July 2008
14 posts
Carrots, Sticks, and the Paradoxes of Motivation |... →
Over the years I have had to explain over and over to people way above my pay grade that money is a bad motivator. Sure we like it, but the idea that just offering an incetive will get us to work harder/better/faster is ultimately foolish. But if you occasionally buy us lunch, send us home early, throw a good party when we ship, and most importand prove that you understand us; and we will follow...
“We are a very close family, with time and space between”
– SM
And there is no irony or sarcasm there. People puzzle at the fact that I can go a year or more without talking to my brothers. It’s because I know that if something were wrong, I would be told and then we would all converge and do everything I can.
"Naming of Parts" by Henry Reed →
I had not head of this poem before, and I wish that were not so. There is something special in that british poetry around the first and second war. A time when poetry was more valued, and young men’s minds were filled with wonderment, and horror; and wrote things like this to make sense of it all
BBC NEWS | Magazine | Is being shy an illness? →
Speaking as someone who is acutely, painfully, shy; I can speak to the realness of this. It doesn’t go away, you just learn to deal with it. But you still feel like you want to throw up each time the phone rings and it isn’t a number you know…
Court tosses FCC 'wardrobe malfunction' fine →
Well Janat Jackson’s “million dollar breasts” (if take the $550K fine for showing one of them, and then double it) seem to be going through a court ordered devaluation.
They are just as lovely thought…
That uncomfortable calculus...
Missing someone who has been dead for 6 years now. In just 13 more years I will have known Sunny dead for as long as I knew her alive.
Superhero Stories
Wondering when people will finally start filing “Flowers for Algernon” under “Superhero Stories”
Empanadas!
I am not quite sure, but I needed exclaim something and what came out was “Empanadas!”
5 reasons to avoid iPhone 3G - Free Software... →
I understand (and even sympathize) with most of the points in this piece. However I do call BS on the location thing. The iPhone asks you whenever a program wants your location, and all location services can be turned off in the Settings panel.
I would love the phone to be more open, but it isn’t. And I invite everyone who isn’t comfortable with that to go elsewhere.
Of course I...
Dream
I had a dream last night that my (deceased) father called me from a 770 area code (Atlanta), just to say hi.
The Worm Turns - New York Times →
The truism is that with each gain we achieve we give something up. We developed writing, and we give up our memories. We develop the pocket calculator, and we give up on math in our head. We develop modern medicine, and sometimes our bodies can’t keep up.
Each one of these advancements are good in the overall. The tradeoffs let us do more. But we should always be aware of them.
I...
Dream
Last night I had a dream that I was debating Andrea Dworkin — in an atheistic club in the mission district of San Francisco. I made some glancing comment to Allen Ginsberg, and she started calling me an “indirect baby rapist,” because any support of Ginsberg was a support of NAMBLA, and thus baby rape.
I was doing my best to hold my own in the debate, but Dworkin kept spiraling...