January 2008 Archives

http://awards.ie/blogawards/2008/01/09/judges-wanted-for-the-blog-awards-lots-and-lots-of-judges/

Judges wanted for the Blog Awards - Lots and lots of judges We need a lot of judges this year since every blog submitted is going to be judged in the first round. By a lot, we’re talking 100+ as so far over 500 individual blogs have been nominated by over 370 people. By the time nominations close we could be talking about 1000 blogs in the mix. If you want to be a judge then please send an email to IrishAwards < at > Gmail.com stating why you’d like to be a judge. Better still, why not also blog about why you want to be a judge? Naturally you will agree that you’ll recuse yourself from judging any blog you are linked to in a professional/personal capacity i.e. No judging your company blog or your husband/boyfriend’s blog and you must inform us of any linkages to blogs that could be nominated. Update: Just so you know, I will mail everyone that’s applied so far on the 19th

Tips for New Dads. General 1. When making up bottles, count the formula scoops on your fingers as you put them in. Don’t think you’ll be able to count to eight unaided. You won’t. Accept that early and you’ll save yourself a lot of discardred bottles.

More tip over at http://www.tuppenceworth.ie/blog/index.php/2008/01/09/tips-for-new-dads/

My own tips/advice

Tempus Fugit. It not only flies it flee's. Enjoy something every day.

No matter how hard you think you have it your wife/partner has it harder.

Shawn at Anecdote

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift
And the rational mind is a faithful servant.
We have created a society that honours the servant
And has forgotten the gift
                        - Albert Einstein

A man who how to use both gift and servant

How does 'An Post' lose post? There are at least two piece of post sent prior to or during the Christmas period that have never arrived. One is a Christmas card from a friend who did send it. The other is a DVD from Screenclick.com.   OK so we know that the run up to Christmas is a busy period. Manic I'd assume for the post office. But I still don't understand how post is 'lost'. Does this mean there is a vortex in the postal sorting center where random items of mail venture only to reappear in the dim distant galaxy where they live with odd socks in perpetuity? Do items of post fall through cracks in the space time continuum where they are altered into wire coat hangers and reappear randomly in wardrobe across the land? Or does someone in the post office say "Ah sod this" and chuck bags of post into the rubbish? I can understand why post takes a bit longer to deliver over Christmas. I can even understand why it may take a lot longer and may go via Mullingar and Terminfeckin. but I don't understand why it gets lost. Where does the post that 'An Post' loses go?

I got "Lapsed Agnostic" by John Waters in one of my Christmas boxes (unasked for). And I read it. Plowed through it, slogged through it at times. My initial reaction was not pleasant but I said why not read it. There is a lot that is interesting in it. Particularly about men and their place in the world. And there is a lot of rubbish in it as well. I'm still not entirely clear what John Waters beliefs are or aren't at the end of the book. I'm not sure that he is entirely sure either. I am sure that his route from agnostic/atheist to believer of some sort is baffling. More of an 'I believe because I must than having a reason for believe'.

Reading Alan Alda in the Edge question  makes a lot more sense in his notions of belief

I've changed my mind twice about God.


    Until I was twenty I was sure there was a being who could see everything I did and who didn't like most of it. He seemed to care about minute aspects of my life, like on what day of the week I ate a piece of meat. And yet, he let earthquakes and mudslides take out whole communities, apparently ignoring the saints among them who ate their meat on the assigned days.  Eventually, I realized that I didn't believe there was such a being. It didn't seem reasonable. And I assumed that I was an atheist.

    As I understood the word, it meant that I was someone who didn't believe in a God; I was without a God. I didn't broadcast this in public because I noticed that people who do believe in a god get upset to hear that others don't. (Why this is so is one of the most pressing of human questions, and I wish a few of the bright people in this conversation would try to answer it through research.)

    But, slowly I realized that in the popular mind the word atheist was coming to mean something more: a statement that there couldn't be a God. God was, in this formulation, not possible, and this was something that could be proved. But I had been changed by eleven years of interviewing six or seven hundred scientists around the world on the television program Scientific American Frontiers. And that change was reflected in how I would now identify myself.

    The most striking thing about the scientists I met was their complete dedication to evidence. It reminded me of the wonderfully plainspoken words of Richard Feynman who felt it was better not to know than to know something that was wrong. The problem for me was that just as I couldn't find any evidence that there was a god, I couldn't find any that there wasn't a god. I would have to call myself an agnostic. At first, this seemed a little wimpy, but after a while I began to hope it might be an example of Feynman's heroic willingness to accept, even glory in, uncertainty.


    I still don't like the word agnostic. It's too fancy. I'm simply not a believer. But, as simple as this notion is, it confuses some people. Someone wrote a Wikipedia entry about me, identifying me as an atheist because I'd said in a book I wrote that I wasn't a believer. I guess in a world uncomfortable with uncertainty, an unbeliever must be an atheist, and possibly an infidel. This gets us back to that most pressing of human questions: why do people worry so much about other people's holding beliefs other than their own? This is the question that makes the subject over which I changed my mind something of global importance, and not just a personal, semantic dalliance.

In the last sentence he get to the heart of the problems besetting the world. The attempt to control what other people do and what they think.  He continues in an interesting vein

Do our beliefs identify us the way our language, foods and customs do? Is this why people who think the universe chugs along on its own are as repellent to some as people who eat live monkey brains are to others? Are we saying, you threaten my identity with your infidelity to my beliefs? You're trying to kill me with your thoughts, so I'll get you first with this stone? And, if so, is this really something that can be resolved through reasonable discourse?

Maybe this is an even more difficult problem; one that's written in the letters that spell out our DNA. Why is the belief in God and Gods so ubiquitous? Does belief in a higher power confer some slight health benefit, and has natural selection favored those who are genetically inclined to believe in such a power — and is that why so many of us are inclined to believe? (Whether or not a God actually exists, the tendency to believe we'll be saved might give us the strength to escape sickness and disaster and live the extra few minutes it takes to replicate ourselves.)

These are wild speculations, of course, and they're probably based on a desperate belief I once had that we could one day understand ourselves.

But, I might have changed my mind on that one, too.      

Set your mind on fire go read the whole lot.
Well worth reading. And for lots of other as well.

Spotted on  Ray Ison's blog

Dyslexic management can't read signs of failure * Simon Caulkin * The Observer, * Sunday November 25 2007

The real British disease is the unerring talent for putting together entities that are less than the sum of their parts. The comical inability to think in systems terms - call it management dyslexia - was on dazzling display last week, all over the front and back pages. First up, the England football team. Management is supposed to amplify effort by providing a creative framework for individual expression that benefits the team. But defeat against Croatia was the reverse, the culmination of unmanagement that over several matches has diminished team effort and turned good players into turnips.

[Snipped a bit]

Second up, a performance by HM Revenue & Customs that makes it hard to know where to begin - with the IT outsourcing that makes it an expensive extra to separate bank details from other personal data, to senior management's decision to dispense with encryption to Gordon Brown's repeated use of the 'one bad apple' excuse: the leak was the result of one individual's failure to carry out procedures - at the dispatch box.

The spectacle of a general blaming his troops is always distasteful, but in this case is also bankrupt. The HMRC leak is primarily the result not of human error, but poor or non-existent systems design which failed in at least three respects: not segregating sensitive from insensitive information, allowing the two to be sent out together, and omitting to encrypt it. If any of those steps had been followed, the further error, of leaving a junior to decide to put it in the post, would have been harmless. This is called fail-safeing - part of any good systems design.

[Snipped a description of a problem in the NHS that could describe some of the problems in Irish Hospital, only they're worse here]

In other words, the Norfolk NHS crisis, like that of HMRC and team England, was self-generated, the result of complete and continuing system-blindness. 'Problems in organisations,' points out Russell Ackoff, one of the first and best systems thinkers, 'are almost always the product of interactions of parts, never the action of a single part.' Treating a single part destabilises the whole and demands more fruitless management intervention; management becomes a consumer of energy, rather than a creator.

Unfortunately, that's the hallmark of 21st century UK management. As last week demonstrated, it still shows no sign of recognising it.

Worth repeating the money quote

'Problems in organisations,' points out Russell Ackoff, one of the first and best systems thinkers, 'are almost always the product of interactions of parts, never the action of a single part.'

A lot to be learned. Not sure anyone is listening in Government buildings in Ireland either.

Sig has interesting things to say about Categories and Relationships.

Relationships, not Categories, will save the planet.

Read the whole thing.