I don’t know whether my life has been a success or a failure. But not having any anxiety about becoming one instead of the other, and just taking things as they come along, I’ve had a lot of extra time to enjoy life.
– Harpo Marx
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Book review: The naked ape
The naked ape is a classic. It’s about humans, but it’s written by a zoologist, who treats us as just another type of ape.
The premise is this: If you took the skin of one of each species of primate and examined them closely, there’s one that would stick out – the human. We’re not covered in hair, hence the naked ape. He then goes on to describe the myriad ways in which we resemble apes, physically, psycologically, socially, sexually, etc. It’s brilliant stuff.
It reminds me of a question asked in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: What animal would you be, if you were an animal? Answer: You already are an animal.
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Book review: The art of systems thinking
Systems thinking is the key to understanding many of the problems that we face today as individuals and organizations. Peter Senge defined it as one of five key disciplines necessary to create a learning organization, but systems thinking is useful far beyond that.
This book, subtitled “Essential skills for creativity and problem solving”, is a thorough introduction to the field.
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Exercise
Check out this quote from an article in Fast Company:
A nine-month study of 80 executives found that those who worked out regularly improved their fitness by 22% and demonstrated a 70% improvement in their ability to make complex decisions as compared with non-exercisers.
A couple of days ago, there was a doctor on TV talking about the health benefits of regular exercise. The danish state will allow doctors to prescribe exercise the way they describe medication. Among others, exercise is good against heart disease, colon cancer and osteoporosis. The more you exercise, the more it works and here’s the clincher: There are NO negative side effects of exercise.
Any medicine out there (and I do mean ANY) has side effects. Exercise doesn’t. In a time where doctors warn that so many things can be bad for you, I think that’s kinda interesting. So exercise already!
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Free books
A lot of people talk content. Baen are delivering, and have been for a couple of years. And oh yeah – successfully! Most of their books are available on paper or as ebooks, and in many cases you can read the first few chapters for free.
In the Baen Free Library you can find free books by some of their authors, to read on your PC or Palm. Be sure to read the opening rant by Eric Flint, it’s informative and funny.
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Quote
Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back,
always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation)
there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas
and splendid plans:The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise never
have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising
in one’s favor all manners of unforeseen incidents and material assistance,
which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.– William Murray (Member of Scottish expedition to Mount Everest)
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Book review: Det gener
Tor Nørretranders has written an excellent book about generosity. It has gotten a decent amount of media exposure since it came out, mostly due to some (literally) sexy catchphrases.
But the book has merit far beyond easy catchphrases. Humans are generous, artistic, flamboyant, playful individualists. And what’s more, we’re the happiest when we can be all of that. Why?
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Infocom adventures
I used to love playing the Infocom adventure games on my Commodore 64. Yes, they had no graphics and no sound. But they did have excellent text and the cleverest, most infuriating puzzles. Also the games had an excellent parser, that could even understand input like “Put the x in the y using z” (hot stuff back then, when many adventure games only accepted input formatted like “verb noun”).
There’s also a lot of humour in there. One of the games had you running around a maze of walls (actually many of them did). In this case if you got desperate enough to try “listen to the wall” the game came back with “Ah, a Pink Floyd Fan.”
My absolute favourite is Planetfall where you’re a lonely ensign third class from the Stellar Patrol Ship Feinstein, stranded on a deserted planet. You need to find a way home, before you run out of food and water. Click more to see an example of the kind of things I relly liked about the Infocom games.
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Appreciative Inquiry resource
I just stumbled on an article describing Appreciative Inquiry. It’s an excellent intro from the author of “The thin book of appreciative inquiry”.
There isn’t much information on how to get started using AI, but the governing principles and values of AI are described. And most importantly, there’s an actual case story on how AI was used in a community project in the South Bronx.
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Book review: Birth of the Chaordic Age
This is one of Dee Hock’s favourite tricks to play on an audience. “How many of you recognize this?” he asks, holding out his own Visa card. Every hand in the room goes up. “Now,” Hock says, “how many of you can tell me who owns it, where it’s headquartered, how it’s governed, or where to buy shares?” Confused silence. No one has the slightest idea, because no one has ever thought about it.
Dee Hock is the mastermind behind Visa and this book is part autobiography, part introduction to Dee’s thoughts on complexity theory and part social manifesto.
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