- E.W. Dijkstra

37. "In the one and only true way. The object-oriented version of 'Spaghetti code' is, of course, 'Lasagna code'. (Too many layers)."

- Roberto Waltman.

36. "FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed — it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer."

- Alan J. Perlis.

35. “For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.”

- Bill Bryson

34. "In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be indented six feet downward and covered with dirt."

- Blair P. Houghton.

33. "When someone says: 'I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done', give him a lollipop."

- Alan J. Perlis

32. "The evolution of languages: FORTRAN is a non-typed language. C is a weakly typed language. Ada is a strongly typed language. C++ is a strongly hyped language."

- Ron Sercely

31. "Good design adds value faster than it adds cost."

- Thomas C. Gale

30. "Python's a drop-in replacement for BASIC in the sense that Optimus Prime is a drop-in replacement for a truck."

- Cory Dodt

29. "Talk is cheap. Show me the code."

- Linus Torvalds

28. "Perfection [in design] is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

27. "C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."

- Dennis M. Ritchie.

26. "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they’re not."

- Yoggi Berra

25. “You can’t have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families.”

- Jim McCarthy

24. "PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals."

- Jon Ribbens

23. "Programming is like kicking yourself in the face, sooner or later your nose will bleed."

- Kyle Woodbury

22. "Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption."

- Keith Bostic

21. "It is easier to port a shell than a shell script."

- Larry Wall

20. "I invented the term 'Object-Oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."

- Alan Kay

19. "Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry"

- Ted Nelson

18. “The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability.”

- Randall E. Stross

17. “If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred Big Macs would give you food poisoning, and the response would be, ‘We’re sorry, here’s a coupon for two more.’ “

- Mark Minasi

16. "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

- Donald E. Knuth.

15. "Computer system analysis is like child-rearing; you can do grievous damage, but you cannot ensure success."

- Tom DeMarco

14. "I don't care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!"

- Vidiu Platon.

13. "Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code."

- Christopher Thompson

12. "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."

- Bill Gates

11. "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

- Brian W. Kernighan.

10. "People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on each other, like a wall of mini stones."

- Donald Knuth

9. “First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack.”

- George Carrette

8. “Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.”

- Larry Wall

7. “Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.”

- Alan Kay

6. “The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.”

- Seymour Cray

5. “To iterate is human, to recurse divine.”

- L. Peter Deutsch

4. "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament]: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

- Charles Babbage

3. "Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program."

- Linus Torvalds

2. "Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."

- Martin Golding

1. “There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”

source: http://www.junauza.com/2010/12/top-50-programming-quotes-of-all-time.html

Resume overused words

2010-12-17T10:31:00.003+02:00

Top 10 overused buzzwords in LinkedIn Profiles in the USA – 2010

1. Extensive experience

2. Innovative

3. Motivated

4. Results-oriented

5. Dynamic

6. Proven track record

7. Team player

8. Fast-paced

9. Problem solver

10. Entrepreneurial

Map projections

2010-10-23T13:01:00.005+03:00

A fact: No map can provide an accurate image of our planet (or any part of it). The reason: there can be no way to accurately simulate the surface of a sphere on a flat surface.

A map projection is any method of representing the surface of a sphere or other shape on a plane. Map projections are necessary for creating maps. All map projections distort the surface in some fashion. Depending on the purpose of the map, some distortions are acceptable and others are not; therefore different map projections exist in order to preserve some properties of the sphere-like body at the expense of other properties. There is no limit to the number of possible map projections.

Many properties can be measured on the Earth's surface independently of its geography. Some of these properties are:

Area
Shape
Direction
Bearing
Distance
Scale

Map projections can be constructed to preserve one or more of these properties, though not all of them simultaneously. Each projection preserves or compromises or approximates basic metric properties in different ways. The purpose of the map determines which projection should form the base for the map. Because many purposes exist for maps, many projections have been created to suit those purposes.

Most of us are familiar with the Mercator projection, though it is fundamentally wrong (Greenland, for instance, appears to be huge -roughly the same size with S.America-while is only one fifth of the size of South America). Another projection which gained some popularity in the 60's was the Gaul-Peter projection. Like the one below:

The American Cartographic Association adopted the following resolution which rejected all rectangular world maps, a category that includes both the Mercator and the Gall–Peters projections:

WHEREAS, the earth is round with a coordinate system composed entirely of circles, and

WHEREAS, flat world maps are more useful than globe maps, but flattening the globe surface necessarily greatly changes the appearance of Earth's features and coordinate systems, and

WHEREAS, world maps have a powerful and lasting effect on people's impressions of the shapes and sizes of lands and seas, their arrangement, and the nature of the coordinate system, and

WHEREAS, frequently seeing a greatly distorted map tends to make it "look right,"

THEREFORE, we strongly urge book and map publishers, the media and government agencies to cease using rectangular world maps for general purposes or artistic displays. Such maps promote serious, erroneous conceptions by severely distorting large sections of the world, by showing the round Earth as having straight edges and sharp corners, by representing most distances and direct routes incorrectly, and by portraying the circular coordinate system as a squared grid. The most widely displayed rectangular world map is the Mercator (in fact a navigational diagram devised for nautical charts), but other rectangular world maps proposed as replacements for the Mercator also display a greatly distorted image of the spherical Earth.

Types of Map projections

A. Projections by surface

Cylindrical (like Mercator and Gaul-Peters)
Pseudocylindrical
Hybrid
Conical
Pseudoconical
Azimuthal (directions from a central point are preserved (and hence, great circles through the central point are represented by straight lines on the map)). There are many subtypes like the gnomonic projection, orthographic projection, the Azimuthal equidistant etc.

B. Projections by preservation of a metric property

Conformal (projections preserve angles locally), like Mercator
Equal-area (preserve area), like Gaul-Peter
Equidistant (preserve distance from some standard point or line)
Gnomonic(Great circles are displayed as straight lines)
Compromise projections ( give up the idea of perfectly preserving metric properties, seeking instead to strike a balance between distortions). Most maps are used today belong in this category. Especially into the subtypes: Robinson projection and the Winkel Tripel projection which is preferred by National Geographic.(like the one in the beginning of the post)

A prayer

2010-10-23T12:55:00.003+03:00

A prayer by Eusebius of Caesarea, (c. 263–339 AD) one of the Church fathers and the author of the first "Church History"

May I be an enemy to no one and the friend of what abides eternally.
May I never quarrel with those nearest me, and be reconciled quickly if I should.
May I never plot evil against others, and if anyone plot evil against me,
may I escape unharmed and without the need to hurt anyone else.
May I love, seek and attain only what is good.
May I desire happiness for all and harbor envy for none.
May I never find joy in the misfortune of one who has wronged me.
May I never wait for the rebuke of others, but always rebuke myself until I make reparation.
May I gain no victory that harms me or my opponent.
May I reconcile friends who are mad at each other.
May I, insofar as I can, give all necessary help to my friends and to all who are in need.
May I never fail a friend in trouble.
May I be able to soften the pain of the
grief stricken and give them comforting words.
May I respect myself.
May I always maintain control of my emotions.
May I habituate myself to be gentle, and never angry with others because of circumstances.
May I never discuss the wicked or what they have done, but know good people and follow in their footsteps.

PC tips comfort

2010-09-12T16:17:00.002+03:00

Get your heat levels right. There’s nothing worse than being too hot or too cold while surfing the Web or trying to relax at home. If it’s cold outside, a great tip is to turn your heating on before you go out. That way when you get home from school or work, your house is warm and immediately inviting to you. If it’s summer time it’s a good idea to have a fan in your room or office to keep the air circulating so it doesn’t get too stuffy.
Air freshener. Computers generate a lot of heat, which leads to a lot of hot air. This doesn’t smell too good. Keep a can of air freshener in your office and use it regularly. I also like to burn scented candles as they help me to relax. Cinnamon is nice. Be careful not to burn candles too close to your computer equipment, though!
Get a good chair. It’s important that your chair is not only comfortable, but also ergonomic and functional. By ergonomic I mean a chair that encourages good posture so you don’t develop back problems later in life. Swivel chairs are good if you move around a lot in your workspace so you don’t necessarily have to get up from the chair.
Clothes. There’s nothing more comfortable than an oversized hoodie and fuzzy slippers. Buy a hoodie a size larger than what you normally wear and you’ll be amazed at how snug and warm it feels. Also buy big fuzzy slippers that look like bear’s feet. My girlfriend got me some for Christmas with claws on and I can tell you I never take them off at home — they’re just sooo comfortable!
Buy a big mug. Get yourself a big mug for your tea or coffee. I have a huge one with Scooby Doo on it that I bought for myself because I was tired of boring old standard mugs. For some reason it’s a lot more comforting to drink coffee from my own mug.

[Lockergnome] Windows Fanatics

Woman as hazardous material

2010-09-11T01:44:00.001+03:00

The modern business plan

2010-05-30T22:26:00.002+03:00

From Seth

I'd divide the modern business plan into five sections:

Truth
Assertions
Alternatives
People
Money

The truth section describes the world as it is. Footnote if you want to, but tell me about the market you are entering, the needs that already exist, the competitors in your space, technology standards, the way others have succeeded and failed in the past. The more specific the better. The more ground knowledge the better. The more visceral the stories, the better. The point of this section is to be sure that you're clear about the way you see the world, and that you and I agree on your assumptions. This section isn't partisan, it takes no positions, it just states how things are.

Truth can take as long as you need to tell it. It can include spreadsheets, market share analysis and anything I need to know about how the world works.

The assertions section is your chance to describe how you're going to change things. We will do X, and then Y will happen. We will build Z with this much money in this much time. We will present Q to the market and the market will respond by taking this action.

This is the heart of the modern business plan. The only reason to launch a project is to change something, and I want to know what you're going to do and what impact it's going to have.

Of course, this section will be incorrect. You will make assertions that won't pan out. You'll miss budgets and deadlines and sales. So the alternatives section tells me what you'll do if that happens. How much flexibility does your product or team have? If your assertions don't pan out, is it over?

The people section rightly highlights the key element... who is on your team, who is going to join your team. 'Who' doesn't mean their resume, who means their attitudes and abilities and track record in shipping.

And the last section is all about money. How much do you need, how will you spend it, what does cash flow look like, P&Ls, balance sheets, margins and exit strategies.

Your local VC might not like this format, but I'm betting it will help your team think through the hard issues more clearly.

gnomikologikon.gr: The Greek Quotations site

2010-04-08T14:49:00.004+03:00

A favorite of mine "ΓΝΩΜΙΚΟΛΟΓΙΚΟΝ", the site with Greek quotations, Proverbs, ancient Greek sayings etc has been transfered to a new address and obviously to a new host: www.gnomikologikon.gr

It contains also some very useful tips for the Greek grammar

100 fundamental service rules for Restaurants

2009-11-06T11:05:00.002+02:00

1. Do not let anyone enter the restaurant without a warm greeting.

2. Do not make a singleton feel bad. Do not say, “Are you waiting for someone?” Ask for a reservation. Ask if he or she would like to sit at the bar.

3. Never refuse to seat three guests because a fourth has not yet arrived.

4. If a table is not ready within a reasonable length of time, offer a free drink and/or amuse-bouche. The guests may be tired and hungry and thirsty, and they did everything right.

5. Tables should be level without anyone asking. Fix it before guests are seated.

6. Do not lead the witness with, “Bottled water or just tap?” Both are fine. Remain neutral.

7. Do not announce your name. No jokes, no flirting, no cuteness.

8. Do not interrupt a conversation. For any reason. Especially not to recite specials. Wait for the right moment.

9. Do not recite the specials too fast or robotically or dramatically. It is not a soliloquy. This is not an audition.

10. Do not inject your personal favorites when explaining the specials.

11. Do not hustle the lobsters. That is, do not say, “We only have two lobsters left.” Even if there are only two lobsters left.

12. Do not touch the rim of a water glass. Or any other glass.

13. Handle wine glasses by their stems and silverware by the handles.

14. When you ask, “How’s everything?” or “How was the meal?” listen to the answer and fix whatever is not right.

15. Never say “I don’t know” to any question without following with, “I’ll find out.”

16. If someone requests more sauce or gravy or cheese, bring a side dish of same. No pouring. Let them help themselves.

17. Do not take an empty plate from one guest while others are still eating the same course. Wait, wait, wait.

18. Know before approaching a table who has ordered what. Do not ask, “Who’s having the shrimp?”

19. Offer guests butter and/or olive oil with their bread.

20. Never refuse to substitute one vegetable for another.

21. Never serve anything that looks creepy or runny or wrong.

22. If someone is unsure about a wine choice, help him. That might mean sending someone else to the table or offering a taste or two.

23. If someone likes a wine, steam the label off the bottle and give it to the guest with the bill. It has the year, the vintner, the importer, etc.

24. Never use the same glass for a second drink.

25. Make sure the glasses are clean. Inspect them before placing them on the table.

26. Never assume people want their white wine in an ice bucket. Inquire.

27. For red wine, ask if the guests want to pour their own or prefer the waiter to pour.

28. Do not put your hands all over the spout of a wine bottle while removing the cork.

29. Do not pop a champagne cork. Remove it quietly, gracefully. The less noise the better.

30. Never let the wine bottle touch the glass into which you are pouring. No one wants to drink the dust or dirt from the bottle.

31. Never remove a plate full of food without asking what went wrong. Obviously, something went wrong.

32. Never touch a customer. No excuses. Do not do it. Do not brush them, move them, wipe them or dust them.

33. Do not bang into chairs or tables when passing by.

34. Do not have a personal conversation with another server within earshot of customers.

35. Do not eat or drink in plain view of guests.

36. Never reek from perfume or cigarettes. People want to smell the food and beverage.

37. Do not drink alcohol on the job, even if invited by the guests. “Not when I’m on duty” will suffice.

38.Do not call a guy a “dude.”

39. Do not call a woman “lady.”

40. Never say, “Good choice,” implying that other choices are bad.

41. Saying, “No problem” is a problem. It has a tone of insincerity or sarcasm. “My pleasure” or “You’re welcome” will do.

42. Do not compliment a guest’s attire or hairdo or makeup. You are insulting someone else.

43. Never mention what your favorite dessert is. It’s irrelevant.

44. Do not discuss your own eating habits, be you vegan or lactose intolerant or diabetic.

45. Do not curse, no matter how young or hip the guests.

46. Never acknowledge any one guest over and above any other. All guests are equal.

47. Do not gossip about co-workers or guests within earshot of guests.

48. Do not ask what someone is eating or drinking when they ask for more; remember or consult the order.

49. Never mention the tip, unless asked.

50. Do not turn on the charm when it’s tip time. Be consistent throughout.

51. If there is a service charge, alert your guests when you present the bill. It’s not a secret or a trick.

52. Know your menu inside and out. If you serve Balsam Farm candy-striped beets, know something about Balsam Farm and candy-striped beets.

53. Do not let guests double-order unintentionally; remind the guest who orders ratatouille that zucchini comes with the entree.

54. If there is a prix fixe, let guests know about it. Do not force anyone to ask for the “special” menu.

55. Do not serve an amuse-bouche without detailing the ingredients. Allergies are a serious matter; peanut oil can kill. (This would also be a good time to ask if anyone has any allergies.)

56. Do not ignore a table because it is not your table. Stop, look, listen, lend a hand. (Whether tips are pooled or not.)

57. Bring the pepper mill with the appetizer. Do not make people wait or beg for a condiment.

58. Do not bring judgment with the ketchup. Or mustard. Or hot sauce. Or whatever condiment is requested.

59. Do not leave place settings that are not being used.

60. Bring all the appetizers at the same time, or do not bring the appetizers. Same with entrees and desserts.

61. Do not stand behind someone who is ordering. Make eye contact. Thank him or her.

62. Do not fill the water glass every two minutes, or after each sip. You’ll make people nervous.

62(a). Do not let a glass sit empty for too long.

63. Never blame the chef or the busboy or the hostess or the weather for anything that goes wrong. Just make it right.

64. Specials, spoken and printed, should always have prices.

65. Always remove used silverware and replace it with new.

66. Do not return to the guest anything that falls on the floor — be it napkin, spoon, menu or soy sauce.

67. Never stack the plates on the table. They make a racket. Shhhhhh.

68. Do not reach across one guest to serve another.

69. If a guest is having trouble making a decision, help out. If someone wants to know your life story, keep it short. If someone wants to meet the chef, make an effort.

70. Never deliver a hot plate without warning the guest. And never ask a guest to pass along that hot plate.

71. Do not race around the dining room as if there is a fire in the kitchen or a medical emergency. (Unless there is a fire in the kitchen or a medical emergency.)

72. Do not serve salad on a freezing cold plate; it usually advertises the fact that it has not been freshly prepared.

73. Do not bring soup without a spoon. Few things are more frustrating than a bowl of hot soup with no spoon.

74. Let the guests know the restaurant is out of something before the guests read the menu and order the missing dish.

75. Do not ask if someone is finished when others are still eating that course.

76. Do not ask if a guest is finished the very second the guest is finished. Let guests digest, savor, reflect.

77. Do not disappear.

78. Do not ask, “Are you still working on that?” Dining is not work — until questions like this are asked.

79. When someone orders a drink “straight up,” determine if he wants it “neat” — right out of the bottle — or chilled. Up is up, but “straight up” is debatable.

80. Never insist that a guest settle up at the bar before sitting down; transfer the tab.

81. Know what the bar has in stock before each meal.

82. If you drip or spill something, clean it up, replace it, offer to pay for whatever damage you may have caused. Refrain from touching the wet spots on the guest.

83. Ask if your guest wants his coffee with dessert or after. Same with an after-dinner drink.

84. Do not refill a coffee cup compulsively. Ask if the guest desires a refill.

84(a). Do not let an empty coffee cup sit too long before asking if a refill is desired.

85. Never bring a check until someone asks for it. Then give it to the person who asked for it.

86. If a few people signal for the check, find a neutral place on the table to leave it.

87. Do not stop your excellent service after the check is presented or paid.

88. Do not ask if a guest needs change. Just bring the change.

89. Never patronize a guest who has a complaint or suggestion; listen, take it seriously, address it.

90. If someone is getting agitated or effusive on a cellphone, politely suggest he keep it down or move away from other guests.

91. If someone complains about the music, do something about it, without upsetting the ambiance. (The music is not for the staff — it’s for the customers.)

92. Never play a radio station with commercials or news or talking of any kind.

93. Do not play brass — no brassy Broadway songs, brass bands, marching bands, or big bands that feature brass, except a muted flugelhorn.

94. Do not play an entire CD of any artist. If someone doesn’t like Frightened Rabbit or Michael Buble, you have just ruined a meal.

95. Never hover long enough to make people feel they are being watched or hurried, especially when they are figuring out the tip or signing for the check.

96. Do not say anything after a tip — be it good, bad, indifferent — except, “Thank you very much.”

97. If a guest goes gaga over a particular dish, get the recipe for him or her.

98. Do not wear too much makeup or jewelry. You know you have too much jewelry when it jingles and/or draws comments.

99. Do not show frustration. Your only mission is to serve. Be patient. It is not easy.

100. Guests, like servers, come in all packages. Show a “good table” your appreciation with a free glass of port, a plate of biscotti or something else management approves.

Magnus Mills, "This much I know

2009-09-25T17:01:00.002+03:00

From the excellent column in Guardian the "This much I know" input by Magnus Mills, bus driver and novelist. Delicious!

Despite what you'd think, it's an easier job since we got one-man buses. Some of the conductors were nightmares. At least now we have some control over our destiny.

Tube stations have luxurious staff toilets which bus drivers, who have none of our own, must ask permission to use. It's a disgrace. So we use the toilets in William Hill's, who are friendlier.

No experience compares to driving along Oxford Street and the concentration required. People keep walking in front of the bus and look quite angry if you keep going. You don't want to constantly hit the brake when there's standing passengers. Mums shoving their buggies out into the road are the worst - usually on mobiles, talking to someone other than their child.

When The Restraint of Beasts was published [1998, Booker Prize shortlisted] I packed in driving buses. I thought I was going to live the life of a writer, sitting in pubs drinking Guinness. But I like having a day job, too. I can only write, it turns out, when I have no apparent spare time.

If you don't want to eat junk food while you're driving, it's important to have a good breakfast. I've had the same caff breakfast for three years. Toast, marmalade, poached egg, hash browns, black pudding, two mugs of tea. But if I could survive on a tablet, I would. Then I could spend an hour in perfect peace, not thinking about getting fuelled up.

Every bus shelter has a poster for a film on it. Most have an actor posing with a gun, and often it's pointing at people waiting for a bus.

I don't like repeating a word on a page, let alone in a paragraph. But there's one word I didn't realise I used twice in a paragraph in The Restraint of Beasts. I'm getting it changed before another reprint. But it's my secret which word.

Most schoolkids don't show their passes. Ken Livingstone made a great mistake letting them travel free. There's a whole generation growing up who think it's a right rather than a concession, and it's us who have to deal with it.

It was very breezy up on Mount Fuji, and very remote. Striding through the soft ash feels like bouncing on the moon.

The travelling public won't understand, but we're never told over the radio to travel faster. We only get messages to slow down, to stop for one or two minutes. It's about maintenance of headway. No drivers would personally choose to be late, because then you get more passengers to deal with. But we're only admonished by inspectors for earliness.

There was a bloke who said he was going to get his knife out and stab me because I wouldn't let him travel with an open can of alcohol. The next day he was at the same bus stop and he was very apologetic and said he didn't carry a knife and that the alcohol had mixed with his medication. He's now one of my best mates whenever he gets on the bus.

If you live in the immediate vicinity of a fire station, like I have, you don't suffer crime of any sort. Firemen have a lot of time on their hands and run outside if there's any trouble.

I try to be more tolerant nowadays. I think Ian Paisley set a good example. If he can be tolerant to Martin McGuinness, I can be tolerant in the morning to someone who swims in the wrong direction in a swimming-pool lane.

I'm only really interested in the position of the bus in front of me and the one behind.

The career manifesto

2009-06-19T02:28:00.001+03:00

by Micahel Wade

The Career Manifesto

1. Unless you’re working in a coal mine, an emergency ward, or their equivalent, spare us the sad stories about your tough job. The biggest risk most of us face in the course of a day is a paper cut.

2. Yes, your boss is an idiot at times. So what? (Do you think your associates sit around and marvel at your deep thoughts?) If you cannot give your boss basic loyalty, either report the weasel to the proper authorities or be gone.

3. You are paid to take meaningful actions, not superficial ones. Don’t brag about that memo you sent out or how hard you work. Tell us what you achieved.

4. Although your title may be the same, the job that you were hired to do three years ago is probably not the job you have now. When you are just coasting and not thinking several steps ahead of your responsibilities, you are in dinosaur territory and a meteor is coming.

5. If you suspect that you’re working in a madhouse, you probably are. Even sociopaths have jobs. Don’t delude yourself by thinking you’ll change what the organization regards as a “turkey farm.” Flee.

6. Your technical skills may impress the other geeks, but if you can’t get along with your co-workers, you’re a litigation breeder. Don’t be surprised if management regards you as an expensive risk.

7. If you have a problem with co-workers, have the guts to tell them, preferably in words of one syllable.

8. Don’t believe what the organization says it does. Its practices are its real policies. Study what is rewarded and what is punished and you’ll have a better clue as to what’s going on.

9. Don’t expect to be perfect. Focus on doing right instead of being right. It will simplify the world enormously.

10.If you plan on showing them what you’re capable of only after you get promoted, you need to reverse your thinking.

Jorge Luis Borges | the just

2009-05-08T01:38:00.000+03:00

The Just
by Jorge Luis Borges

A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a café in the South,
aaaa silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well,
aaathough it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets
aaaof a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of a Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.

25 Best Business Books

2009-05-03T18:59:00.002+03:00

From Business Pundit

While many corporate leaders will cite Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince as invaluable business tomes, we stuck with books written for a business-minded readership.

25. The Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith
1991

First published in 1776, this broad-ranging exploration of commercial and economic first principles laid the philosophical foundations for modern capitalism and the free-market economy. Smith’s central thesis is that capital can best be used to create both individual and national wealth in conditions of minimal government interference. He believed that free-market competition advances both the vitality of commercial activity and the ultimate good of all a nation’s citizens.

24. The Functions of the Executive
by Chester I. Barnard
1968

This collection of Barnard’s lectures on management, though dated in its language, remains relevant, notably in his promotion of clear, short communication channels and managerial morality. A successful executive himself as well as a theorist, Barnard broadened the managerial role from one that assesses, controls, and supervises, to one that nurtures the organization’s values and goals, and translates them into action, thereby defining a purpose and moral code that pervades the organization.

23. The Principles of Scientific Management
by Frederick Winslow Taylor
1911

In its day, this book advanced management as a discrete field requiring formal training, and systematized human work into rigorously measured, optimizable processes.

Arguing that the “inefficiency in almost all of our daily acts” can be remedied by “systematic management, rather than in searching for some unusual or extraordinary man,” Taylor aimed to determine the best practices for every job. His principles influenced working methods and managerial attitudes for most of the 20th century, particularly in mass-production industries—companies that emphasize quantity over quality.

22. The Human Side of Enterprise
Douglas McGregor
1960

Psychologist McGregor revolutionized human relations management by distinguishing the two ways managers view employees and consequently manage them, ultimately producing the accordant behavior in them. Theory X assumes that workers are inherently lazy and need to be motivated and supervised; Theory Y assumes that people are self-motivated and self-directed. “McGregor’s fundamental principles,” says author Gary Hamel, “underlie the work of modern management thinkers from Drucker to Deming to Peters, and the employment practices of the world’s most progressive and successful companies.”

21. Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise
by Alfred D. Chandler
1962

A business historian, Chandler was one of the first scholars to systematically examine the corporate structure of large companies. Considered a theoretical masterpiece, this book—namely, its now-debated conclusion that strategy should drive structure—played a leading role in the profitable decentralization of leading corporations in the 1960s and 1970s.

20. Organizational Culture and Leadership
by Edgar H. Stein
1992

Organizational development pioneer Schein introduced, into the management debate, culture as a constantly changing force in an organization’s life—and one that must be understood for there to be successful change. In successive editions of this book, the author draws on contemporary research to redefine culture, including the notion of subcultures, and shows how to transform this abstract concept into a practical tool for understanding and influencing organizational dynamics.

19. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations
by James Surowieki
2004

First developed in his “Financial Page” column of The New Yorker, Surowieki’s ideas contradict the long-held distrust of masses and groupthink: “Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.” The author animates his rigorous argument with pertinent anecdotes and case studies from business, social psychology, sports, and everyday life. Author Po Bronson insists, “This book should be in every thinking businessperson’s library. Without exception.”

18. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
by Thomas L Friedman
2005

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman presents this timely, indispensable update on globalization, its successes and shortcomings, with the same urgent curiosity, panache, and illumination that has earned him three Pulitzer Prizes. With his incomparable ability to elucidate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the beginning of the 21st century, and what globalization—both an opportunity and a threat—means to countries, companies, communities, and individuals. In his 2006 hardcover update, with 100 pages of revised and expanded material, Friedman makes specific recommendations about the technical and creative training he believes will be needed to compete in the New Middle class.

17. Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
1990

This narrative has been called one of the most influential business books ever, as the definitive account of the largest takeover in Wall Street history at that time: the landmark leveraged buyout of the RJR Nabisco Corporation for $25 billion in 1988. Cinematic and gripping, yet remarkably judicious, this book by two skilled journalists has sold more than 500,000 copies and inspired an HBO movie. Its graphic portrayal of how financial operations at the highest levels are conducted is considered must-reading for those who want to know how the world really works.

16. My Years with General Motors
by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.
1963

Sloan’s “as told to” opus still stands as the most cogent expression of the managerial philosophy that dominated American business for most of the 20th century. With insightful authority, this fabled CEO chronicles General Motors’ resurrection, under his leadership, from a nearly bankrupt enterprise in the early 1900s to the world’s greatest industrial corporation when he retired in 1956.

Particularly striking is this book’s unintentional expression of a value system: a relentless commitment to the engineering worldview of efficiency as paramount. Sloan’s simultaneous decentralization of manufacturing and centralization of corporate policy and financial controls became the basis for an organizational model that dominated American industry for more than half a century.

15. The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization
by Peter M. Senge
1990

Based on 15 years of experience putting the ideas into practice, this bestselling classic popularized the concept of the learning organization, a holistic approach that prioritizes learning—new and expansive patterns of thinking—as both an individual and a group experience. Senge argues that “changing individuals so that they produce results they care about [and] accomplish things that are important to them” faster than the competiton does is, in the long run, the only sustainable competitive advantage.

Because the learning organization requires managers to surrender their traditional spheres of power and control, and because it demands trust, involvement, and the allowance for experimentation and failure, it has rarely been converted into a reality. Nevertheless, Senge’s ideas have affected the rewards and remuneration strategies of many companies.

14. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Business Don’t Work and What to Do about It
by Michael E. Gerber
1985

This underground bestseller dispels the commonplace assumptions surrounding starting and running a successful small business. Two of Gerber’s most incisive observations are that (1) many entrepreneurs know considerably more about producing what they sell than about operating their business, and (2) the entrepreneur must “work on your business, not in your business.” This book intelligently and comprehensively charts an approach to systematizing a new business so that it grows beyond the capacities of its creator.

13. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
by Malcolm Gladwell
2000

Drawing on a fascinating array of research findings and real-world examples, Gladwell presents a concise, elegant, erudite analysis of mass behavioral change that is strikingly counterintuitive. Regarded among marketing and sales professionals as one of the best books on the economics of popular culture, this entertaining read is, says author Jeffrey Toobin, “one of those rare books that changes the way you think about, well, everything.”

12. Competing for the Future
by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad
1994

This definitive book on contemporary business strategy criticizes the narrow mechanistic view of strategy and calls for an approach that is multifaceted, emotional as well as analytical, and concerned with meaning, purpose, and passion. The authors say their work “provides would-be revolutionaries with the tools and concepts they need to challenge the protectors of the past.” They argue that too many leaders, stuck in the day-to-day details of running their businesses, fail to prepare their companies for the future, and that crafting a strategic architecture around a company’s core competencies is the solution.

11. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t
by Jim Collins
2001

Measuring sustained results over a period of 15 years, Collins identifies, from an original list of 1435, 11 well-established companies that made the leap from being “good” to being “great.”

Applicable to entrepreneurs as well as corporations, this carefully researched book singles out what Collins calls Level 5 Leadership—“a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will”—as the critical factor in those transformations. Such natural leaders “channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company,” which begins with getting the right people—those with discipline and resolve—in the right positions. Challenging the conventional notion of the outgoing, high-profile CEO, an effective leader moves with selfless determination, inspiring average performers to become great producers.

10. Out of the Crisis
by W. Edwards Deming
1982

This classic on quality management reflects Deming’s experience introducing statistical methods for quality measurement and improvement to Japan in the 1960s. Aiming to transform the U.S. style of management and governmental relations with industry, the author blends statistics and common sense to challenge American business practices at almost every point, launching the quality revolution here. Citing poor management, not lazy workers, as responsible for most quality problems, this book, in simple, direct language, offers a theory of management based on Deming’s notable 14 Points of Management, and explains how to apply them to boost quality.

9. Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution
by Michael Hammer and James Champy
1993

Though based on the relatively dry field of operations research, this book became a prominent bestseller in its heyday, replacing much of the received wisdom of the last 200 years of industrial management with a radical prescription for rebuilding businesses wholesale to achieve dramatic performance gains.

8. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras
1994

Drawing on six years of innovative research, Collins and Porras identify 18 exceptional, long-lasting companies and directly compare each with one of its top competitors, over time. With entertaining case histories, they discredit the longstanding beliefs that a successful business is founded by a charismatic, visionary leader and begins with a great product. Rather, they argue, enduring organizations demonstrate core values and a core purpose that remain fixed, while their business strategies and practices adapt endlessly to a changing world. Organized into a coherent framework of practical concepts that can be applied by managers and entrepreneurs at all levels, this book provides a master blueprint for building a great and enduring company.

7. The Practice of Management
by Peter F. Drucker
1954

Considered the foremost management and business thinker of the 20th century, Drucker was the first to depict management as a distinct function, a separate responsibility in the workplace: the work of getting work done through and with other people. This still-relevant book holds that management was one of the major social innovations of the last century, and it poses three now-classic business questions: What is our business? Who is our customer? What does our customer consider valuable?

6. Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors
by Michael E. Porter
1980

Now in its 63rd printing in English, with translations in 19 languages, this modern classic filled a void in management thinking, transforming the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy. Strikingly accessible, Porter’s analysis of industries captures the complexity of industry competition in three generic strategies and five competitive forces that have been internalized and applied by managers, investment analysts, consultants, students, and scholars throughout the world.

This seminal book changed conventional thinking around strategy, offering a method whereby a company can examine not just its particular industry but its place in it, that is, its essential differentiation from its competitors that can be sold to the customer.

5. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
by Stephen R. Covey
1989

Having developed the concept of this groundbreaking, long-term bestseller by studying literature going back more than 200 years, Covey bases his approach on relatively immutable personal human values. Unlike many a self-improvement author, however, he doesn’t promise a quick fix; rather, he calls for a paradigm shift—a revolutionary change in one’s perceptions and interpretations of how the world works. And with different thinking comes different actions that will profoundly affect one’s productivity and effectiveness.

Be proactive. Begin with an end in mind. Put first things first. Think win/win. Seek first to understand. Synergize. Renewal. With penetrating insights and cogent anecdotes, Covey presents a highly structured, holistically integrated methodology for creating balance, and hence success, in one’s personal and professional lives.

4. The One-Minute Manager
by Kenneth H. Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
1981

Millions of managers in Fortune 500 companies and small businesses around the globe have followed the timeless principles of this first mega-bestselling business book, presented as a parable. Concisely elegant, this narrative reveals three practical management secrets: One-Minute Goals, One-Minute Praisings, and One-Minute Reprimands—a concept that has spawned numerous “One-Minute” titles, for endeavors from parenting to golfing.

3. How to Win Friends & Influence People
by Dale Carnegie
1937

Having sold more than 15 million copies, this seminal self-improvement book continues to guide managers in the universal challenge of face-to-face communication.

A master of human nature, Carnegie advises that “[w]hen dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudice, and motivated by pride and vanity.” He argues that success is only 15% professional knowledge; the remaining 85% is “the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among people.”

2. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
by Clayton M. Christensen
1997

Examining a variety of leading well-managed companies that have failed to capitalize on innovative technologies, Christensen explains, with striking clarity and style, how to manage breakthrough products successfully when customers may not be ready for them.

His argument that overdependence on customer needs, or on the most profitable products, can damage a company’s success challenges the marketing and customer service books that put customer focus at the top of the corporate agenda. Considered a paradigmatic marketing visionary, Christensen highlights the problems inherent in what appears to be sound decision making, and rigorously demonstrates that companies will fall behind if they fail to adapt or adopt new technologies that will meet customers’ unstated or future needs.

1. In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies
by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.
1982

Highly influential when global competition, largely from Japan, had brought Western business to a low, this quintessential business book describes eight enduring management principles that made the forty-three companies surveyed “excellent.” The authors focus exclusively on big companies, namely big manufacturers, but ironically condemn the excesses of modern management practice and advocate a return to simpler virtues. They have since come to feel that their ideas are better embodied in smaller companies.

Through lively case studies, this very readable classic forces a look at the fundamentals, at “first principles” that give a company its soul: Attention to customers, an abiding concern for people (productivity through people), the celebration of trial and error. A driving force in the subsequent deluge of business books, this trailblazer established customer service as a key form of differentiation and advantage, and launched the author-as-consultant/speaker/celebrity phenomenon.

Babylonia vs. Greece

2009-04-10T21:06:00.002+03:00

An excellent piece (for a Greek, anyway) comparing ancient Greek and Messopotamian cultures

By Roger Sandall Saturday, March 21, 2009

Filed under: Culture, Big Ideas

The elite attack on ancient Greek achievement is made manifest in London, Paris, and Berlin.

The August heat made Berlin feel like Baghdad. Inside the Pergamon Museum, and constructed specially for the travelling Babylon show, were narrow winding ways impenetrable to air conditioning. In packed discomfort hundreds of us were slowly inching past glass cases of cuneiform tablets—little panels of baked brick that seem to have been Mesopotamia’s main industrial product. One of them told of Babylon’s creation epic. Another contained a magical spell. The biggest invariably declaimed the power of kings. Craning our heads we tried hard to read the labels and tried just as hard to be impressed.

Being impressed by Mesopotamia was the point. For too long had Hellenism been uncritically exalted in the West. Now it was time for the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome to stand aside so that we could gaze upon the je ne sais quoi that was Mesopotamia. But what exactly was Babylon? Imperial majesty? Architectural folly? A voluptuary paradise? Oriental despotism incarnate? To try to answer these questions the combined museological might of the British Museum, the Musée du Louvre, and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin had assembled a display of things Babylonian under the title Babylon: Myth and Reality. Early in 2008, the exhibition had begun its travels in Paris; it was in Berlin at the time of my visit; and it was in London until last Sunday.

But if the existing Ishtar Gate made the choice of the Pergamon Museum inevitable, it was also a risky and perhaps even self-defeating decision. For as its name suggests, the main display at this establishment on Berlin’s “Museum Island” is one of Hellenism’s most astonishing artefacts, the Pergamon Altar, with over 100 yards of sculptured friezes as eye-catching as anything from the Parthenon. This is a decidedly hard act to follow: once seen never forgotten. And the altar and its frieze is the first thing visitors did see. Only after this marvel did they move along to find what Mesopotamia had to offer.

Is it conceivable that whole decades of research reveal no Persian literary endeavors to compare with the achievements of the Greeks?

Of course there were other items of interest from Babylon besides the gate. There were rigid busts thought to show this king or that. The seven-foot-high black basalt stone on which Hammurabi’s Code was written around 1750 BC is a useful reminder of the historic place of law in civilized society. A third stone, about 24 inches by 20 inches dating from Nebuchadnezzar’s reign (605–562 BC) and containing four columns of early cuneiform script, is described in the catalogue as “a masterpiece of archaizing Babylonian epigraphy”—and no doubt it is.

But what is inscribed? What royal ruminations are here set down that might claim our attention, diverting it from things Greek? We were told it "memorializes Nebuchadnezzar’s building operations in stone. After quoting his royal titles and describing his personal piety, it describes the decorating of the chapels of Marduk, Zarpanitu, and Nabu, the reconstruction of the processional boat of Marduk, the rebuilding of the Akitu house, the restoration of the Babylon temples," and so on. Peggy Lee’s disenchanted question has no doubt been overworked, yet it was difficult to emerge from those claustrophobic museum corridors without gasping “Is that all there is?” What literary evidence is there from antiquity of a polity and a culture meriting as much attention as ancient Greece?

One wonders about the motives behind the exhibition itself. Topically, they plainly had to do with current events in Iraq and at the Baghdad Museum—a concluding chapter in the British Museum’s English-language catalogue says as much. But they also go deeper than that. For much of the past 30 years admirers of classical Greece have been on the defensive, while easternizing admirers of Mesopotamia—which includes the Assyrians, the 6th century BC Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, and the Persians who took over under Cyrus in 539 BC—have been on the attack. Darius and Co. have been talked up; Pericles and Herodotus and Co. have been talked down.

That distinguished and venerable classicist Peter Green apologised for having been too keen for freedom in his 1970 book Xerxes at Salamis. Revising it in 1996 under the new title The Greco-Persian Wars, he regretted embracing so enthusiastically “the fundamental Herodotean concept of freedom-under-law (eleutheria, isonomia) making its great and impassioned stand against Oriental Despotism.” What he called “the insistent lessons of multiculturalism” had forced all classical scholars “to take a long hard look at Greek ‘anti-barbarian’ propaganda, beginning with Aeschylus’s Persians and the whole thrust of Herodotus’s Histories.”

The Oxford University Press author of the 2003 The Greek Wars, George Cawkwell, told us in a short preface that he was proud to be part of a scholarly movement that aims “to rid ourselves of a Hellenocentric view of the Persian world.” Much of the first three pages of his introduction then proceeded to ridicule and discredit Herodotus, who showed “an astounding misapprehension” concerning the Persians, whose stories were sometimes delightful but were certainly absurd, and who, he wrote, “had no real understanding of the Persian Empire.”

But if Herodotus didn’t get it right, who exactly did? Obviously, some nameless Persian equivalent to Herodotus might have had “a real understanding of the Persian Empire,” but who was he and where is his narrative? What book by which contemporary Persian historian provides an alternative account of Achaemenid manners and customs, institutions and political thought, imperial policy and administration and ideals?

For much of the past 30 years admirers of classical Greece have been on the defensive, while easternizing admirers of Mesopotamia have been on the attack.

The courts of Cyrus the Great, Darius the Great, not to mention Xerxes, King of Kings, employed armies of chroniclers recording royal achievements and military victories. Is it conceivable that whole decades of the recent research invoked by Peter Green and Tom Holland (author of the 2005 book Persian Fire) reveal no Persian literary endeavors to compare with the achievements of the Greeks?

Alas, that seems to be the case. Even the Oxford don so jeeringly hostile to Herodotus admits that though the evidence of past Persian glories “is ample and various, one thing is lacking. Apart from the Behistun Inscription which gives an account of the opening of the reign of Darius I, there are no literary accounts of Achaemenid history other than those written by Greeks.” Moreover, he admits, such literacy as existed in the Persian Empire was largely Greek; and such writing as took place was mainly done by Greeks.

Escaping out through the monumental Ishtar Gate into the rest of the Pergamon Museum, one was glad to be again surrounded by Hellenistic sculptures. It was like taking off from a barren desert airstrip and landing in Paris. Human faces. Faces of human scale alive with familiar emotions. In the remarkable Telephos Frieze there were youthful and elegant figures clothed in drapery, arranged with all the delicacy of civilized feeling and all the art that gifted sculptors can bestow. Gods like men and men like gods. Exploring in the nearby Graeco-Roman collection one found, instead of the heartless faces of despots, the marble statue of a young girl playing knucklebones.

Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world

2009-04-10T13:07:00.000+03:00

By Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Financial Times, 7 Apr 2009

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest.

2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

4. Do not let someone making an "incentive" bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks. Odds are he would cut every corner on safety to show "profits" while claiming to be "conservative". Bonuses do not accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.

5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity. Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. The complex economy is already a form of leverage: the leverage of efficiency. Such systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy; adding debt produces wild and dangerous gyrations and leaves no room for error. Capitalism cannot avoid fads and bubbles: equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious.

6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning . Complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it. Citizens must be protected from themselves, from bankers selling them "hedging" products, and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists.

7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to "restore confidence". Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.

8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains. Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.

9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible "expert" advice for their retirement. Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).

10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs. Finally, this crisis cannot be fixed with makeshift repairs, no more than a boat with a rotten hull can be fixed with ad-hoc patches. We need to rebuild the hull with new (stronger) materials; we will have to remake the system before it does so itself. Let us move voluntarily into Capitalism 2.0 by helping what needs to be broken break on its own, converting debt into equity, marginalising the economics and business school establishments, shutting down the "Nobel" in economics, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here, and teaching people to navigate a world with fewer certainties.

Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news.

In other words, a place more resistant to black swans.

The writer is a veteran trader, a distinguished professor at New York University's Polytechnic Institute and the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Hubris paved way to crisis

2009-04-03T11:26:00.002+03:00

By DANIEL CLOUD

PRINCETON, New Jersey — To understand how we got ourselves into our current economic mess, complicated explanations about derivatives, regulatory failure, and so on are beside the point. The best answer is both ancient and simple: hubris.

In modern mathematical economics, many people in the rich world decided that we had finally devised a set of scientific tools that could really predict human behavior. These tools were supposed to be as reliable as those used in engineering. Having ushered scientific socialism into its grave at the Cold War's end, we quickly found ourselves embracing another science of man.

Our new beliefs did not stem from some new experiment or unexpected observation, the way a real scientific paradigm shift does. Economists do not typically conduct experiments with real money. When they do, as when the Nobel laureate Myron Scholes ran the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), the dangers often outweigh the benefits (a lesson we still don't seem to have learned.) And, since almost every observation that economists make turns out in a way that wasn't predicted, no unexpected observation could ever actually change an economic paradigm.

What really produced the change in economics that led to disaster was the simple fact that you could now get away with saying certain kinds of things in public. Some of us honestly thought that history was over. And after all, you can't have a final, utopian society without having a final, scientific theory of human behavior, together with some mad scientists or philosophes to preside over the whole thing.

The problem is that, no matter how "scientifically" these new beliefs were formulated, they are still false. Capitalism is, among other things, a struggle between individual people over the control of scarce resources. Like boxing and poker, it is a soft, restrained, private form of warfare.

Military strategists have known for centuries that there is, and can be, no final science of war. In a real struggle over things that actually matter, we must assume that we are up against thinking opponents, who may understand some things about us that we don't know about ourselves. For example, if profit can be made by understanding the model behind a policy, as is surely the case with the models used by the U.S. Federal Reserve, sooner or later so much capital will seek that profit that the tail will begin to wag the dog, as has been happening lately.

The truth is that such models are most useful when they are little known or not universally believed. They progressively lose their predictive value as we all accept and begin to bet on them. But there can be no real predictive science for a system that may change its behavior if we publish a model of it.

Markets might once have been fairly efficient, before we had the theory of efficient markets. If investing is simply a matter of allocating money to an index, however, liquidity becomes the sole determinant of prices, and valuations go haywire. When a substantial fraction of market participants are simply buying the index, the market's role in ensuring good corporate governance also disappears.

The formation of large bubbles in recent decades was partly a consequence of the commonness and incorrigibility of the belief that no such thing could ever happen. Our collective belief that markets are efficient helped make them wildly inefficient.

Despite this, over the course of the last 20 years, economists began to act as if we thought we could genuinely predict the economic future. If the universe didn't oblige, it wasn't because our models were wrong; "market failure" was to blame. It is not clear how we could know that markets were failing whenever they fell significantly, but believed that we had no business second-guessing them when they climbed. Nor is it clear how we all knew that LTCM's failure or the post-Sept. 11 malaise posed grave risks to the system, but could seriously doubt that the dot-com craze was a bubble.

We repeatedly rescued bubbles, and never deliberately burst them. As a result, our financial markets became a pyramid scheme. Moral hazard, we thought, could safely be ignored, because it is "moral," which, as every true scientist knows, just means "imaginary."

But a market is not a rocket, economists are not rocket scientists, and moral hazard is, in human affairs, the risk that matters most. The false belief that we can collectively see the future using science has led us all to make various binding promises about things in that future that no human being can possibly guarantee. A promise of something that we should know cannot be guaranteed is also known as a lie. That vast tissue of lies is now tearing itself apart.

Governments think we can stop this process by throwing money at it, but there are many reasons to believe that this won't work. The banking system is probably already past saving — many institutions simply aren't banks anymore, but vast experiments that didn't work out as predicted.

We could easily be "stimulating" and "rescuing" the economy for a rather long time, in ways that only delay the needed adjustment, before we are finally forced to allow the required creative destruction to occur. But that is not the real problem. The real problem is the pseudoscientific ideology behind today's crisis. A final science of man has no room for the unplanned and unpredictable recovery that is the only kind a capitalist economy can have after a crisis of this size.

If we cleave to the false security of a supposed science that isn't working, and forget about the philosophy behind it, ideas like personal responsibility and the right to fail, our leaders will very scientifically give us no recovery at all.

The 14 Principles of Management

2009-03-29T19:16:00.003+03:00

Henri Fayol (1841-1925) was the first Management guru, ever. His principles of Management were published in the beginning of the 20th century. They are still valid. Forget the modern theories and all the mambo jumbo about management. These 14 principles remain the real thing.

The 14 Management Principles of Henri Fayol are:

Division of Work. Specialization allows the individual to build up experience, and to continuously improve his skills. Thereby he can be more productive.
Authority. The right to issue commands, along with which must go the balanced responsibility for its function.
Discipline. Employees must obey, but this is two-sided: employees will only obey orders if management play their part by providing good leadership.
Unity of Command. Each worker should have only one boss with no other conflicting lines of command.
Unity of Direction. People engaged in the same kind of activities must have the same objectives in a single plan. This is essential to ensure unity and coordination in the enterprise. Unity of command does not exist without unity of direction but does not necessarily flows from it.
Subordination of individual interest (to the general interest). Management must see that the goals of the firms are always paramount.
Remuneration. Payment is an important motivator although by analyzing a number of possibilities, Fayol points out that there is no such thing as a perfect system.
Centralization (or Decentralization). This is a matter of degree depending on the condition of the business and the quality of its personnel.
Scalar chain (Line of Authority). A hierarchy is necessary for unity of direction. But lateral communication is also fundamental, as long as superiors know that such communication is taking place. Scalar chain refers to the number of levels in the hierarchy from the ultimate authority to the lowest level in the organization. It should not be over-stretched and consist of too-many levels.
Order. Both material order and social order are necessary. The former minimizes lost time and useless handling of materials. The latter is achieved through organization and selection.
Equity. In running a business a ‘combination of kindliness and justice’ is needed. Treating employees well is important to achieve equity.
Stability of Tenure of Personnel. Employees work better if job security and career progress are assured to them. An insecure tenure and a high rate of employee turnover will affect the organization adversely.
Initiative. Allowing all personnel to show their initiative in some way is a source of strength for the organization. Even though it may well involve a sacrifice of ‘personal vanity’ on the part of many managers.
Esprit de Corps. Management must foster the morale of its employees. He further suggests that: “real talent is needed to coordinate effort, encourage keenness, use each person’s abilities, and reward each one’s merit without arousing possible jealousies and disturbing harmonious relations.”

Systemantics: A systems' view of everything

2009-03-22T10:39:00.003+02:00

Systemantics (retitled The Systems Bible in its third edition) is a text by John Gall in which he proposes several "laws" of systems' failures. Systemantics is a play on words on semantics and systems display antics.

It is written in the style of a serious academic work, and is often mistakenly cited as such. The content is similar in style to Murphy's Law and the Peter Principle, which are both referenced in the work.

Some laws of Systemantics

The Primal Scenario or Basic Datum of Experience: Systems in general work poorly or not at all. (Complicated systems seldom exceed five percent efficiency.)
The Fundamental Theorem: New systems generate new problems.
Laws of Growth: Systems tend to grow, and as they grow, they encroach.
The Generalized Uncertainty Principle: Complicated systems produce unexpected outcomes. The total behavior of large systems cannot be predicted.
Le Chatelier's Principle: Complex systems tend to oppose their own proper function. As systems grow in complexity, they tend to oppose their stated function.
Functionary's Falsity: People in systems do not actually do what the system says they are doing.
The Fundamental Law of Administrative Workings (F.L.A.W.): Things are what they are reported to be. The real world is what it is reported to be. (That is, the system takes as given that things are as reported, regardless of the true state of affairs.)
Systems attract systems-people. (For every human system, there is a type of person adapted to thrive on it or in it.)
The bigger the system, the narrower and more specialized the interface with individuals.
A complex system cannot be "made" to work. It either works or it doesn't.
A simple system, designed from scratch, sometimes works.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.
A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
The Functional Indeterminacy Theorem (F.I.T.): In complex systems, malfunction and even total non-function may not be detectable for long periods, if ever.
The Newtonian Law of Systems Inertia: A system that performs a certain way will continue to operate in that way regardless of the need or of changed conditions.
Systems develop goals of their own the instant they come into being.
Intrasystem [sic] goals come first.
The Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem (F.F.T.): Complex systems usually operate in failure mode.
The mode of failure of a complex system cannot ordinarily be predicted from its structure.
The crucial variables are discovered by accident.
The larger the system, the greater the probability of unexpected failure.
"Success" or "Function" in any system may be failure in the larger or smaller systems to which the system is connected.
The Fail-Safe Theorem: When a Fail-Safe system fails, it fails by failing to fail safe.
Complex systems tend to produce complex responses (not solutions) to problems.
Great advances are not produced by systems designed to produce great advances.
The Vector Theory of Systems: Systems run better when designed to run downhill.
Loose systems last longer and work better. (Efficient systems are dangerous to themselves and to others.)
As systems grow in size, they tend to lose basic functions.
The larger the system, the less the variety in the product.
Control of a system is exercised by the element with the greatest variety of behavioral responses.
Colossal systems foster colossal errors.
Choose your systems with care.

Advanced systems theory

1. Everything is a system.

2. Everything is part of a larger system.

3. The universe is infinitely systematized, both upward (larger systems) and downward (smaller systems).

4. All systems are infinitely complex.

What is Good Design

2009-03-21T10:28:00.001+02:00

What Is Good Design:

Good Is Sustainable
Good Is Accessible
Good Is Functional
Good Is Well Made
Good Is Emotionally Resonant
Good Is Enduring
Good Is Socially Beneficial
Good Is Beautiful
Good Is Ergonomic
Good Is Affordable

"Like's" & "don't like's" in a Resume

2009-03-13T17:58:00.003+02:00

Here is a list of "likes" and don't like's" in a Resume (found it in Guy Kawasaki's blog)

Here’s What I Like:

A direct style: use blunt, short words. Most resumes are scanned, not read.
Looks: like a middle-aged man’s apartment. Nice and tidy.
Objective: be direct; your objective is the job you’re applying for.
Verbs ending in “d”: shipped, launched, built, sold.
Results: not responsibilities or experience — but what responsibilities and experience helped you accomplish.
Bullets: 3 ñ 4 results per job.
Numbers: increased traffic from Google 230%, decreased ad spending 40%.
Grades: your GPA, even if it was ten years ago, if it’s over 3.5.
Reviews: ratings from your last review, especially useful if you worked for a tough grader like Microsoft
Honors: we’ll interview an employee-of-the-quarter, every time.
Promotions: if your role changes, highlight that as two jobs.
LinkedIn endorsements: persuasive, even from your friends; excerpted & linked.
A link to your blog: a blog gives you online street cred. For some, it is your resume .
Themes: whether you care about customer service or agile software, tell a consistent story from job to job.
Hobbies: I always want to meet people with fun hobbies. And that’s all a resume is: a request for a meeting. At Plumtree, we received a resume from a Playboy model. A colleague forwarded it to me with a note reading, “I’ve never asked you for anything beforeÖ” I feel the same way about cyclists.
Two pages, max: if you’re under 30, one page.
Anything you did that showed initiative or passion. Eagle Scout. Math Olympics.
Email to the CEO: it takes chutzpah & resourcefulness to go straight to the top. The email address is easy to guess.
Customization: tailor your resume & especially the cover letter to the job.
Completed degrees: I’ve hired plenty of folks a few credits shy of a degree. Some were great; many couldn’t finish what they started. If you have time now, finish your degree.
Gmail address: or your own domain. Nothing says “totally out of it” like an AOL address.

Here’s What I Don’t Like:

Churn: stints at two or more employers of less than two years.
List of generic skills: just show what you actually accomplished at each job.
Typos or misspellings: About half the resumes I get are addressed to “RedFin.” For the other words, spell-check!
Photos: my favorite was of a candidate in tennis whites with a racket.
“Proven”: as in “proven leadership.” We all still have something to prove.
Printed resumes: email a Word document, web page or PDF.
Buzzwords: search bots love it, actual people don’t.
Wordiness: yes, this is the pot calling the kettle black…

But this is just one person’s (very opinionated) opinion

Read more: "How to Change the World" - http://blog.guykawasaki.com/#ixzz09eNzK1Mf

The Cretan Runner

2009-03-13T14:26:00.002+02:00

George Psychoundakis died on the 29 January, 2006, at Canea. His obituary appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 18 February 2006. I have included the whole obituary below. A brave man.

George Psychoundakis was best known for his extraordinary account of clandestine life in the Resistance after the German occupation of his island in 1941; the book was translated into English by Patrick (now Sir Patrick) Leigh Fermor, and enjoyed success in Britain as The Cretan Runner.

George Psychoundakis was born on November 3 1920 at the village of Asi Gonia, perched high in a mountain pass in central Crete. He was the eldest of four children, born to a family whose only possessions were a single-room house and a few sheep and goats.

Education at the village school was basic; but unlike most of his fellows George learnt to write as well as read, and gleaned what learning he could from books lent by the schoolteacher and the village priest. When the German invasion of Crete began, he was 21, a light , wiry, elfin figure who could move among the mountains with speed and agility. While the Germans imposed their rule with the utmost brutality, Psychoundakis was among the many who guided straggling Allied soldiers over the mountains to the south coast, from where they could be evacuated.

As the Resistance grew more organised, Psychoundakis became a runner, carrying messages, wireless sets, batteries and weapons between villages and secret wireless stations, always on foot, always in danger, often exhausted and hungry, over some of the most precipitous terrain in Europe. It was gruelling work, but in an interview many years later Psychoundakis made light of the hundreds of miles he covered at a run: "I felt as if I were flying, so light and easy - just like drinking a cup of coffee."

Patrick Leigh Fermor, one of a handful of SOE officers whose job it was to co-ordinate the Cretan resistance, first met Psychoundakis at the end of July 1942 in a rocky hide-out above the village of Vaphe. The messages Psychoundakis was carrying were twisted into tiny billets and hidden away in his clothes: "They were produced," wrote Leigh Fermor, "with a comic kind of conjuror's flourish, after grotesquely furtive glances over the shoulder and fingers laid on lips in a caricature of clandestine security precautions that made us all laugh." His clothes were in rags, one of his patched boots was held together with a length of wire - but his humour and cheerfulness were infectious. Humour and danger went hand in hand. Psychoundakis told how a couple of German soldiers decided to help him with an overladen donkey, whish was carrying a heavy wireless set under bags of wheat. The Germans beat the poor creature so hard that Psychoundakis was afraid they would knock off the saddle-bags but mercifully their attention was drawn to some village girls, and the soldiers started flirting with them instead. He also describes British officers with wry amusement - one had "pyjamas, a washbasin, and a thousand and two mysterious objects. He wore a row of medals on his breast, and had a rucksack full of geological books which he studied all day long."

At the same time, the harshness of everyday life was ever-present. Near starvation at one point with another SOE officer, Jack Smith-Hughes, Psychoundakis described how they picked broken snail shells off blades of grass and ate them, pretending that each was more delicious than the last. A bed of springy branches in a dry cave was a luxury: George spent many a night freezing on a rain-soaked mountainside, listening out for German search-parties, knowing what they would do if he were caught. Tales of torture, burning villages and summary executions were all too familiar. On the one occasion he visited England, in 1955, Psychoundakis was awarded the King's Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom. yet at the end of the war, the Greek authorities had taken a very different view of the man who had done so much for the Cretan resistance. Psychoundakis's paperwork was not in order, so he was arrested and imprisoned as a deserter.

Months of bitterness, misery and humiliation followed in the jails of Piraeus and Macedonia. In the end he was released, though there was little comfort for him at home. His family's flock had been stolen during the Occupation, they were poorer than ever, and Psychoundakis was now the chief bread-winner. When Leigh Fermor caught up with him for a few days in Crete in 1951, he was working as a charcoal burner. He told Leigh Fermor, who recorded their meeting in the introduction to The Cretan Runner, that while in prison he had begun to write down everything he could remember about the Occupation. On his release he got a job building roads, and lived in a little cave in the hills. Here he continued his writing by the light of an oil-lamp. Leigh Fermor asked if he could see the results. "Without a word he dived into his knap-sack, fished out five thick exercise books tied in a bundle, and handed them over." As he read them, Leigh Fermor recognised Psychoundakis's manuscript as a unique document and made up his mind to translate it. At a time when dozens of books by ex-officers were filling the bookshops, this was one of the first to reveal the occupation from the point of view of the local inhabitant - and the fact that it was written with such truthfulness and honesty made it all the more impressive. The book appeared first in English, translated by Leigh Fermor, in 1955. It was published in Hungarian in 1981, and in Greek in 1986.

Psychoundakis's resilient sense of humour never failed, though bouts of bad luck continued to dog his life. With the money he earned from The Cretan Runner he bought some grazing land, and became immediately embroiled in a dispute with neighbours - "but if I'd bought land by the sea, I'd be a rich man now!" In later years he looked after the German cemetery in Canea. A German War Graves Commissioner came to see it one day, and was impressed by how well Psychoundakis looked after it- though he was surprised that he spoke no German. "Well, there's not much opportunity to learn it here," said Psychoundakis. "All the Germans I look after are dead."

He never stopped reading and writing. After The Cretan Runner he wrote a book on the island's legends and customs, Eagle's Nest in Crete, and translated Hesiod's Georgic Works and Days. His most ambitious project was the translation of The Odyssey from other prose translations into Cretan verse, based on the pattern of The Erotokritos. This celebrated 17th-century Cretan epic, composed in rhyming couplets of 15 syllables, rivals Homer in length - though Psychoundakis's father, despite being illiterate, could recite it word-perfect. When he had finished, Patrick Leigh Fermor asked what he was going to do next: "He looked surprised at the question, and answered, "Oh, The Iliad." For his translations of Homer, Psychoundakis was honoured by the Academy of Athens.

George Psychoundakis is survived by his wife Sofia, their son and two daughters.

Patrick Leigh Fermor writes:

George was a one-off, as they say. Nobody was remotely like him. Touchstone and Ariel spring to mind, and there is a dash of Kim. It was the oddity, independence, charm, curiosity and imagination that gave him the cover-name of "Changeling" in our dispatches from Crete. It seemed strange that someone so inventive could, when he took pen in hand, be so truthful, and it was puzzling that the war-like but unlettered mountain-world could give birth to anyone so gifted. His pluck, flair and defiance of fatigue and danger were of the greatest help in many contingencies, particularly in rushing signals from cave after cave arranging the departure of General Kreipe. He was happiest when writing. His last work was a poetic dialogue with Charon who, in modern Greek folklore, is not only the ferryman of the Styx, but also Death himself. We never lost touch.

Three things you need if you want more customers

2009-03-07T22:25:00.000+02:00

From Seth's blog:

If you want to grow, you need new customers. And if you want new customers, you need three things:

1. A group of possible customers you can identify and reach.
2. A group with a problem they want to solve using your solution.
3. A group with the desire and ability to spend money to solve that problem.

You'd be amazed at how often new businesses or new ventures have none of these. The first one is critical, because if you don't have permission, or knowledge, or word of mouth, you're invisible.

The Zune didn't have #2.

A service aimed at creating videos for bestselling authors doesn't have #1.

And a counseling service helping people cut back on Big Mac consumption doesn't have #3.

Warren Buffet's Acquisition criteria

2009-03-06T11:11:00.003+02:00

This is from the BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC.2008 annual report:

We are eager to hear from principals or their representatives about businesses that meet all of the following criteria:

Large purchases (at least $75 million of pre-tax earnings, unless the business will fit into one of our existing units),
Demonstrated consistent earning power (future projections are of no interest to us, nor are “turnaround” situations),
Businesses earning good returns on equity while employing little or no debt,
Management in place (we can’t supply it),
Simple businesses (if there’s lots of technology, we won’t understand it),
An offering price (we don’t want to waste by talking, even preliminarily, about a transaction when price is unknown).

The larger the company, the greater will be our interest: We would like to make an acquisition in the $5-20 billion range.
We are not interested, however, in receiving suggestions about purchases we might make in the general stock market.
We will not engage in unfriendly takeovers.
We can promise complete confidentiality and a very fast answer—customarily within five minutes as to whether we’re interested. We prefer to buy for cash, but will consider issuing stock when we receive as much in intrinsic business value as we give.
We don’t participate in auctions.

comment: a good guide if you had a lot of cash!

The 19 Es of EXCELLENCE

2009-03-05T16:26:00.001+02:00

Enthusiasm. (Be an irresistible force of nature!)
Energy. (Be fire! Light fires!)
Exuberance. (Vibrate—cause earthquakes!)
Execution. (Do it! Now! Get it done! Barriers are baloney! Excuses are for wimps! Accountability is gospel! Adhere to the Bill Parcells doctrine: "Blame nobody! Expect nothing! Do something!")
Empowerment. (Respect and appreciation rule! Always ask, "What do you think?" Then listen! Then let go and liberate! Then celebrate!)
Edginess. (Perpetually dancing at the frontier, and a little or a lot beyond.)
Enraged. (Determined to challenge & change the status quo!)
Engaged. (Addicted to MBWA/Managing By Wandering Around. In touch. Always.)
Electronic. (Partners with the world 60/60/24/7 via electronic community building and entanglement of every sort. Crowdsourcing rules!)
Encompassing. (Relentlessly pursue diverse opinions—the more diversity the merrier! Diversity per se "works"!)
Emotion. (The alpha. The omega. The essence of leadership. The essence of sales. The essence of marketing. The essence. Period. Acknowledge it.)
Empathy. (Connect, connect, connect with others' reality and aspirations! "Walk in the other person’s shoes"—until the soles have holes!)
Experience. (Life is theater! Make every activity-contact memorable! Standard: "Insanely Great"/Steve Jobs; "Radically Thrilling"/BMW.)
Eliminate. (Keep it simple!)
Errorprone. (Ready! Fire! Aim! Try a lot of stuff and make a lot of booboos and then try some more stuff and make some more booboos—all of it at the speed of light!)
Evenhanded. (Straight as an arrow! Fair to a fault! Honest as Abe!)
Expectations. (Michelangelo: "The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." Amen!)
Eudaimonia. (Pursue the highest of human moral purpose—the core of Aristotle's philosophy. Be of service. Always.)
Excellence. (The only standard! Never an exception! Start now! No excuses! If not Excellence, what? If not Excellence now, when?)

Are you a professional?

2009-03-05T16:21:00.002+02:00

"So learn this as a first lesson about life. The only successful beings in any field, including living itself, are those who have a professional viewpoint and make themselves and ARE professionals" — L. Ron Hubbard

A professional learns every aspect of the job. An amateur skips the learning process whenever possible.
A professional carefully discovers what is needed and wanted. An amateur assumes what others need and want.
A professional looks, speaks and dresses like a professional. An amateur is sloppy in appearance and speech.
A professional keeps his or her work area clean and orderly. An amateur has a messy, confused or dirty work area.
A professional is focused and clear-headed. An amateur is confused and distracted.
A professional does not let mistakes slide by. An amateur ignores or hides mistakes.
A professional jumps into difficult assignments. An amateur tries to get out of difficult work.
A professional completes projects as soon as possible. An amateur is surrounded by unfinished work piled on top of unfinished work.
A professional remains level-headed and optimistic. An amateur gets upset and assumes the worst.
A professional handles money and accounts very carefully. An amateur is sloppy with money or accounts.
A professional faces up to other people’s upsets and problems. An amateur avoids others’ problems.
A professional uses higher emotional tones: Enthusiasm, cheerfulness, interest, contentment. An amateur uses lower emotional tones: anger, hostility, resentment, fear, victim.
A professional persists until the objective is achieved. An amateur gives up at the first opportunity.
A professional produces more than expected. An amateur produces just enough to get by.
A professional produces a high-quality product or service. An amateur produces a medium-to-low quality product or service.
A professional earns high pay. An amateur earns low pay and feels it’s unfair.
A professional has a promising future. An amateur has an uncertain future.

The first step to making yourself a professional is to decide you ARE a professional.

Are you a professional?

Good boss - bad boss

2009-03-04T17:31:00.002+02:00

Tool Kit

Good Boss, Bad Boss. Which Are You?

By PAUL B. BROWN

Maybe it is not them.

If employee turnover and absenteeism within the company are too high, and productivity and morale too low, the person in charge may be the one at fault.

To find out how good — or bad — a boss you are, the National Federation of Independent Business, a small business advocacy group, suggests asking yourself these questions:

1. Have you ever publicly criticized an employee?

2. Do you take credit for your employees’ work?

3. Do your employees fear you?

4. Do you expect employees to do what you tell them without question?

5. Do you believe employees should know what to do without you telling them or providing guidelines?

6. Are you a yeller?

7. Do you demean employees as a form of punishment?

8. Do you play favorites?

9. Do you hate delegating?

10. Do you check everyone’s work?

According to the answer key, the more “yes” answers, the greater the likelihood you are a bad boss.

A SHORT CHECKLIST Given that Trevor Gay wrote a book called “Simplicity Is the Key” it is not surprising that he has come up with a basic list of the differences between good and bad bosses.

¶ “Inspired confidence

¶ Were humble

¶ Had integrity

¶ Knew what they were talking about

¶ Let me get on with things

¶ Were always there when I needed help

¶ Usually said, ‘Yes, try it.’”

His worst bosses, he said, had these deficiencies:

¶ “Never seemed to be around when I needed them

¶ Always asked me to justify what I wanted to do

¶ Always wanted to know what I was doing

¶ Often said ‘no, we can’t do that’

¶ Gave the impression of being distrustful

¶ Didn’t smile much

¶ Talked about themselves a lot.”

HOW TO BE A BAD BOSS Paul Lemberg, an executive coach, has compiled a list of ways weak bosses can hinder an employee’s performance.

His advice to those bosses is to "stop immediately," if they are doing any of the following:

¶ You don't give employees a clear and compelling company direction. When people align themselves with the company’s goals, they are free to invent, to improvise, to innovate, to inspire each other.

¶ You say important things only once. If the message is important, it is worth repeating.

¶ You don’t hold employees accountable.

¶ You concentrate on trying to improve employees’ shortcomings. “Bad bosses waste too much energy on employee makeovers. Don’t worry about weaknesses — instead, figure out what employees are really good at and train them to be brilliant.”

TAKE THE QUIZ Working America, which is affiliated with the A.F.L.-C.I.O., writes on its Web site that it works “against wrong-headed priorities favoring the rich and corporate special interests over America’s well-being.”

That apparently does not keep them from having a sense of humor.

The organization has created a 10-question quiz to help employees figure how bad their boss is.

The quiz presents a situation and then asks if it sounds “like something your boss would do.”

For example, “someone in your family has died unexpectedly,” it says. “You are devastated, but feel touched when your normally cheap boss sends flowers to the funeral. The next month you find out your boss has taken the money for flowers out of your paycheck.”

The Web site says questions like this one are based on real events.

LAST CALL Writing in Inc., Leigh Buchanan offers several signs to bosses that their employees probably hate them. These are our two favorites:

“You never see people walk by. Employees would rather circumnavigate the entire office to get to the coffee machine or bathroom than take the shortcut past your door and risk being invited in.”

Employees do not volunteer for the boss’s pet projects. It could be because the idea is bad, and they are afraid to say that. Or the idea may be good, but they are petrified of what will happen if they let the boss down. Or since it is the boss’s pet project, he will probably work on it as well. “Which means more time spent ...gulp ...with you.”

Business strategy: the 48 things that matter

2009-03-04T17:24:00.002+02:00

An excellent framework for any business

The Heart of Business Strategy:
48 Things That Matter

by Tom Peters

"Thank you." Minimum several times a day. Measure it.
"Thank you" to everyone even peripherally involved in some activity—especially those "deep in the hierarchy."
Smile. Work on it.
Apologize. Even if "they" are "mostly" to blame.
Jump all over those who play the "blame game."
Hire enthusiasm.
Low enthusiasm: No hire. Any job.
Hire optimists. Everywhere. ("Positive outlook on life," not mindless optimism.)
Hiring: Would you like to go to lunch with him-her. 100% of jobs.
Hire for good manners.
Do not reject "trouble makers"—that is those who are uncomfortable with the status quo.
Expose all would-be hires to something unexpected-weird. Observe their reaction.
Overwhelm response to even the smallest screw-ups.
Become a student of all you will meet with. Big time.
Hang out with interesting new people. Measure it.
Lunch with folks in other functions. Measure it.
Listen. Hear. Become a serious student of listening-hearing.
Work on everyone's listening skills. Practice.
Become a student of information extraction-interviewing.
Become a student of presentation giving. Formal. Short and spontaneous.
Incredible care in 1st line supervisor selection.
World's best training for 1st line supervisors.
Construct small leadership opportunities for junior people within days of starting on the job.
Insane care in all promotion decisions.
Promote "people people" for all managerial jobs. Finance-logistics-R&D as much as, say, sales.
Hire-promote for demonstrated curiosity. Check their past commitment to continuous learning.
Small "d" diversity. Rich mixes for any and all teams.
Hire women. Roughly 50% women on exec team.
Exec team "looks like" customer population, actual and desired.
Focus on creating products for and selling to women.
Focus on creating products for and selling to boomers-geezers.
Work on first and last impressions.
Walls display tomorrow's aspirations, not yesterday's accomplishments.
Simplify systems. Constantly.
Insist that almost all material be covered by a 1-page summary. Absolutely no longer.
Practice decency.
Add "We are thoughtful in all we do" to corporate values list. Number 1 force for customer loyalty, employee satisfaction.
Make some form of employee growth (for all) a formal part of values set. Above customer satisfaction. Steal from RE/MAX: "We are a life success company."
Flowers.
Celebrate "small wins." Often. Perhaps a "small win of the day."
Manage your calendar religiously: Does it accurately reflect your espoused priorities?
Use a "calendar friend" who's not very friendly to help you with this.
Review your calendar: Work assiduously on your "To don'ts"—stuff that distracts.
Bosses, especially near the top: Formally cultivate one advisor whose role is to tell you the truth. Regularly!
Commit to Excellence.
Talk up Excellence.
Put "Excellence in all we do" in the values set.
Measure everyone on demonstrated commitment to Excellence.

Leadership from TRIBES

2009-02-27T22:48:00.002+02:00

Insights on Leadership from Seth Godin's book TRIBES:

“In other words, if everyone could do it [be a leader], they would, and it wouldn’t be worth much.
It’s uncomfortable to stand up in front of strangers.
It’s uncomfortable to propose an idea that might fail.
It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.
It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.

If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader.

Leadership is a choice. It’s the choice to not do nothing."

Finding the lost city

2009-02-27T17:05:00.003+02:00

Finding the lost city

Does the Amazon jungle conceal a vanished empire?

By David Grann | February 22, 2009

In 1925, the legendary British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett ventured into the Amazon, vowing to make one of the most important archeological discoveries in history. He was searching for an ancient civilization, which he had named, simply, the City of Z.

Ever since the Spanish conquistadores descended the Amazon River, in 1542, perhaps no region on the planet had so ignited the imagination - or lured so many men to their death. For centuries, the conquistadores had searched the jungle for the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. The kingdom, which the conquistadores had heard about from Indians, was said to be so plentiful in gold that its inhabitants ground the metal into powder and blew it through "hollow canes upon their naked bodies." (El Dorado literally means the Gilded Man.) Thousands had died looking for this golden realm.

Yet after a toll of suffering and death worthy of Joseph Conrad, most archeologists had concluded that El Dorado was no more than an illusion. Many modern scientists have assumed that no complex civilization could have emerged in so hostile an environment, where the soil is agriculturally poor, mosquitoes transport lethal diseases, and predators lurk amid the forest canopy. The Amazon's brutal conditions have fueled one of the most enduring theories of human development: environmental determinism. According to this theory, even if some early humans eked out an existence in the harshest conditions on the planet, they rarely advanced beyond a few primitive tribes. Society, in other words, is a captive of geography.

Fawcett, however, was convinced that the Amazon wilderness - an area virtually the size of the continental United States - concealed the remnants of at least one, and

probably more, highly advanced civilizations. He was the last of a breed of explorers to venture into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose, and he spent nearly two decades gathering evidence to prove his case and pinpointing a location. With his 21-year-old son, Jack, and Jack's best friend, Raleigh Rimell, Fawcett finally set off into the Brazilian jungle to find the City of Z. Then he and his party vanished, giving rise to what has been described as "the greatest exploration mystery of the 20th century."

Fawcett had warned that no one should follow in his wake due to the danger, but scores of scientists, explorers, and adventurers plunged into the wilderness, determined to recover the Fawcett party, alive or dead, and to return with proof of Z. In February 1955, the New York Times claimed that Fawcett's disappearance had set off more searches "than those launched through the centuries to find the fabulous El Dorado." Some were wiped out by starvation and disease, or retreated in despair; others were murdered by tribesmen firing arrows dipped in poison. Then there were those adventurers who had gone to find Fawcett and, like him, simply disappeared in the forests that travelers had long ago christened the "green hell."

History has been as unsparing of Fawcett as was the jungle. Although his legend helped inspire Arthur Conan Doyle's novel "The Lost World" and once spawned radio plays, poems, documentaries, movies, stamps, children's stories, comic books, ballads, stage plays, and graphic novels, Fawcett has increasingly been forgotten. Most scholars have dismissed him as a crank who sacrificed his life, and that of his son, in pursuit of a mad fantasy.

Yet in recent years archeologists have begun to find evidence of what Fawcett had always claimed: ancient ruins buried deep in the Amazon, in places ranging from the Bolivian flood plains to the Brazilian forests. These ruins include enormous man-made earth mounds, plazas, geometrically aligned causeways, bridges, elaborately engineered canal systems, and even an apparent astronomical observatory tower made of huge granite rocks that has been dubbed "the Stonehenge of the Amazon."

The discoveries are not only transforming our understanding of one of the most daring and eccentric explorers ever to set foot in the New World. They are challenging long-held assumptions about the Amazon as a Hobbesian place where only small primitive tribes could ever have existed, and about the limits the environment placed on the rise of early civilizations. And these revelations are exploding our perceptions of what the Americas really looked liked before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

The idea did not strike Fawcett like a bolt of lightning. Rather, the theory of Z developed over time, with one clue leading to the next. Fawcett, who was born during the Victorian age of exploration, had trained as a surveyor at the Royal Geographical Society in London, the same place that had helped launch such explorers as Richard Burton and David Livingstone. In 1906, after serving as a British secret agent in Africa, Fawcett had been recruited by Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru to map the interior of the Amazon. The region was still so unexplored that these countries could not even agree on their borders: They were simply speculative lines sketched through forests and mountains.

It was during these epic journeys - journeys in which many of his men perished from disease and starvation - that Fawcett began to gather evidence of Z. Over a span of nearly two decades, he made contact with various unknown tribes, documenting how they had brilliantly adapted to the conditions in the jungle. They often used the Amazonian flood plains, which were more fertile than terra firma, to grow crops, and relied on elaborate ways of hunting and fishing. As a result, they were able to generate enough food to sustain larger populations - a precursor to any sort of complex society with divisions of labor and political hierarchies such as chiefdoms and kingdoms. "Food problems never bothered them," Fawcett said.

Fawcett also studied the 16th- and 17th-century chronicles of the El Dorado hunters. Even though the conquistadores had not found a golden kingdom, they had reported seeing "cities that glistened in white," with temples, public squares, palisade walls, causeways, and exquisite artifacts. Because later explorers never came across similar settlements - or indeed any large populations - it was assumed these descriptions, like El Dorado itself, were simply products of the conquistadores' fervid imaginations.

But once while Fawcett was climbing a desolate mound of earth above the flood plains of the Bolivian Amazon, he noticed something sticking out of the ground. He scooped it into his hand: it was a shard of pottery. He started to scour the soil. Virtually everywhere he scratched, he later wrote, he turned up bits of ancient, brittle pottery. He thought the craftsmanship was as refined as anything from ancient Greece or Rome or China. "Wherever there are 'alturas,' that is high ground above the plains" in the Amazon basin, Fawcett said, "there are artifacts." And that wasn't all: extending between these alturas, there appeared to be some sort of geometrically aligned paths. They looked, he could swear, like "roads" and "causeways."

Still, Fawcett struggled to make sense of his own findings. The notion of a complex civilization in the Amazon contradicted the two ethnological paradigms that had prevailed since the first encounter between Europeans and Native Americans, more than 400 years earlier. Though some of the first conquistadores were in awe of the civilizations that Native Americans had developed, many theologians debated whether these dark-skinned, scantily clad peoples were, in fact, human; for how could the descendants of Adam and Eve have wandered so far, and how could the biblical prophets have been ignorant of them? In the mid-16th century, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, one of the Holy Roman Emperor's chaplains, argued that the Indians were "half men" who should be treated as natural slaves.

At the time, the most forceful critic of this genocidal paradigm was Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican friar who had traveled throughout the Americas. In a famous debate with Sepúlveda and in a series of treatises, Las Casas tried to prove, once and for all, that Indians were equal humans ("Are these not men? Do they not have rational souls?"), and to condemn those "pretending to be Christians" who "wiped them from the face of the earth." In the process, however, he contributed to a conception of the Indians that became an equal staple of European ethnology: the "noble" savage. According to Las Casas, the Indians were "the simplest people in the world," "without malice or guile," who are "totally uninterested in worldly power."

Although in Fawcett's era both conceptions remained popular in scholarly and popular literature, they were now filtered through a radical new scientific theory on the origins of humankind: evolution. Victorians now attempted to make sense of human diversity not in theological terms but in biological ones. A popular anthropology manual, which Fawcett studied, included chapters on "Anatomy and Physiology," "Hair," "Colour," Odour," "Physical Powers," "Senses," and "Heredity." The Victorians wanted to know, in effect, why some apes had evolved into English gentlemen and why some hadn't.

Fawcett was deeply influenced by such racist ideas; his writings are rife with images of Indians as "jolly children" and "ape-like" savages. And he constantly struggled to reconcile what he saw with everything he had been taught. The only thing he was certain of was that the Amazon and its people were not what everyone assumed them to be. Too much evidence indicated that the jungle had once been the center of a great civilization.

After Fawcett disappeared, many scientists no longer doubted his theory on biological grounds. The Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in Peru had obviously produced extraordinary cities, disproving any notion that Native Americans were somehow "half men" physically incapable of such feats. Instead, many scholars assumed that the Amazon jungle was simply too inhospitable to sustain a sophisticated society. Biological determinism had increasingly given way to environmental determinism. And the Amazon - the great "counterfeit paradise," as the archeologist Betty Meggers famously coined it - was the most vivid proof of the Malthusian limits that the environment placed on civilizations.

And then slowly it began to happen. After many archeologists had ignored the Amazon, assuming nothing of import would be found, a small group of revisionist scholars started to visit the region. Unlike their predecessors, they were often aided by an array of sophisticated tools, including ground-penetrating radar, satellite imagery to map sites, and remote sensors that can pinpoint buried artifacts. And what they found, in the words of one archeologist, was "earth shattering."

In the last few years, a team of researchers led by the archeologist Michael Heckenberger uncovered 20 pre-Columbian settlements in the Xingu region of the southern basin of the Amazon - the very region where Fawcett believed he would find the City of Z and where he disappeared. These settlements, which were occupied roughly between 800 and 1600 AD, included houses and moats and palisade walls. There were causeways and roads, which connected the settlements together. There were plazas laid out along cardinal points, from east to west, and roads positioned at the same geometric angles. (Fawcett had reported that Indians told him legends that described "many streets set at right angles to one another." ) According to the scientists, each cluster of settlements contained anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 people, which means that the larger communities were the size of many medieval European cities.

"These people had a cultural aesthetic of monumentality," Heckenberger said. "They liked to have beautiful roads and plazas and bridges."

Other scientists are fueling this revolution in archeology, which is upending the view of the Amazon as a place that could never sustain what Fawcett had envisioned: a prosperous, glorious civilization. Anna Roosevelt, a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt, who is an archeologist at the University of Illinois, has uncovered in a cave near Santarém, in the Brazilian Amazon, the remains of a settlement at least 10,000 years old - about twice as old as scientists had estimated the human presence in the Amazon.

The settlement is so ancient that it undercuts the long-held theory that the Americas were first populated by the Clovis people, who crossed the Bering Strait from Asia at the end of the Ice Age, settled in North America around 11,000 years ago, and then gradually migrated down to Central and South America.

In the cave and at a nearby riverbank settlement, Roosevelt made another astonishing discovery: pottery that dates to 7,500 years ago, predating by more than 2,000 years the earliest pottery found in the Andes or Mesoamerica. This means that the Amazon may have been the earliest ceramic-producing region in all the Americas, and that, as Fawcett radically argued, the region was possibly even a wellspring of South American civilization - that an advanced culture had spread outward, rather than vice versa.

Using aerial photography and satellite imaging, scientists have also begun to find enormous man-made earth mounds and causeways across the Amazon - in particular in the Bolivian flood plains where Fawcett first found his shards of pottery. Clark Erickson, an anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania who has studied these earthworks in Bolivia, says that the mounds allowed the Indians to continue farming during seasonal floods. To create them, he said, required extraordinary labor and engineering: tons of soil had to be transported, the course of rivers altered, canals excavated, and interconnecting roadways and settlements built. In many ways, he said, the mounds "rival the Egyptian pyramids."

Some scientists now believe the rain forest may have sustained millions of people. And for the first time scholars are reevaluating the El Dorado chronicles that Fawcett used to piece together his theory of Z. Though no one has found evidence of the fantastical gold that the conquistadores had dreamed of, the anthropologist Neil Whitehead said, "With some caveats, El Dorado really did exist."

These scholars say they are just beginning the process of understanding this ancient world - and, like the theory of who first populated the Americas, all the traditional paradigms must be reevaluated. "Anthropologists," Heckenberger said, "made the mistake of coming into the Amazon in the 20th century and seeing only small tribes and saying, 'Well, that's all there is.' The problem is that, by then, many Indian populations had already been wiped out by what was essentially a holocaust from European contact. That's why the first Europeans in the Amazon described such massive settlements that, later, no one could ever find."

Fawcett often complained about his many detractors, about the "men of science" who had "in their day pooh-poohed the existence of the Americas - and, later, the idea of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Troy." He spoke of his vision of a majestic culture rising in the Amazon and radiating outward, before being finally overwhelmed and swallowed by the lianas and creepers and palms. And in his final letter, which was carried out of the jungle by an Indian runner before he vanished, Fawcett assured his wife: "You need have no fear of any failure."

Obama will drive now

2009-02-27T17:00:00.003+02:00

Excellent!

Imagination. Originallity, freshness

2009-02-16T13:19:00.002+02:00

Cultural dimensions in Management Theory

2008-12-22T18:35:00.002+02:00

According to Geert Hofstede, there is no such thing as a universal management method or management theory across the globe. Even the word 'management' has different origins and meanings in countries throughout the world. Management is not a phenomenon that can be isolated from other processes taking place in society. It interacts with what happens in the family, at school, in politics, and government. It is obviously also related to religion and to beliefs about science.

The cultural dimensions model of Geert Hofstede is a framework that describes five sorts (dimensions) of differences / value perspectives between national cultures:

power distance (the degree of inequality among people which the population of a country considers as normal)

individualism versus collectivism (the extent to which people feel they are supposed to take care for or to be cared for by themselves, their families or organizations they belong to)

masculinity versus femininity (the extent to which a culture is conducive to dominance, assertiveness and acquisition of things versus a culture which is more conducive to people, feelings and the quality of life)

uncertainty avoidance (the degree to which people in a country prefer structured over unstructured situations)

long-term versus short-term orientation (long-term: values oriented towards the future, like saving and persistence - short-term: values oriented towards the past and present, like respect for tradition and fulfilling social obligations)

To understand management in a country, one should have both knowledge and empathy with the entire local scene. However, the scores of the unique statistical survey that Hofstede carried out should make everybody aware that people in other countries may think, feel, and act very differently from yourself, even when confronted with basic problems of society. Any person dealing with Value Based Management or Corporate Strategy is well advised to bear the lessons from Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Theory constantly in mind (human beings have a tendency to think and feel and act from their own experiences), especially when working internationally.

The origin of the @

2008-10-28T19:10:00.004+02:00

The origin and use of the @ sign

In Germany, they call it Klammeraffe, the spider monkey. In Hebrew, it's called strudel, as in the rolled pastry. Its Italian nickname is chiocciola, for snail; in Russian, it's called sobaka, for little dog; and in Greece they call it the papaki, which means duckling. In the English-speaking world, however, we know this symbol, @, as the at sign.

Strictly speaking, by current Unicode standards, the official name for the @ symbol is the commercial at. Most folks didn't encounter the @ until they became regular e-mail users, which has led to a common misconception that the @ symbol was created for, if not e-mail, then at least computer software in general. Not so.

The @ symbol was included in the original ASCII character set in 1963, and ASCII was created largely for the benefit of teletype, not computer systems. (Although early computer developers found ASCII very handy.) Moreover, the original ASCII codifiers didn't generate the @ symbol from whole cloth, as this odd little be-swirled letter has appeared on typewriter keyboards since at least 1902. So where, exactly, did the @ symbol come from, and what did it mean before it found a use in e-mail addresses?

That explains where the @ symbol came from before e-mail, but surely both @ and e-mail have been synonymous since the latter was created. Again, not so. E-mail existed in various forms before it was ever associated with @ sign, and it took one particular techie to decide that the @ operator would be perfect for this then-new communications medium.

The developer in question is Ray Tomlinson, who worked on both ARPAnet, the precursor to the modern Internet, and TENEX, an early mainframe operating system. Tomlinson is often cited as the outright inventor of e-mail, a claim that is inaccurate and one that Tomlinson himself denies. The accolade which is due Tomlinson is that he sent the first Internet e-mail, and he was the first to use the @ sign as an address operator.

The first e-mail, by most accounts, was sent in 1965 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between users of the Compatible Timesharing System (CTSS) mainframe. CTSS users could post messages to each other, so that whenever the receiving user logged onto the mainframe, the message was waiting. (Actually, the new message was simply appended to a running message file, and each user got one, long, constantly updated message logfile.)

In 1971, Tomlinson was working on a similar message system for the TENEX operating system, called SNDMSG, as part of the ARPAnet team. He hit upon the idea of extending the functionality of SNDMSG to e-mail messages not to just users of the same mainframe, but to users of any mainframe connected to ARPAnet. In this case, he’d need an addressing system that indicated both the username and the host computer name. To combine these two data spaces, he chose the @ symbol because, in his words, “It made sense. At signs didn’t appear in names so there would be no ambiguity about where the separation between login name and host name occurred.”

Tomlinson sent the first Internet e-mail message in 1971 — he doesn’t recall exactly when, though it was most likely late summer or early fall. The e-mail traveled between two DEC mainframes sitting side by side, but which were connected exclusively through ARPAnet. Tomlinson tested the technology with a standard qwertyuiop-style nonsense message, but what Tomlinson describes as the first substantive message simply alerted all the local users to the availability of the new @ operator-enhanced ARPAnet e-mail — which is to say, it was a message from IT that e-mail was working. My, how little has changed in 37 years.

14 things to do if you are laid off from a tech job

2008-10-27T22:38:00.003+02:00

A post from Rafe Needleman, CNet

I saw a great piece of advice in a recent story on U.S. News & World Report called 10 things to do on the day after you're laid off: "Write a thank-you note to your former boss." I like that. It can't hurt, and if your boss hears of openings elsewhere, you're now that much more likely to get the referral.

Geeks and other tech employees are a little different from the vanilla workforce, though, so I wanted to put together a list of specific things that people in our part of the economy might want to consider if they're let go. Here's the rundown.

1. Get involved in an open-source project
It's where the most interesting and influential products are being developed, and more importantly, many open-source projects are filled with people who are also connected to companies that pay their engineers. Plus, obviously, working on a development project will keep you sharp and expand your skill set.

2. Go to start-up fairs
Wherever people are pitching new businesses, be there. They're all hiring. If not now, then soon. I am partial to the Under the Radar series (I helped start them and moderate at many of them), and there are several a year. Update: I just talked with the organizers of the next UTR event, which focuses on mobility startups, and they've created a special pink slip discount: $200 off admission, includes entry to the opening night reception for even more networking. There are 20 tickets at this rate.

3. Get project work
You may not have a daily gig, but you still have your skills, and there are people who need them. Head over to a project marketplace like oDesk or eLance and pick up some work.

4. Update your profiles
Go to your pages on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc., and let people know you are available for new projects. While you're at it, proactively send out notes to your trusted associates that you are looking for work. As we say here at CNET: "duh."

5. Learn some new skills
No, I don't mean to learn Rails if you're a Java guy. That's obvious. I mean cooking, rock climbing, riding a motorcycle--something that you didn't have the time to do while you were an FTE.

6. Answer some questions
Scan Friendfeed and Twitter Search for people asking questions in your areas of expertise, hang out in message boards on things you know stuff about. You'll see what's going on in the industry, you might be able to help people out (always worthwhile), and you might also land a tip for a gig.

7. Get a girlfriend or boyfriend
Don't let the fact that you have no job, per se, slow you down. You can still earn some dough. You will have more control over your schedule. And you can spend some of your newfound time with your new friend, assuming this friend doesn't have his or her own 18-hour-a-day engineering job.

8. Campaign in a swing state
Hurry up, though.

9. Take some time off
"Invest a little and travel to a seaside town in Mexico, even if it's just a few days. Mexico is easy to get to, it might be cheaper to live there, and lying on a beach is certainly not a bad way to contemplate what you want to do with the rest of your career. At the very least, you'll see people who get by on a lot less than we make."

10. Move out of the Bay Area
Just a thought: This is a very expensive place to live, and the economy is heavily tilted to tech. If you have other skills, you might find a better market for them elsewhere, and it will be less expensive to maintain your lifestyle. Plus, you can continue to do project work.

11. Buy a new rig
Yes, you're going to have to do the obvious and odious task of taking a financial inventory and cutting back on your expenses, but you will also need current tools to pick up projects. You'll be more positive about working on those projects if you're doing it on a shiny new system configured just the way you like.

12. Take pictures
Put your $1,500 dSLR to use by selling stock-art pictures of household objects to Fotolia, ShutterStock, iStockphoto, StockXpert, etc. "It's cheap for people to buy images compared to the traditional stock (photo) market, but it can be lucrative over time because images sell over and over. I've made money without trying too hard. But quality standards are going up, so you can't just upload any old crap. Brush up on your model releases."

13. Volunteer
"It can build new skills (like leadership), a new portfolio. Someone capable of making their kid's Boy Scout troop turn a profit suddenly looks a lot more proactive than the shlub who catches up on reruns while waiting for Craigslist to pay off."

14. Start your own company
If you have some savings and can afford to work for peanuts (or less), it's a great time to start a company. Without the annoying distraction of a booming economy, you can focus on building a product to solve a problem you know people will have again when the economy loosens up. There is still funding, even, for early-stage companies. What should you build? We leave that as an exercise for the reader.

China’s Rise Goes Beyond Gold Medals

2008-09-09T09:37:00.002+03:00

August 21, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

BEIJING

China has displaced the United States as the winner of the most Olympic gold medals this year. Get used to it.

Today, it’s the athletic surge that dazzles us, but China will leave a similar outsize footprint in the arts, in business, in science, in education.

The world we are familiar with, dominated by America and Europe, is a historical anomaly. Until the 1400s, the largest economies in the world were China and India, and forecasters then might have assumed that they would be the ones to colonize the Americas — meaning that by all rights this newspaper should be printed in Chinese or perhaps Hindi.

But then China and India both began to fall apart at just the time that Europe began to rise. China’s per-capita income was actually lower, adjusted for inflation, in the 1950s than it had been at the end of the Song Dynasty in the 1270s.

Now the world is reverting to its normal state — a powerful Asia — and we will have to adjust. Just as many Americans know their red wines and easily distinguish a Manet from a Monet, our children will become connoisseurs of pu-er tea and will know the difference between guanxi and Guangxi, the Qin and the Qing. When angry, they may even insult each other as “turtle’s eggs.”

During the rise of the West, Chinese culture constantly had to adapt. When the first Westerners arrived and brought their faith in the Virgin Mary, China didn’t have an equivalent female figure to work miracles — so Guan Yin, the God of Mercy, underwent a sex change and became the Goddess of Mercy.

Now it will be our turn to scramble to compete with a rising Asia.

This transition to Chinese dominance will be a difficult process for the entire international community, made more so by China’s prickly nationalism. China still sees the world through the prism of guochi, or national humiliation, and among some young Chinese success sometimes seems to have produced not so much national self-confidence as cockiness.

China’s intelligence agencies are becoming more aggressive in targeting America, including corporate secrets, and the Chinese military is busily funding new efforts to poke holes in American military pre-eminence. These include space weapons, cyberwarfare and technologies to threaten American aircraft carrier groups.

President Bush was roundly criticized for attending the Beijing Olympics, but, in retrospect, I think he was right to attend. The most important bilateral relationship in the world in the coming years will be the one between China and the United States, and Mr. Bush won enormous good will from the Chinese people by showing up.

Having won that political capital, though, Mr. Bush didn’t spend it. Mr. Bush should have spoken out more forcefully on behalf of human rights, including urging Beijing to stop shipping the weapons used for genocide in Darfur.

It’s a difficult balance to get right, but China’s determination to top the gold medal charts — and its overwhelming efforts to find and train the best athletes — bespeaks a larger desire for international respect and legitimacy. We can use that desire also to shame and coax better behavior out of China’s leaders.

When the Chinese government sentences two frail women in their late 70s to labor camp because they applied to hold a legal protest during the Olympics, as it just has, then that is an outrage to be addressed not by “silent diplomacy” but by pointing it out.

We also must recognize that informal pressures are becoming increasingly important. The most important figure in China-U.S. relations today isn’t the ambassador for either country; it is Yao Ming, the basketball player — and David Stern, the commissioner of the N.B.A., is second. The biggest force for democratization isn’t the Group of 7 governments, but is the millions of Chinese who study in the West and return — sometimes with green cards or blue passports, but always with greater expectations of freedom. China’s rise is sustained in part by the way the Communist Party has grudgingly, sometimes incompetently, adapted to these pressures for change.

On this visit, I dropped by the home of Bao Tong, a former senior Communist Party official who spent seven years in prison for challenging the hard-liners during the Tiananmen democracy movement. The guards who monitor him 24/7 let me through when I showed my Olympic press credentials.

Mr. Bao noted that Communist leaders used to actually believe in Communism; now they simply believe in Communist Party rule. He recalled that hard-liners used to fret about the danger of “peaceful evolution,” meaning a gradual shift to a Western-style political and economic system. “Now, in fact, what we have is peaceful evolution,” he noted.

That flexibility is one of China’s great strengths, and it’s one reason that the most important thing going on in the world today is the rise of China — in the Olympics and in almost every other facet of life.

Don't ask (in BEIJING)

2008-07-24T16:08:00.001+03:00

Preparing for the influx of Olympic visitors, authorities in Beijing published posters on bulletin boards around the forbidden city counseling locals against a wide range of potentially awkward conversation topics with foreigners.

The authorities (actually, the Propaganda (!) department) issued a list of "eight don't asks":

Don't ask about income or expenses,
don't ask about age,
don't ask about love life or marriage,
don't ask about health, don't ask about someone's home or address,
don't ask about personal experience,
don't ask about religious beliefs or political views,
don't ask what someone does

I wonder what's left to ask...The weather perhaps. And then there are probably so many "don't tells"

The ideal husband

2008-07-10T22:29:00.001+03:00

This is from an editorial by MAUREEN DOWD, in New York Times:

Father Pat Connor, a 79-year-old Catholic priest born in Australia and based in Bordentown, N.J., has spent his celibate life — including nine years as a missionary in India — mulling connubial bliss. His decades of marriage counseling led him to distill some “mostly common sense” advice about how to dodge mates who would maul your happiness.

“Hollywood says you can be deeply in love with someone and then your marriage will work,” the twinkly eyed, white-haired priest says. “But you can be deeply in love with someone to whom you cannot be successfully married.”

For 40 years, he has been giving a lecture — “Whom Not to Marry” — to high school seniors, mostly girls because they’re more interested.

“It’s important to do it before they fall seriously in love, because then it will be too late,” he explains. “Infatuation trumps judgment.”

I asked him to summarize his talk:

“Never marry a man who has no friends,” he starts. “This usually means that he will be incapable of the intimacy that marriage demands. I am always amazed at the number of men I have counseled who have no friends. Since, as the Hebrew Scriptures say, ‘Iron shapes iron and friend shapes friend,’ what are his friends like? What do your friends and family members think of him? Sometimes, your friends can’t render an impartial judgment because they are envious that you are beating them in the race to the altar. Envy beclouds judgment.

“Does he use money responsibly? Is he stingy? Most marriages that founder do so because of money — she’s thrifty, he’s on his 10th credit card.

“Steer clear of someone whose life you can run, who never makes demands counter to yours. It’s good to have a doormat in the home, but not if it’s your husband.

“Is he overly attached to his mother and her mythical apron strings? When he wants to make a decision, say, about where you should go on your honeymoon, he doesn’t consult you, he consults his mother. (I’ve known cases where the mother accompanies the couple on their honeymoon!)

“Does he have a sense of humor? That covers a multitude of sins. My mother was once asked how she managed to live harmoniously with three men — my father, brother and me. Her answer, delivered with awesome arrogance, was: ‘You simply operate on the assumption that no man matures after the age of 11.’ My father fell about laughing.

“A therapist friend insists that ‘more marriages are killed by silence than by violence.’ The strong, silent type can be charming but ultimately destructive. That world-class misogynist, Paul of Tarsus, got it right when he said, ‘In all your dealings with one another, speak the truth to one another in love that you may grow up.’

“Don’t marry a problem character thinking you will change him. He’s a heavy drinker, or some other kind of addict, but if he marries a good woman, he’ll settle down. People are the same after marriage as before, only more so.

“Take a good, unsentimental look at his family — you’ll learn a lot about him and his attitude towards women. Kay made a monstrous mistake marrying Michael Corleone! Is there a history of divorce in the family? An atmosphere of racism, sexism or prejudice in his home? Are his goals and deepest beliefs worthy and similar to yours? I remember counseling a pious Catholic woman that it might not be prudent to marry a pious Muslim, whose attitude about women was very different. Love trumped prudence; the annulment process was instigated by her six months later.

“Imagine a religious fundamentalist married to an agnostic. One would have to pray that the fundamentalist doesn’t open the Bible and hit the page in which Abraham is willing to obey God and slit his son’s throat.

“Finally: Does he possess those character traits that add up to a good human being — the willingness to forgive, praise, be courteous? Or is he inclined to be a fibber, to fits of rage, to be a control freak, to be envious of you, to be secretive?

“After I regale a group with this talk, the despairing cry goes up: ‘But you’ve eliminated everyone!’ Life is unfair.”

The 11 Best Foods You Aren’t Eating

2008-07-10T22:26:00.000+03:00

This is from the New York Times:

Nutritionist and author Jonny Bowden has created several lists of healthful foods people should be eating but aren’t. But some of his favorites, like purslane, guava and goji berries, aren’t always available at regular grocery stores. I asked Dr. Bowden, author of “The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth,” to update his list with some favorite foods that are easy to find but don’t always find their way into our shopping carts. Here’s his advice.

Beets: Think of beets as red spinach, Dr. Bowden said, because they are a rich source of folate as well as natural red pigments that may be cancer fighters.
How to eat: Fresh, raw and grated to make a salad. Heating decreases the antioxidant power.
Cabbage: Loaded with nutrients like sulforaphane, a chemical said to boost cancer-fighting enzymes.
How to eat: Asian-style slaw or as a crunchy topping on burgers and sandwiches.
Swiss chard: A leafy green vegetable packed with carotenoids that protect aging eyes.
How to eat it: Chop and saute in olive oil.
Cinnamon: May help control blood sugar and cholesterol.
How to eat it: Sprinkle on coffee or oatmeal.
Pomegranate juice: Appears to lower blood pressure and loaded with antioxidants.
How to eat: Just drink it.
Dried plums: Okay, so they are really prunes, but they are packed with antioxidants.
How to eat: Wrapped in prosciutto and baked.
Pumpkin seeds: The most nutritious part of the pumpkin and packed with magnesium; high levels of the mineral are associated with lower risk for early death.
How to eat: Roasted as a snack, or sprinkled on salad.
Sardines: Dr. Bowden calls them “health food in a can.'’ They are high in omega-3’s, contain virtually no mercury and are loaded with calcium. They also contain iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, zinc, copper and manganese as well as a full complement of B vitamins.
How to eat: Choose sardines packed in olive or sardine oil. Eat plain, mixed with salad, on toast, or mashed with dijon mustard and onions as a spread.
Turmeric: The “superstar of spices,'’ it may have anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer properties.
How to eat: Mix with scrambled eggs or in any vegetable dish.
Frozen blueberries: Even though freezing can degrade some of the nutrients in fruits and vegetables, frozen blueberries are available year-round and don’t spoil; associated with better memory in animal studies.
How to eat: Blended with yogurt or chocolate soy milk and sprinkled with crushed almonds.
Canned pumpkin: A low-calorie vegetable that is high in fiber and immune-stimulating vitamin A; fills you up on very few calories.
How to eat: Mix with a little butter, cinnamon and nutmeg.

George Carlin - Quotes and Jokes

2008-06-28T02:31:00.003+03:00

George Denis Patrick Carlin (May 12, 1937–June 22, 2008) was an American stand-up comedian, actor and author who won four Grammy Awards for his comedy albums.

Carlin was noted for his political insights, his black humor and his observations on language, psychology, religion and on many taboo subjects.

Here are some of his famous lines:

If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten.
Electricity is really just organized lightning.
Always do whatever's next.
Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn't mean the circus has left town.
Standing ovations have become far too commonplace. What we need are ovations where the audience members all punch and kick one another.
Standing ovations have become far too commonplace. What we need are ovations where the audience members all punch and kick one another.
In comic strips, the person on the right always speaks first.
I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.
The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.
Think off-center.
At a formal dinner party, the person nearest death should always be seated closest to the bathroom.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.
Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me - they're cramming for their final exam.
I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.
If God had intended us not to masturbate he would've made our arms shorter.
Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.
Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.
Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that crap.
The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.
There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.
There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.
Weather forecast for tonight: dark. Continued dark overnight, with widely scattered light by morning.
When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I'm sure it made the work seem that much more urgent.
When you step on the brakes your life is in your foot's hands.
When you're born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front row seat.
You know an odd feeling? Sittin on the toilet eating a chocolate candy bar.
You know the good part about all those executions in Texas? Fewer Texans.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
It's never just a game when you're winning.
If a man is standing in the middle of the forest speaking and there is no woman around to hear him...is he still wrong?
What do you do when you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant?
Why do they lock gas station bathrooms? Are they afraid someone will clean them?
If a turtle doesn't have a shell, is he homeless or naked?
If the "black box" flight recorder is never damaged during a plane crash, why isn't the whole damn airplane made out of that stuff?

A list of best and worst to consider

2008-06-13T14:05:00.001+03:00

Some Things To Consider:

The most destructive habits.............Worry and Assumption
The greatest Joy........................Giving
The greatest loss...................Loss of self-respect
The most satisfying work................Helping others
The ugliest personality trait............Selfishness
The most endangered species..............Dedicated leaders
Our greatest natural resource..............Our youth
The greatest "shot in the arm".............Encouragement
The greatest problem to overcome.............Fear
The most effective sleeping pill............Peace of mind
The most crippling failure disease...........Excuses
The most powerful force in life..............Love
A dangerous pariah...........................A gossiper
The world's most incredible computer.........The brain
The worst things to be without.... .......... Hope and Humor
The deadliest weapon..........................The tongue
The two most power-filled words................"I Can"
The greatest asset.................................Faith
The most worthless emotion.......................Self-pity
The most beautiful attire........................A SMILE!
The most prized possession...................... Integrity
The most powerful channel of communication.........Prayer
The most contagious spirit.......................Enthusiasm

Phillips Brooks

Be Happy, Confucian Style

2008-06-09T01:08:00.001+03:00

Confucius' advice on how to live the good life, contrasted with some of the tenets of Taoism and Buddhism.

1. Invest in intimate ties

Confucianism's view of life is built on the idea of 'Jen'. This means a feeling of concern for the wellbeing of others. Those following Confucianism should bring Jen into both their social relations and, so far as they are able, into society itself.

Compared with the modern observed conditions of happiness this looks like good advice. Generally speaking marriage makes us happier, more friends make us happier and people are especially happy if they have someone to confide in. Classical Taoism goes along with this point but ancient Buddhism runs counter to the evidence, advising the avoidance of intimate ties.

2. Embrace society

Society is accepted within Confucianism and the philosophy encourages its followers to engage in it. Looking at the research, this is also good advice. People who are members of clubs, churches and other organisations are happier, people who have a job are happier, and so on. The evidence shows that this is also true at a societal level. Countries in which people have the densest networks of friends are also those in which people are the happiest.

In comparison, ancient Taoism says retreat to nature and Buddhism says withdraw completely from society - both these points of view are suspect if happiness is your goal.

3. Be successful

Confucianism recommends a devotion to your occupation. The wealth earned from working is also seen in a positive light within Confucianism. Generally speaking people with more money and higher status are happier (but bear in mind that more money doesn't always equal more happiness). In contrast both ancient Taoism and Buddhism are sniffy about earnings.

4. Have fun

Confucius thought moderate amounts of fun were acceptable. This is backed up by modern research finding that people who engage in pleasurable activities are happier (I know, surprise surprise!). Follow-up studies show no long-term disadvantages to a bit of short-term fun. So there's no point rejecting the possibility of happiness, as does ancient Chinese Buddhism, which warns that the pursuit of happiness will only end in disappointment.

5. Live healthily

Still in the land of the blindingly obvious - yes, people who are healthier are happier. Still, just because the advice is obvious doesn't mean it's any less relevant, or any more likely for people to actually act on! Despite this the self-evident nature of this advice, ancient Chinese Buddhism actually recommends physical privation. Again, we'll stick with Confucius on this one.

6. Meet your obligations

One of the most important aspects of ancient Chinese Confucianism is a sense of duty and responsibility. There's some sparse evidence from the individual level that this might lead to greater happiness. At a societal level, however, people who live in collectivist societies, like the Chinese, tend to be less happier than those who live in individualistic societies. This may be because collectivist societies stifle the individual's search for self-actualisation.

7. School yourself

You've guessed it, the well-educated are also happier. On the other hand education mostly contributes to happiness by enabling you to get a better job, and lots of education doesn't necessarily lead to more happiness. One thing is clear though, it is better to live in a more educated society, even if others are more educated than us.

Seven Surprises for New CEOs

2008-06-05T00:55:00.002+03:00

Seven Surprises for New CEOs

An article in Harvard Business Review (May 2004) by Michael Porter, Jay W. Lorsch, Nitin Nohria . Already a classic, I think.

Main points:

As a newly minted CEO, one may think to finally have the power to set strategy, the authority to make things happen, and full access to the finer points of your business. But if one expects the job to be as simple as that, you’re in for an awakening. Even though you bear full responsibility for your company’s well-being, you are a few steps removed from many of the factors that drive results. You have more power than anybody else in the corporation, but you need to use it with extreme caution.

Porter ea have discovered that nothing—not even running a large business within the company—fully prepares a person to be the chief executive. The following seven surprises are most common for new CEOs:

You can’t run the company (The sheer volume and intensity of external demands take many by surprise. Almost every new CEO struggles to manage the time drain of attending to shareholders, analysts, board members, industry groups, politicians, and other constituencies)
Giving orders is very costly (No proposal should reach the CEO for final approval unless he can ratify it with enthusiasm. Before then, everyone involved with the matter should have raised and resolved any potential deal breakers, bringing the CEO into the discussion only at strategically significant moments to obtain feedback and support)
It is hard to know what is really going on (Certainly, CEOs are flooded with information, but reliable information is surprisingly scarce. All information coming to the top is filtered, sometimes with good intentions, sometimes with not such good intentions)
You are always sending a message (A CEOs words and deeds, however small or off-the-cuff, are instantly spread and amplified, scrutinized, interpreted and sometimes drastically misinterpreted)
You are not the boss (Although the CEO may sit at the top of the management hierarchy, he still reports to the board of directors. At the end of the day, the board—not the CEO—is in charge)
Pleasing shareholders is not the goal (CEOs must recognize that, ultimately, it is only long-term value creation that matters, not today’s growth expectations or even the stock price)
You are still only human (CEO Should recognize he needs connections to the world outside his organization, at home and in the community, to avoid being consumed by his corporate live)

These seven surprises for new CEOs carry some important lessons:

First, as a new CEO you must learn to manage organizational context rather than focus on daily operations.
Second, you must recognize that your position does not confer the right to lead, nor does it guarantee the loyalty of the organization.
Finally, you must remember that you are subject to a host of limitations, even though others might treat you as omnipotent.

Greek Quotations-ΓΝΩΜΙΚΟΛΟΓΙΚΟΝ

2008-06-03T14:40:00.005+03:00

Greek Quotations - ΓΝΩΜΙΚΟΛΟΓΙΚΟΝ

This is a great site in Greek with Greek quotations, proverbs etc.

The only site of its kind in Greek, I think.

The Law of Accelerating Returns

2008-06-03T14:32:00.002+03:00

This is an article in NY Times about the work on The Law of Accelerating Returns by Ray Kurzweil

Does Evolution Go Fast-Forward?

By John Tierney

As life and then technology evolved, the big changes kept occurring more quickly. The rate of progress accelerated so predictably since the beginning of life that the paradigm shifts fall along the straight line plotted by Ray Kurzweil on this logarithmic graph. (Each unit of time is 1/10th as long as the preceeding unit when you move down the vertical axis or move to the right along the horizontal axis.) (Ray Kurzweil)

Does this graph help explain why you could soon live forever? That’s one theory, but let’s start out with a simpler question to debate: Is it evidence that life and technology evolve at a predictable pace – faster and faster?

It’s one of Ray Kurzweil’s many graphs illustrating his theory of technological change discussed in my Findings column. He argues that the pace of evolution and technological change has kept accelerating at a remarkably predictable rate since the beginning of life. As he explained in his 2001 essay, “The Law of Accelerating Returns”:

The evolution of life forms required billions of years for the first steps (e.g., primitive cells); later on progress accelerated. During the Cambrian explosion, major paradigm shifts took only tens of millions of years. Later on, Humanoids developed over a period of millions of years, and Homo sapiens over a period of only hundreds of thousands of years. . . .
The first technological steps-sharp edges, fire, the wheel–took tens of thousands of years. For people living in this era, there was little noticeable technological change in even a thousand years. By 1000 A.D., progress was much faster and a paradigm shift required only a century or two. In the nineteenth century, we saw more technological change than in the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century. Now, paradigm shifts occur in only a few years time. The World Wide Web did not exist in anything like its present form just a few years ago; it didn’t exist at all a decade ago.

Now, you might argue that there are other paradigm shifts that don’t fit so neatly on the graph’s straight line. Did Dr. Kurzweil choose his points to make a point? To address that potential criticism, he drew up another graph plotting key events identified by 15 other sources, including the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the American Museum of Natural History, Carl Sagan and other authors.

The result, once again, is a straight line. You can see this exponential trend by clicking on the chart at right. To identify the key events, click here to see reach Dr. Kurzweil’s original graph.. There you can also find the other graphs of exponential acceleration in the power and spread of technologies. After the telephone was introduced more than a century go, Dr. Kurzweil says, it took 50 years for a quarter of the American population to get one. After the cell phone was introduced, it took only seven years.

Dr. Kurzweil’s bottom line:

The paradigm shift rate (i.e., the overall rate of technical progress) is currently doubling (approximately) every decade; that is, paradigm shift times are halving every decade (and the rate of acceleration is itself growing exponentially). So, the technological progress in the twenty-first century will be equivalent to what would require (in the linear view) on the order of 200 centuries. In contrast, the twentieth century saw only about 25 years of progress (again at today’s rate of progress) since we have been speeding up to current rates. So the twenty-first century will see almost a thousand times greater technological change than its predecessor.

As you can see by clicking the graph at right, Dr. Kurzweil expects the exponential growth in computing power to result in machines more powerful than the human brain before 2030. I’m happy to debate the possible implications of that development — whether the brain can be reverse-engineered, whether the Singularity will usher in a new era of history with ever-smarter humans and post-humans, whether immortality is possible — but I’d rather save that discussion for a separate post.

For now, I’d rather focus on a simpler question: Is Dr. Kurzweil right about the Law of Accelerating Returns? Has the law held since the beginning of life? Is it still in force? What do the graphs mean?

For a critique of Dr. Kurzweil’s law, see Alfred Nordman’s article in IEEE Spectrum. For more on Dr. Kurzweil’s work, including his 2005 best-seller, “The Singularity Is Near,” see Singularity.com and kurzweilai.net.z

The 10 Smartest TV Shows of All Time

2008-03-01T10:52:00.002+02:00

From Foxnews.com, 19 Feb 2008:

The head of genius organization Mensa has picked the 10 Smartest TV Shows of All Time —sparking debate in the blogosphere, especially over the inclusion of the 1990s sitcom "Mad About You."
Jim Werdell, chairman of Mensa International, selected the shows after being posed the question by Fancast.com.
“They weren’t pure comedy, mystery or action,” Werdell said. “They tended to be shows that dealt with issues in the world, and from my perspective that’s considered smart. Some sitcoms reach a higher level of intellect than others, and you can say the same about some of the dramas. The stories may be cliché, but the characters and dialogue are smarter.”
Here's the list with Werdell's comments:

1. "M*A*S*H" – It had smart repartee and was so much more than a comedy.

2. "Cosmos" (with Carl Sagan) – Sagan was able to communicate something extremely complicated to the layman and do it well, and that’s unusual for a scientist at his level.
3. "CSI" — The way they use science to solve their programs is intriguing to viewers.
4. "House" – Again, it’s high level type of show; it’s the personality that makes it a winner, plus it deals with science.
5. "West Wing" – You had to pay attention to stay up with it. The repartee was fast and furious and you needed a fairly high level intelligence to keep up with it.
6. "Boston Legal" – It’s primarily because of the characters. The story lines are okay, but the characters are incredible and the writers give them great dialogue.
7. "All in the Family" – The show dealt with social issues before its time and was on the forefront of trying to show people’s feelings, beliefs and the complexities of personality, in both a serious and comedic way.
8. "Frasier" – The repartee was sensational; the main characters were very good. Even though they portrayed people who were likely of high intelligence, they also showed their weaknesses.
9. "Mad About You" – It’s a personal favorite, I loved the characters and the back and forth. It was very smart.
10. "Jeopardy" – It’s about the only game show that really tries to test people’s intelligence. There’s very little luck involved, and there are few game shows like that. I don’t watch it all that much honestly, but from what I’ve seen it tests more than knowledge, it tests intelligence too.

Fans have been responding on various blogs, arguing over the lack of recognition for "The Twilight Zone," "Gilmore Girls," "Battlestar Galactica," "Rocky and Bullwinkle" and others.

New pictogram for Marriage

2008-02-06T14:52:00.000+02:00

Here is the newly developed symbol-pictogram for marriage:

Leadership Quotes

2008-02-04T10:21:00.000+02:00

If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.
- Admiral Grace Hopper

The most important quality in a leader is that of being acknowledged as such.
- Andre Maurois

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

The best example of leadership, is leadership by example.
- Jerry McClain of Seattle, WA

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
- John Kenneth Galbraith, U.S. economist μThe Age of Uncertaintyξ

It's amazing how many cares disappear when you decide not to be something, but to be someone.
- Coco Chanel

Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character; it requires moral rather than athletic or intellectual effort, and it imposes on both leader and follower alike the burdens of self-restraint.
- Lewis H. Lapham

I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.
- Bishop Desmond Tutu

People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. . . The leader works in the open, and the boss in covert. The leader leads, and the boss drives.
- Theodore Roosevelt

In organizations, real power and energy is generated through relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions.
- Margaret Wheatly Leadership and the New Science

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with the important matters.
- Albert Einstein

Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.
- Karen Kaiser Clark

The quality of leadership, more than any other single factor, determines the success or failure of an organization.
- Fred Fiedler & Martin Chemers Improving Leadership Effectiveness

Don't be afraid to take a big step when one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small steps.
- David Loyd George

The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you.
- Max DePree

When what you are doing isn't working, you tend to do more of the same and with greater intensity.
- Dr. Bill Maynard & Tom Champoux Heart, Soul and Spirit

Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does to survive in the future.
- Peter Drucker

A friend of mine characterizes leaders simply like this: "Leaders don't inflict pain. They bear pain."
- Max DePree

Ah well! I am their leader, I really ought to follow them!
- Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.
- Winston Churchill

I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don't think that's quite it; it's more like jazz. There is more improvisation.
- Warren Bennis

When the effective leader is finished with his work, the people say it happened naturally.
- Lao Tse

Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their jobs done - Peter Drucker

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity
- George Patton

Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes... but no plans.
- Peter Drucker

Leadership is understanding people and involving them to help you do a job. That takes all of the good characteristics, like integrity, dedication of purpose, selflessness, knowledge, skill, implacability, as well as determination not to accept failure.
- Admiral Arleigh A. Burke

Lead and inspire people. Don't try to manage and manipulate people. Inventories can be managed but people must be lead.
- Ross Perot

We must become the change we want to see.
- Mahatma Gandhi

A competent leader can get efficient service from poor troops, while on the contrary an incapable leader can demoralize the best of troops.
- General of the Armies John J. Pershing

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
- Abraham Lincoln

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
- Helen Keller

It is not a question of how well each process works, the question is how well they all work together.
- Lloyd Dobens and Clare Crawford-Mason Thinking About Quality

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.
- Eric Hoffer

In war, three quarters turns on personal character and relations; the balance of manpower and materials counts only for the remaining quarter.
- Napoleon I

To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately.
- Russell L. Ackoff

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
- Albert Einstein

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and will to carry on.
- Walter J. Lippmann

Leadership should be born out of the understanding of the needs of those who would be affected by it.
- Marian Anderson

You may have afresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down.
- Mary Pickford

People are more easily led than driven.
- David Harold Fink

Leadership has a harder job to do than just choose sides. It must bring sides together.
- Jesse Jackson

No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it.
- Andrew Carnegie

The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.
- Max DePree The Art of Leadership

Processes don't do work, people do.
- John Seely Brown

The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.
- Ray Kroc, Founder of McDonald's

Remember that it is far better to follow well than to lead indifferently.
- John G. Vance

The only real training for leadership is leadership.
- Antony Jay

Probably my best quality as a coach is that I ask a lot of challenging questions and let the person come up with the answer.
- Phil Dixon

The art of leading, in operations large or small, is the art of dealing with humanity, of working diligently on behalf of men, of being sympathetic with them, but equally, of insisting that they make a square facing toward their own problems.
- S. L. A. Marshall Men Against Fire

In matters of style, swim with the current;
In matters of principle, stand like a rock.
- T. Jefferson

Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.
- Winston Churchill

The Ten Habits of Highly Effective Brains

2008-02-01T16:15:00.000+02:00

Learn what is the "It" in "Use It or Lose It". A basic understanding will serve you well to appreciate your brain's beauty as a living and constantly-developing dense forest with billions of neurons and synapses.
Take care of your nutrition. Did you know that the brain only weighs 2% of body mass but consumes over 20% of the oxygen and nutrients we intake? As a general rule, you don't need expensive ultra-sophisticated nutritional supplements, just make sure you don't stuff yourself with the "bad stuff".
Remember that the brain is part of the body. Things that exercise your body can also help sharpen your brain: physical exercise enhances neurogenesis.
Practice positive, future-oriented thoughts until they become your default mindset and you look forward to every new day in a constructive way. Stress and anxiety, no matter whether induced by external events or by your own thoughts, actually kills neurons and prevent the creation of new ones. You can think of chronic stress as the opposite of exercise: it prevents the creation of new neurons.
5. Thrive on Learning and Mental Challenges. The point of having a brain is precisely to learn and to adapt to challenging new environments. Once new neurons appear in your brain, where they stay in your brain and how long they survive depends on how you use them. "Use It or Lose It" does not mean "do crossword puzzle number 1,234,567". It means, "challenge your brain often with fundamentally new activities".
We are (as far as we know) the only self-directed organisms in this planet. Aim high. Once you graduate from college, keep learning. The brain keeps developing, no matter your age, and it reflects what you do with it.
Explore, travel. Adapting to new locations forces you to pay more attention to your environment. Make new decisions, use your brain.
Don't Outsource Your Brain. Not to media personalities, not to politicians, not to your smart neighbour... Make your own decisions, and mistakes. And learn from them. That way, you are training your brain, not your neighbour's.
Develop and maintain stimulating friendships. We are "social animals", and need social interaction. Which, by the way, is why 'Baby Einstein' has been shown not to be the panacea for children development.
Laugh. Often. Especially to cognitively complex humor, full of twists and surprises. Better, try to become the next Jon Stewart (Note: I just corrected his name from "John"...which may call for a #11: Spellcheck!)

Santa vs. St. Nicholas

2007-12-29T20:47:00.000+02:00

From the New York Times

St. Nick in the Big City

By JOHN ANTHONY McGUCKIN

Published: December 25, 2007

ST. NICHOLAS was a super-saint with an immense cult for most of the Christian past. There may be more icons surviving for Nicholas alone than for all the other saints of Christendom put together. So what happened to him? Where’s the fourth-century Anatolian bishop who presided over gift-giving to poor children? And how did we get the new icon of mass consumerism in his place?

Well, it’s a New York story.

In all innocence, the morphing began with the Dutch Christians of New Amsterdam, who remembered St. Nicholas from the old country and called him Sinte Klaas. They had kept alive an old memory — that a kindly old cleric brought little gifts to the poor in the weeks leading up to the Feast of the Nativity. While the gifts were important, they were never meant to overshadow the message of Jesus’s humble birth.

But today’s chubby Santa is not about giving to the poor. He has had his saintly garb stripped away. The filling out of the figure, the loss of the vestments, and his transformation into a beery fellow smoking a pipe combined to form a caricature of Dutch peasant culture. Eventually this Magic Santa (a suitable patron saint if there ever was one for the burgeoning capitalist machinery of the city) was of course popularized by the Manhattanite Clement Clarke Moore published in “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” in The Troy (New York) Sentinel on Dec. 23, 1823.

The newly created deity Santa soon attracted a school of iconographers: notable among them were Thomas Nast, whose 1863 image of a red-suited giant in Harper’s Weekly set the tone, and Haddon Sundblom, who drew up the archetypal image we know today on behalf of the Coca-Cola Company in the 1930s. This Santa was regularly accompanied by the flying reindeer: godlike in his majesty and presiding over the winter darkness like Odin the sky god returned.

The new Santa also acquired a host of Nordic elves to replace the small dark-skinned boy called Black Peter, who in Christian tradition so loved St. Nicholas that he traveled with him everywhere. But, some might say, wasn’t it better to lose this racially stereotyped relic? Actually, no, considering the real St. Nicholas first came into contact with Peter when he raided the slave market in his hometown and railed against the trade. The story tells us that when the slavers refused to take him seriously, he used the church’s funds to redeem Peter and gave the boy a job in the church.

And what of the throwing of the bags of gold down the chimney, where they landed in the stockings and little shoes that had been hung up to dry by the fireplace? Charming though it sounds, it reflected the deplorable custom, still prevalent in late Roman society when the Byzantine church was struggling to establish the supremacy of its values, of selling surplus daughters into bondage. This was a euphemism for sexual slavery — a trade that still blights our world.

As the tale goes, Nicholas had heard that a father in the town planned to sell his three daughters because his debts had been called in by pitiless creditors. As he did for Black Peter, Nicholas raided his church funds to secure the redemption of the girls. He dropped the gold down the chimney to save face for the impoverished father.

This tale was the origin of a whole subsequent series of efforts among the Christians who celebrated Nicholas to make some effort to redeem the lot of the poor — especially children, who always were, and still are, the world’s front-line victims. Such was the origin of Christmas almsgiving: gifts for the poor, not just gifts for our friends.

I like St. Nicholas. You can keep chubby Santa.

John Anthony McGuckin is a professor of religious history at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia.

7 stories you haven't heard about the Olympic games

2007-12-21T00:06:00.000+02:00

7 Stories You Haven’t Heard About The Olympics

by Justin Feinstein

1. Perfect 10s All Around!

Scoring a perfect 10 is the dream of every Olympic gymnast. In 1924, 22 male gymnasts made this dream a reality in the same event. But this wasn’t due to some freak occurrence or heightened level of competition – the event was rope climbing, which has since been discontinued.

2. Basketball Gets Dragged Through the Mud

Basketball’s debut at the 1936 Olympics was nothing short of a disaster. Not only were the finals a low scoring affair (the United States snagged gold from Canada in a yawn-inducing 19-8 game), but the conditions were a mess. Part of the problem was Germany’s venue: the game was played outdoors. On a dirt court. In the pouring rain! Playing on mud made dribbling and bounce-passes impossible. Things weren’t much easier for the fans. A lack of seating forced all (approximately 1,000) spectators to stand and watch in the rain.

3. Paris takes Games to a New Low

As bad as Germany’s basketball planning was, the event barely holds a candle to the 1900 Paris Olympics, which were held in conjunction with the World’s Fair and spread out over five months. Take the marathon, for instance, which was rife with logistical nightmares. The event was run through the city’s active streets, complete with pedestrians and bicyclists. Worse still, several competitors got lost because the course was so poorly marked. Of course, the long race was just one of the many memorable events, including several that would never be seen again. The 1900 Olympics were the only Games to feature such time-wasters as pigeon shooting and swimming through an obstacle course – which included swimming under boats.

4. John Boland wins an Audience Participation Award

The first modern Olympic Games were held in 1896 and yielded perhaps the most unlikely champion in Olympic history. A student at Oxford, John Boland traveled to Greece as a spectator to take in the excitement. But a friend on the Olympic Committee had signed him up for the tennis competition. Despite a lack of proper attire, the plucky Boland decided to go ahead and play (in his dress shoes, no less) and actually won.

5. Golfer Brings Home Gold (without ever knowing it?!)

Margaret Ives Abbott was the first American woman to win a gold medal. Unfortunately, she lived her entire life without ever knowing what she had accomplished. Since the aforementioned 1900 Paris events were spread out informally over several months, de-emphasizing their Olympic status, she simply thought she had won a nine-hole golf tournament in Paris.

6. The Only Case where “Slow and Steady” Actually Worked

The 1904 Olympic Marathon in St. Louis was perhaps the most brutal event in Olympic history. On a sweltering hot summer day, marathon runners took off on an unpaved dusty course, following pace cars and inhaling exhaust. Many runners had to withdraw to receive medical attention, and even the winner, American Thomas Hicks, needed repeated medical care both during and after the race. And by “medical care,” we mean strychnine and brandy. Of course, our favorite tale from the Games is that of Felix Carvajal, a Cuban who took “The Tortoise” approach to running the race. Despite stopping to chat with spectators and breaking to pick and eat fruit from an orchard (which made him sick), Carvajal still managed to finish in fourth place.

7. And just a word on the Games’ (harsh) origins

The ancient Olympic Games served as the basis for our modern Olympics, and fortunately the whole “competing in the nude” thing wasn’t the only custom left to history. Athletes that arrived late to compete were fined, with the only acceptable excuses being shipwreck, weather or pirates. Athletes that were caught cheating were also fined, but were allowed to keep their winnings. But married women caught watching the Games got it the worst: they were executed. Of course, that probably had something to do with the whole competing in the nude thing.

And let’s not forget three of our favorite Olympic athletes. Swede Oscar Swahn won a silver medal in a deer-shooting event at the 1920 Olympics at the age of 72! In 1904, American gymnast George Eyser won six medals (three gold) despite having a wooden left leg, which is even more amazing. But Hungarian pistol shooter Karoly Takacs taught himself how to shoot left-handed after his right (shooting) hand was shattered by a grenade, and then went on to win the rapid-fire shooting event at the 1948 Olympics. He gets our gold.

Life lessons from Noah's Ark

2007-12-09T14:54:00.000+02:00

this was sent to me by email. I don't know its origin:

Everything I need to know about life, I learned from Noah's Ark

Don't miss the boat.
Remember that we are all in the same boat.
Plan ahead. It wasn't raining when Noah built the Ark.
Stay fit . When you're 600 years old, someone may ask you to do something really big.
Don't listen to critics; just get on with the job that needs to be done.
Build your future on high ground.
For safety's sake, travel in pairs.
Speed isn't always an advantage. The snails were on board with the cheetahs
When you're stressed, float a while.
Remember, the Ark was built by amateurs; the Titanic by professionals.
No matter the storm, there's always a rainbow waiting...

Proof of Global warming

2007-12-06T01:46:00.000+02:00

Why we have sex

2007-08-05T00:01:00.000+03:00

A Post by Stephen Shankland from CNET blog

No doubt we all oversimplify the world a bit, but University of Texas-Austin researchers have found that there are way more reasons people have sex than one might expect.

Specifically, 237 reasons!

Helpfully, the researchers did boil the list down to four major factors--physical, goal-based, emotional and insecurity-based--and 13 minor ones, the university said Tuesday. Researchers David Buss and Cindy Meston described the motivations in the August issue of the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

"Why people have sex is extremely important, but rarely studied. Surprisingly, many scientists assume the answer is obvious, but people have different reasons for having sex, some of which are rather complex," Buss said in a statement.

The top reason both men and women gave was that "I was attracted to the person," but some motivations were ranked very differently by the two sexes. The study authors found an "astonishing" 123 of the 237 motivations were cited more frequently by one sex or the other. Topping the list was "The person wore revealing clothes," which as social stereotypes might lead one to expect was cited by men more often than women.

More specifically, men had lots of reasons for sex that women didn't rate as highly.

"Men showed significantly greater endorsement of having sex due to physical reasons...and simply because the opportunity presented itself. Men more than women reported having sex as a way to improve their social status. Finally, men exceeded women on endorsing a variety of utilitarian reasons for sex," the study said.

In contrast, "Women exceeded men on only three of the 237 reasons: "I wanted to feel feminine"; "I wanted to express my love for the person"; "I realized that I was in love."

Among the reasons that subjects gave researchers for two studies on the matter:

• I wanted to feel closer to God.
• I wanted to get a promotion.
• I wanted to feel connected.
• I wanted to keep my partner from straying.
• I wanted to have a baby.
• I wanted to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease.
• I wanted the attention.
• I wanted to break up a rival's relationship.
• It seemed like good exercise.
• I wanted to defy my parents.
• I wanted to change the topic of conversation
• The person was famous and I wanted to be able to say I had sex with him/her.
• I wanted to end the relationship.
• I wanted to communicate at a "deeper" level.
• My partner kept insisting.
• I was bored.

What we should learn in school (by G.Kawasaki)

2007-07-21T20:03:00.000+03:00

Compare your answers to what you learned after a few years in the workforce. It seems to me that schools often teach the opposite of what's necessary for the real world. Perhaps in school people have plenty of time and no money, so long papers, emails, and presentations are not a problem. However, people in the real world have plenty of money (or at least more money) and no time. This is a list of what I wished I learned in school before I graduated.

1. How to talk to your boss. In college, you’re supposed to bring problems to your teachers during office hours, and you share the experience of coming up with a solution. In the real world, you’re supposed to bring solutions to your boss in an email, in the hall, or in a five-minute conversation. Typically, your boss either already knows about the problem or doesn’t want to know about it. Your role is to provide answers, not questions. Believe it or not, but in the real world, those who can do, do. Those who can’t do, share with others who can’t do.

2. How to survive a meeting that’s poorly run. Unfortunately, it could be a while before you run meetings. Until then, you’ll be a hapless victim of them, so adopt these three practices to survive. First, assume that most of what you’ll hear is pure, petty, ass-covering bull shiitake, and it’s part of the game. This will prevent you from going crazy. Second, focus on what you want to accomplish in the meeting and ignore everything else. Once you get what you want, take yourself “out of your body,” sit back, and enjoy the show. Third, vow to yourself that someday you’ll start a company, and your meetings won’t work like this.

3. How to run a meeting. Hopefully, you’ll be running meetings soon. Then you need to understand that the primary purpose of a business meeting is to make a decision. It is not to share experiences or feel warm and fuzzy. With that in mind, here are five key points to learn about running a meeting: (1) Start on time even if everyone isn’t there because they will be next time; (2) Invite the fewest people possible to the meeting; (3) Set an agenda for exactly what’s going to happen at the meeting; (4) End on time so that everyone focuses on the pertinent issues; (5) Send an email to all participants that confirms decisions reviews action items. There are more power tips for running good meetings, but if you do these five, you’re ahead of 90% of the world.

4. How to figure out anything on your own. Armed with Google, PDFs of manuals, and self-reliance, force yourself to learn how to figure out just about anything on your own. There are no office hours, no teaching assistants, and study groups in the real world. Actually, the real world is one long, often lonely independent study, so get with it. Here’s a question to test your research prowess. How do you update the calendar in a Motorola Q phone with appointments stored in Now-Up-To-Date?

5. How to negotiate. Don’t believe what you see in reality television shows about negotiation and teamwork. They’re all bull shiitake. The only method that works in the real world involves five steps: (1) Prepare for the negotiation by knowing your facts; (2) Figure out what you really want; (3) Figure out what you don’t care about; (4) Figure out what the other party really wants (per Kai); and (5) Create a win-win outcome to ensure that everyone is happy. You’ll be a negotiating maven if you do this.

6. How to have a conversation. Generally, “Whassup?” doesn’t work in the real world. Generally, “What do you do?” unleashes a response that leads to a good conversation (hence the recommendation below). Generally, if you listen more than you talk, you will (ironically) be considered not only a good conversationalist but also smart. Yes, life is mysterious sometimes.

7. How to explain something in thirty seconds. Unfortunately, many schools don’t have elevators or else students would know how to explain things in a thirty-second elevator pitch. Think mantra (three words), not mission statements (sixty words). Think time, not money, is the most important commodity. Think ahead, not on your feet. At the end of your thirty-second spiel, there should be an obvious answer to the question, “ So what?” If you can’t explain enough in thirty seconds to incite interest, you’re going to have a long, boring career.

8. How to write a one-page report. I remember struggling to meet the minimum page requirements of reports in college. Double spacing and 14 point Selectric typewriter balls saved me. Then I went out into the real world, and encountered bosses who wanted a one-page report. What the heck??? The best reports in the real world are one page or less. (The same thing is true of resumes, but that’s another, more controversial topic for unemployed people who want to list all the .Net classes that they took.)

9. How to write a five-sentence email. Young people have an advantage over older people in this area because older people (like me) were taught to write letters that were printed on paper, signed, stuck in an envelope, and mailed. Writing a short email was a new experience for them. Young people, by contrast are used to IMing and chatting. If anything, they’re too skilled on brevity, but it’s easier to teach someone how to write a long message than a short one. Whether UR young or old, the point is that the optimal length of an email message is five sentences. All you should do is explain who you are, what you want, why you should get it, and when you need it by.

10. How to get along with co-workers. Success in school is mostly determined by individual accomplishments: grades, test scores, projects, whatever. Few activities are group efforts. Then you go out in the real world the higher you rise in an organization, the less important your individual accomplishments are. What becomes more and more important is the ability to work with/through/besides and sometimes around others. The most important lesson to learn: Share the credit with others because a rising tide floats all boats.

What about freeloaders? (Those scum of the earth that don’t do anything for the group.) In school you can let them know how you truly feel. You can’t in the real world because bozos have a way of rising to the top of many organizations, and bozos seek revenge. The best solution is to bite your tongue, tolerate them, and try to never have them on the team again, but there’s little upside in criticizing them.

11. How to use PowerPoint. I’ve seen the PowerPoint slides of professors—it’s no wonder that most people can’t use PowerPoint to sell hybrid cars when gas is $10/gallon. Maybe professors are thinking: “This is a one-hour class, I can cover one slide per minute, so I need sixty slides. Oh, and I’ve written all this text already in my textbook, so I’ll just copy and paste my twelve-point manuscript into the presentation.” Perhaps the tenure system causes this kind of problem. In the real world, this is no tenure so you need to limit yourself to ten slides, twenty minutes, and a thirty-point font—assuming that you want to get what you want.

12. How to leave a voicemail. Very few people of any age leave good voicemails. The purpose of a voicemail is to make progress towards along a continuum whose end is getting what you want. A long voicemail isn’t going to zip you along to the end point of this decision. A good model is to think of a voicemail as an oral version of a compelling five-sentence email; the optimal length of a voicemail is fifteen seconds.

Two power tips: First, slowly say your telephone number once at the beginning of your message and again at the end. You don’t want to make people playback your message to get your phone number, and if either of you are using Cingular, you may not hear all the digits. Second (and this applies to email too), always make progress. Never leave a voicemail or send an email that says, “Call me back, and I’ll tell you what time we can meet.” Just say, “Tuesday, 10:00 am, at your office.”

One last thing: the purpose of going to school is not to prepare for working but to prepare for living. Working is a part of living, and it requires these kinds of skills no matter what career you pursue. However, there is much more to life than work, so study what you love.

Alfred Hitchcock film techniques

2007-07-20T00:23:00.000+03:00

How to turn your boring movie into a Hitchcock thriller...

Borgus.com - We've put together a list of the most significant film techniques that were used by Alfred Hitchcock. This information comes out of many books and interviews from the man himself and his been simplified for your consideration.

This page is mostly for filmmakers who are sad and depressed because their movie is so average that nobody will watch it. Stop crying and pay attention. What is written here will save your career (at least until tomorrow morning.) However there is no cure for a bad producer - there may be no help for you!

1: It's the Mind of the Audience
Change everything in your screenplay so that it is done for the audience. Nothing is more important than how each scene is going to affect the viewer. Make sure the content engages them and sucks them in. Use the characters to tease the viewer and pull them along desperately wanting more.

Hitchcock knew why people are drawn to a darkened theater to absorb themselves for hours with images on a screen. They do it to have fun. In the same way people go to a roller coaster to get thrown around at high speeds, theater audiences know they are safe. As a film director you can throw things at them, hurl them off a cliff, or pull them into a dangerous love story, and they know that nothing will happen to them. They're confident that they'll be able to walk out the exit when its done and resume their normal lives. And, the more fun they have, the quicker they will come back begging for more. (Gottlieb)

2: Frame for Emotion

Emotion (in the form of fear, laughter, surprise, sadness, anger, boredom, etc.) is the ultimate goal of each scene. The first consideration of where to place the camera should involve knowing what emotion you want the audience to experience at that particular time. Emotion comes directly from the actor's eyes. You can control the intensity of that emotion by placing the camera close or far away from those eyes. A close-up will fill the screen with emotion, and pulling away to a wide angle shot will dissipate that emotion. A sudden cut from wide to close-up will give the audience a sudden surprise. Sometimes a strange angle above an actor will heighten the dramatic meaning. (Truffaut)

Hitchcock used this theory of proximity to plan out each scene. These varations are a way of controlling when the audience feels intensity, or relaxation. Hitchcock compared this to a composer writing a music score - except instead of playing instruments, he's playing the audience!

3: Camera is Not a Camera

The camera should take on human qualities and roam around playfully looking for something suspicious in a room. This allows the audience to feel like they are involved in uncovering the story. Scenes can often begin by panning a room showing close-ups of objects that explain plot elements.

This goes back to Hitchcock's beginnings in silent film. Without sound, filmmakers had to create ways to tell the story visually in a succession of images and ideas. Hitchcock said this trend changed drastically when sound finally came to film in the 1930's. Suddenly everything went toward dialogue oriented material based on scripts from the stage. Movies began to rely on actors talking, and visual storytelling was almost forgotten. (Truffaut) Always use the camera as more than just a camera.

4: Dialogue Means Nothing

One of your characters must be pre-occupied with something during a dialogue scene. Their eyes can then be distracted while the other person doesn't notice. This is a good way to pull the audience into a character's secretive world.

“People don’t always express their inner thoughts to one another," he said "a conversation may be quite trivial, but often the eyes will reveal what a person thinks or needs.” The focus of the scene should never be on what the characters are actually saying. Have something else going on. Resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise.

"In other words we don’t have pages to fill, or pages from a typewriter to fill, we have a rectangular screen in a movie house,” said Hitchcock. (Schickel)

5: Point of View Editing

Jimmy Stewart looks at dog and then we see him smiling. Jimmy Stewart looks at a woman undressing and then we see him smiling. Those two smiles have completely different meanings, even if they are the exact same smile.

Putting an idea into the mind of the character without explaining it in dialogue is done by using a point-of-view shot sequence. This is subjective cinema. You take the eyes of the characters and add something for them to look at.

- Start with a close-up of the actor
- Cut to a shot of what they're seeing
- Cut back to the actor to see his reaction
- Repeat as desired

You can edit back and forth between the character and the subject as many times as you want to build tension. The audience won't get bored. This is the most powerful form of cinema, even more important than acting. To take it even further have the actor walk toward the subject. Switch to a tracking shot to show his changing perspective as he walks. The audience will believe they are sharing something personal with the character. This is what Hitchcock calls "pure cinema." (Truffaut)

Note:

If another person looks at the character in point-of-view they must look directly at the camera

6: Montage Gives You Control

Divide action into a series of close-ups shown in succession. Don't avoid this basic technique. This is not the same as throwing together random shots into a fight sequence to create confusion. Instead, carfully chose a close-up of a hand, an arm, a face, a gun falling to the floor - tie them all together to tell a story. In this way you can portray an event by showing various pieces of it and having control over the timing. You can also hide parts of the event so that the mind of the audience is engaged. (Truffaut)

Hitchcock said this was "transferring the menace from the screen into the mind of the audience." (Schickel) The famous shower scene in Psycho uses montage to hide the violence. You never see the knife hitting Janet Leigh. The impression of violence is done with quick editing, and the killing takes place inside the viewer's head rather than the screen.

Basic rule:

anytime something important happens, show it in a close-up. Make sure the audience can see it.

7: Keep the Story Simple!

If your story is confusing or requires a lot of memorization, you're never going to get suspense out of it. The key to creating that raw Hitchcock energy is by using simplistic, linear stories that the audience can easily follow. Everything in your screenplay must be streamlined to offer maximum dramatic impact. Remove all extraneous material and keep it crisp. Each scene should include only those essential ingredients that make things gripping for the audience. As Hitchcock says, “what is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out…” (Truffaut)

An abstract story will bore the audience. This is why Hitchcock tended to use crime stories with spies, assassinations, and people running from the police. These sort of plots make it easy to play on fear, but are not mandatory for all movies.

8: Characters Must Break Cliché

Make all of your characters the exact opposite of what the audience expects in a movie. Turn dumb blondes into smart blondes, give the Cuban guy a French accent, and the criminals must be rich and successful. They should have unexpected personalities, making decisions on a whim rather than what previous buildup would suggest. These sort of ironic characters make them more realistic to the audience, and much more ripe for something to happen to them.

Hitchcock criminals tend to be wealthy upper class citizens whom you’d never suspect, the policeman and politicians are usually the bumbling fools, the innocent are accused, and the villains get away with everything because nobody suspects them. They surprise you at every step of the plot.

9: Use Humor to Add Tension

Humor is essential to Hitchcock storytelling. Pretend you are playing a practical joke on the main character of your movie. Give him the most ironic situations to deal with. It's the unexpected gag, the coincidence, the worst possible thing that can go wrong - all can be used to build tension.

In Marnie, Tippi Hedren is stealing money from an office safe and is just about to leave when she notices the maid happens to be cleaning in the next room. The maid is completely innocent and unaware. Hedren will get caught if the maid sees her, but the audience is already hoping that she gets away with it. The more happily the maid mops the floor and the closer she gets to seeing Hedren, the higher the tension.

You'll also find that Hitchcock tended to use comical old women to add a flavor of innocent humor in his films. They will usually be opinionated, chatty, and have a highly optimistic view about crime. If someone were committing a crime they might even help with it!

10: Two Things Happening at Once

Build tension into a scene by using contrasting situations. Use two unrelated things happening at once. The audience should be focused on the momentum of one, and be interrupted by the other. Usually the second item should be a humorous distraction that means nothing (this can often be dialogue.) It was put there by you only to get in the way.

When unexpected guests arrive at the hotel room in the Man Who Knew Too Much, Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day are in the midst of a tense phone-call. The arrival of the guests laughing and joking serve a dramatic counterpoint to the real momentum of the scene. The end result is - the audience pays more attention to what's happening.

“

The essential fact is to get real suspense you must let the audience have information."

11: Suspense is Information

Once you put tension into your scene, you build it toward something, creating suspense. "Information" is essential to Hitchcock suspense; showing the audience what the characters don’t see. If something is about to harm the characters, show it at beginning of the scene and let the scene play out as normal. Constant reminders of this looming danger will build suspense. But remember - the suspense is not in the mind of the character. They must be completely unaware of it. (Schickel, Truffaut)

12: Surprise and Twist

Pull the audience in one direction and then another, trick them, and keep them from knowing what's really going to happen. You must make the audience think they know whats coming next, and then you pull the rug out from under them. It must never turn out the way they expected.

13: Warning: May Cause MacGuffin

The MacGuffin is the side effect of creating pure suspense. When scenes are built around dramatic tension, it doesn’t really matter what the story is about. If you've done your job and followed all the previous steps, the audience is still glued no matter what. You can use random plot devices known as the MacGuffin.

The MacGuffin is nothing. The only reason for the MacGuffin is to serve a pivotal reason for the suspense to occur. (Schickel) It could be something as vague as the "government secrets perhaps" in North by Northwest, or the long detailed weapons plans of Mr. Memory in the 39 Steps. Or, it could be something simple like the dog blocking the stairway in Strangers on a Train. Nobody cares about the dog. It's only there for one reason - suspense. It could have just as easily been a person, an alarm, a talking parrot, or a macguffin!

This list is by no means comprehensive. We invite your comments and additions. Our goal is to be an Internet source easily found to help those in need of quick introduction. You can also find more by reading the books listed below. They include much more detail on these theories and provide a lot more examples. These books are essential reading for any filmmaker or Hitchcock fan.

Written by Jeff Bays, June 2004 Updated: July 2004, January 2006. Jeff Bays is a graduate of the Webster University School of Communications, and is an award-winning radio producer and independent filmmaker.
Contact: info@borgus.com

Book Sources:

Truffaut, Francois. "Hitchcock" Revised Edition. New York. 1985.
Gottlieb, Sydney. "Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews" Los Angeles. 1997.
Spoto, Donald. "The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of his Motion Pictures" New York. 1992.

Video Source:
AMERICAN CINEMATHEQUE DOCUMENTARY "ALFRED HITCHOCK: MASTER OF SUSPENSE" City Center of Music and Drama
by Richard Schickel, Fox Lorber Associates, Inc. 1973

Yogi Bera's speech

2007-06-25T09:41:00.000+03:00

This is a -most probably- fake transcript of the commencement address delivered by Yogi Berra at Saint Louis University, May 2007.

"Thank you all for being here tonight. I know this is a busy time of year, and if you weren't here, you could probably be somewhere else. I especially want to thank the administration at St. Louis University for making this day necessary. It is an honor to receive this honorary degree.

"It is wonderful to be here in St. Louis and to visit the old neighborhood. I haven't been back since the last time I was here. Everything looks the same, only different. Of course, things in the past are never as they used to be.

"Before I speak, I have something I'd like to say. As you may know, I never went to college, or high school for that matter. To be honest, I'm not much of a public speaker, so I will try to keep this short as long as I can.

"As I look out upon all of the young people here tonight, there are a number of words of wisdom I might depart. But I think the most irrelevant piece of advice I can pass along is this:

"The most important things in life are the things that are least important.

"I could have gone a number of directions in my life. Growing up on the Hill, I could have opened a restaurant or a bakery. But the more time I spent in places like that, the less time I wanted to spend there. I knew that if I wanted to play baseball, I was going to have to play baseball. My childhood friend, Joe Garagiola, also became a big-league ballpayer, as did my son, Dale. I think you'll find the similarities in our careers are quite different.

"You're probably wondering, how does a kid from the Hill become a New York Yankee and get in the Hall of Fame? Well, let me tell you something, if it was easy nobody would do it. Nothing is impossible until you make it possible.

"Of course, times were different. To be honest, I was born at an early age. Things are much more confiscated now. It seems like a nickel ain't worth a dime anymore. But let me tell you, if the world was perfect, it wouldn't be. Even Napoleon had his Watergate.

"You'll make some wrong mistakes along the way, but only the wrong survive. Never put off until tomorrow what you can't do today. Denial isn't just a river in Europe.

"Strive for success and remember you won't get what you want unless you want what you get. Some will choose a different path. If they don't want to come along, you can't stop them. Remember, none are so kind as those who will not see.

"Keep the faith and follow the Commandments: Do not covet thy neighbor's wife, unless she has nothing else to wear. Treat others before you treat yourself. As Franklin Eleanor Roosevelt once said, 'The only thing you have to fear is beer itself.'

"Hold on to your integrity, ladies and gentlemen. It's the one thing you really need to have; if you don't have it, that's why you need it. Work hard to reach your goals, and if you can't reach them, use a ladder. There may come a day when you get hurt and have to miss work. Don't worry, it won't hurt to miss work.

"Over the years, I have realized that baseball is really just a menopause for life. We all have limitations, but we also know limitation is the greatest form of flattery. Beauty is in the eyes of Jim Holder.

"Half the lies you hear won't be true, and half the things you say, you won't ever say.

"As parents you'll want to give your children all the things you didn't have. But don't buy them an encyclopedia, make them walk to school like you did. Teach them to have respect for others, especially the police. They are not here to create disorder, they are here to preserve it.

"Throughout my career, I found good things always came in pairs of three. There will be times when you are an overwhelming underdog. Give 100 percent to everything you do, and when that's not enough, give everything you have left. 'Winning isn't everything, but it's better than rheumatism.' I think Guy Lombardo said that.

"Finally, dear graduates and friends, cherish this moment; it is a memory you will never forget. You have your entire future ahead of you.

"Good luck and Bob's speed."

Manolis P

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