Freeze
Yesterday, a newly elected Arizona representative was shot in Tucson by a 22-year-old shooter. The shooter killed 6 people and injured a dozen more. As the shooter fled the scene after killing and injuring several people, he was tackled to the ground by a bystander. A man with a gun puts bullets into 18 people, then runs away. If you saw that, what would you do? They've done studies about this, and apparently, only a...
Self-Defeating
My friend Dave shared a link yesterday, to an article that knowingly suggests that most of us set ourselves up for failure. When I was in college, I became acquainted with a lot of very different, very smart people. Even on a larger campus, you start to run into the same faces over and over again. I met lots of people with novels to write, albums to compose, and other things to give. They would...
Tug O' War
In Cambodia, deep in the jungle, lies the ancient temple of Angkor Wat. Inside, there is a large stone carving on a tablet called the "Churning Ocean of Milk", which features many gods and demons in a battle of tug of war with a large snake suspended over an ocean of milk. In this story, the battle rages endlessly between both sides, and the endgame has nothing to do with either side winning...it has to...
Method to the Madness
Do you have a soap problem in your house? Is your bathroom missing hand soap, or is anti-bacterial cleaner missing from your kitchen? Chances are pretty good, if you live in the United States, that it isn't. Advertisers spent the last century working to make sure that most Americans have their soap and cleaning supply problem taken care of. Fortunately for hygiene and health, they've largely succeeded...almost no one is in search of a new...
Self-Deprecation is Overrated
Self-deprecation is good as a joke, in small bursts, and when it's meant to be funny. Generally, the best way to put people at ease when they expect that you're about to be full of yourself is to make a joke at your own expense. But it only really works when it's honest. Too often, people will use a self-deprecating remark in an effort to cloak their ego. They willingly take a stab at themselves,...
The Wrong
"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never produce anything original." -Sir Ken Robinson
Video Killed the Radio-haters, Too
In the past, I've harbored plenty of resentment towards television, but I have trouble doing this now. If you look at the trends, there was clearly an explosion in television-watching around the same time that TV sets became widely available. This looks bad; it makes it seem that TV consumption supplanted a lot of other more important and intellectual pursuits. Perhaps it left us worse off. But the rise in television watching coincides, I believe,...
Wonder
I'm a little rusty on my history, but I'm willing to bet that Newton didn't have to try terribly hard to get people to accept his theory of gravity. He just had to drop something to the ground in front of him. "That's gravity." And they believed him. (And the venture capitalists were so impressed they wrote him a check on the spot.) We understand it, because we can see it, and I think this...
Get the 'Net
There are some people who hate the Internet just as much as they hated television. Ray Bradbury is among them. He wrote an entire book about how evil television was for society, since he saw it as a consumptive drain on people's time at home. And now he hates the Internet, for much the same reason. Try as I have, I can't bring myself to see things this way. I can't see the Internet as...
Flushing Followers
I overheard a conversation between the marketing interns at work. One of them was training the other on how to manage the Twitter account we have. Basically, the instructions were to follow other people at random, keep track and see who followed us back, and to eventually stop following people who didn't. I'll concede that I really haven't figured out how to use Twitter yet, but I do know that the worst corners of it...