Tuesday musings

Mike Spillane’s passing leaves me very sad, but to be true to his spirit, life, and the blog, must go on. Thusly:
The Pope is visiting the U.S. this week, and I am very interested in learning more about this man and his ideas. I have been a little leery of Benedict, given some of […]

Projects to think about on the road

Linda and I are off (at 4:30 AM) to Milwaukee, of all places, tomorrow. Long story, but the Giants are playing the Brewers, I have an old college buddy there and a good friend from Chicago is coming up. I plan to use the travel time to think through a couple of very important projects.
One […]

Blogging (well, writing) then and now

Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903) wrote every day for fifty years. He created a ‘bookshelf’ of titles on cultural evolution according to Rodney Stark in his book Discovering God, and was the originator of the Ghost Theory of primitive religion ’spelled out and illustrated in massive detail.’
Spencer’s theory was eventually dismissed as ‘nonsense’ by scholars. […]

More on ‘Liberals are born that way’

From this week’s New Scientist:
“In 2003, John Jost, a psychologist at New York University, and colleagues surveyed 88 studies, involving more than 20,000 people in 12 countries, that looked for a correlation between personality traits and political orientation (American Psychologist, vol 61, p 651). Some traits are obviously going to be linked to politics, such […]

Snow in the Bay Area

It rarely snows here, but one of the Bay Area’s tallest peaks, Mt. Diablo, has a healthy dusting of snow today, and the snow level was said to have fallen as low as 1000 feet.
In the past, a snow level of 1000 feet has meant snow on Windy Hill, a nearby geographic feature. That’s Cassie […]

Crashing

So, my first investment appeared to be a disaster - I put my life’s savings ($1000!) in a mutual fund a few weeks before the infamous ‘Black Friday’ crash (early 80s?) and I watched a couple hundred bucks evaporate.
I was in it for the long haul, though, and let the money ride. Today that fund […]

Evolution and morality

“The human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations.” writes Stephen Pinker in the January 13 NYT Magazine. Pinker, one of the leading lights in the controversial field of evolutionary psychology, believes that morality, like some other human behavioral traits, […]

Phone co. cuts off FBI wiretap: bill overdue

Makes me feel safe: first the FBI et al. have been given unprecedented powers to listen in on  American’s phone and email conversations, which is spooky in that Big Brother kind of way. And now we hear that the FBI can’t be bothered to pay its phone bill for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act wiretap. […]

The Inbox

So, we’ve blogged before about our embrace of GTD - Get Things Done - which seems to be the most straightforward (and least expensive) personal organization and time management program. Many in Silicon Valley use it, and I took the course (stored on my iPod Shuffle) as part of my return to Adobe last […]

How Warren Buffett got where he is

The New York Times’ David Leonhardt reminds us of two Columbia professors named Benjamin Graham and David L. Dodd, and their notion of ‘value investing.’  Warren Buffett took their class, worked for their firm and then set out to make his billions using their notions. Leonhardt thinks investors today, by focusing on the long term, […]

— keep looking »