I’ve not seen, in my life, too many sculptures that have made too great of an impression on me. I guess I’m more often moved by paintings and drawings than by the more physical arts. But I saw this image today, and I found it quite stunning. It’s a sculpture from Philadelphia called Freedom. The artist is Zenos Frudakis, and this is some of what he had to say about it: “I wanted to create a sculpture almost anyone, regardless of their background, could look at and instantly recognize that it is about the idea of struggling to break…
Fear: a key ingredient in bad decisions
On more than one occasion, my Dad has told me this story, and he swears it is true: One day, the President of his company was walking into their headquarters. As he was walking in, he noticed that some workers were erecting scaffolding around the outside front of the building. When he got inside, he went to the Building Services Manager and asked “What’s all the scaffolding for?” The manager interpreted the question from the President as a sign of disapproval and ordered the workers to take down the scaffolding. At the end of the day, as the President…
Changing the way we talk about politics
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. “ – Eleanor Roosevelt Normally, I’m not one for quotes. However, this one was pointed out to me as I was walking through a local grade school. It articulated something I had concluded about two years earlier. As long as I’ve been following politics, people have been talking about the President like they knew him personally. They would assign motives to every statement and assign credit for very complicated laws or regulations that were vetted by hundreds, if not thousands, of people. It was about that time…
They can’t drive 55
Having never owned or shopped for a Suburu, I’m hoping a Suburu owner can help me out with a question. Is there something in the Suburu purchase agreement that prohibits the driver from driving the speed limit? Perhaps all Suburu’s come with a governor to limit speed? In my 30 years of driving, it has been as reliable as the sun that if you get behind a Suburu, you will most certainly be traveling under the posted the speed limit. (Not to mention accelerating 0-60mph in never seconds and beginning your slow down for a stop light 300 yards…
Doing the jobs humans won’t do
In the past week, I’ve run across a few articles about how robot caregivers are making a huge difference in the lives of our senior citizens. Facilities in Japan and Germany are using the robots to interact with the elderly. The robots challenge senior citizens with memory games and bring food and drinks to residents. Any why not? One look at a sidewalk, restaurant, bus, or shopping mall will show you that we’ve already lost the ability to look each other in the eye and hold a normal conversation. The best of friends will sit at a table and…
Apple invents… the newspaper
On Monday, during their Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple’s VP of Product Marketing, Susan Prescott, shocked the world by announcing that Apple would be selecting the top news stories that appear in their Apple News product. In other words, they’re going to behave remarkably similar to every other news organization with real editors and journalists. This is not one of Apple’s more groundbreaking innovations. However, many treated it as such. A Google search using the terms “apple news selecting stories susan prescott” returns several conservative news sites reporting the inherent bias built in to this model. They go further to…
The story behind the story
On Saturday, The News Observer out of North Carolina reported that a Google search for Republican state Senator Trudy Wade was returning a photo of the senator in the Knowledge Panel (the box on the right hand side of the search results) that had the word “bigot” on it. After the story made national news, Google apologized, and said this photo was showing up because the engine was grabbing a photo posted by a man named Matt Comer. This all happened just a few days after Google was criticized for including the word “nazism,” under the “Ideology” description in…
Celebrate similarity
In 2002, during a performance of “Anna Stesia”, Prince said, “‘We should champion our diversity…’ Ha!” “We should champion our similarities. We should meet on a higher level. Instead of looking at white, black… rich, poor… young, old… Differences. Differences. ‘Diversity.’ Let’s meet somewhere higher.” You can’t get through a week without seeing a “celebrate diversity” sign or hearing someone talking about the importance of diversity. It’s never made any sense to me. Why aren’t we celebrating the things we have in common? The things that unite us? People keep trying to break us down into groups: white, black,…
The minty taste of victory
The kid and I have taken to playing backgammon. After a marathon session of games, we were looking for ways to liven it up. We decided to dive into our stash of Mint M&M’s (you should always store at least 10-15 bags from their Christmas season availability so you have them throughout the year), and use them in place of the regular game pieces. Nothing makes victory taste so good as eating the game pieces as you take them off the board. And to add even more variety, you can vary the colors: The only downside is that once…
I only have time to tell you how little time I have
One of the most frustrating aspects of getting rejected after a job interview (and there are many), is the reluctance of recruiters to give you any feedback so you can improve for your next interview. After one of many failed job interviews, I decided it’d be good to finally get some feedback on my performance in hopes that I could find some actionable improvements to make. Right after I received the rejection, I created a job interview feedback survey on SurveyMonkey and emailed it directly to the four interviewers I had seen that day. I also wrote to the…