Misfiled Vagueries

About this time of year I embark on all the filing I might have done throughout the past year if I had half the brains god gave a crab apple. Among the bills and legal notices I found the following this year:

The tragedy of American medicine is that money buried the ugly fact before it arranged an opportunity to kill the beautiful hypothesis.

And:

As my twin lodestones, Twain and Marquis, might advise, it is a good to write one's own obituary to ensure the salient points are included. Leave the dust mote matter to the depiction of the cub reporter and junior reporter. the process will build their moral fibre by habituating them to their depravity their life offers.

--ml

Today in Aphorisms

As usual our political fate hangs on the independents: people who cannot commit, or make up their minds, or pay attention.
--ml

I Did It Not For Myself, But For You

Brenda Rosser at Econospeak begins a series which exhumes the roots of the current global financial crisis. Amply sourced and throughly footnoted as it is, the actual prose is pellucid. It is tempting to call the perps pirates! as is my wont. Yet there is a distinct glimmer in events of earnest but flawed persons hoping to ride a whirlwind to the aid and benefit of, at least, their masters, but also as many others nearby as possible. The worst flaw, perhaps, was a compulsion to justify an action as beneficial to those damaged by it.

Statecraft's most carefully tended tool is dissembly.

--ml

Biology Lab by the Dozens

Scene: A bucolic college in Ohio, one of three thousand seven hundred and forty eight "Harvard's of the west" ...
Time: The peak of the Kennedy Years, before Johnson passed all his legislation.

In a small Science lab/lecture hall very late in June or early in July when humidity has exceeded temperature to the nth degree, a smattering of ca-twenty-year-olds forgather. They are attired in sandals of all descriptions, shorts and tees, Indian cotton, and the studiously off hand serape.
It is their first lab for Bio 101, i.e.: The real world for naiv imbeciles.
Seated on the black stone counter is a buxom daughter of a successful Valkyrie. Six foot in an age of five foot seven. Blond ropes in braids any lynch mob would die for (so to speak) on her head. In khaki shorts, and a light Norwegian sweater, She sits cross legged.
After the routines of pedagogy are complied with she begins the lab. Her clear eyes, that shame the welkin's hue, lose focus in the mists of last night. She heaves a great, welcome, sigh. Her lips part into a wide display of even, white, seraphic dentition, and announces:

Sex is wonderful.

The truth of this overwhelms me.
Even now.
Blessings upon her.
--ml
tags: aphorisms, , Dum Luks Stockpot, science

Didact's Koan

If the student learns, may the teacher take credit for teaching?

If all students learn just as much at the same time, then the teacher taught.

If only some students learn, while other's fail, then the student did the learning.

This is a very hard notion for young teachers to accept.
--ml
tags: aphorisms, Dum Luks Stockpot

Words to Ponder Over Coffee

Before morning coffee fully awakened Diana she laid an aphorism or two on the Kid^tm and I.

"'Tips' spelled backwards is 'spit'"

"Who ever figured out that 'desserts' spelled backwards is 'stressed' was brilliant."

Bon mots.
Fun with words.
mhumphf.
--ml
tags: aphorisms, Dum Luks Stockpot

Cricketal Observance #784b

The clearest proof of our collective irrationality is our insistence -- in the face of the evidence -- that we are rational.
--ml
tags: aphorisms, Dum Luks Stockpot

A Quarter for a Truism

Walker at Maxspeak:

Economists are trained to type in the assumptions that will maximize the career-utility of their results.

Too bad inflation has rendered the reward so small compared to the merit of the thought!
--ml

Update 5/13/7-- It at last penetrates the thick carapace in which I preserve the odd goo I call a brain from sulliment by coarse, unreasoning reality: The above might be construed as a cretin's sneer at his betters, i.e.: Economists. The furry little scene inside the camera obsura of my imagination -- more obscure than camera -- was quite other. The thought was that we are all so limited to what pays in our assumptions that it is little wonder actual new paradigms are so singularly thin on the ground. Most people have the well commended opinion that only fools re-invent the wheel. That in the face of what a clumsy contraption we make our contrivance.
tags: Dum Luks Community, aphorisms

No News is Good?

The ultimate sound bite is silence.
(RIP CBC Radio2 news)
--ml
tags: aphorisms, Dum Luks Stockpot, CBC Radio 2

The Longer the Title ...

The smaller the pay check.

e.g.: President = 30 x median
CEO = 300 x median

-- ml
tags: aphorisms, Design, management

Analects of Management XXVI

How to become a consultant

1933 was a frenzied year for Earle. After he earned his Masters in chemistry from MIT he married Dorothy, dropped out of MIT's Doctoral program and got a first job as a chemical engineer for the Union Paste Company.
His first day on the job he got the plant tour with emphasis on the research lab where he would be working.
"Now, here is the problem we really hope you will solve," his boss said. "This is our best new glue. It's brand new. It does every thing we want it to do in terms of application ease, strength and reliability. It is inexpensive to manufacture. There is only one problem. It is green. Every one knows that glue is brown. This stuff is a green so putrid that the sales department won't even try to offer it."
Somewhat diffidently Earle spoke, "Have you tried putting a red dye in to make it brown?"
No they hadn't. Once they did, it worked and the new product was a great success. Earle more than made his first year's salary for the company his first day on the job by applying a knowledge of color mixing he acquired in kindergarten.
Earle told me that a consultant's job is to get the client to restate his question in such a way that it answers itself.
--ml
tags: aphorisms, science, what is science

Clean Up Party

Company coming -- like maybe Parents? Stress making. Clean everything to the nth degree!

"Nonsense," said Tune, A fine dame who kept a neat house. "Just pick up before the party and clean the mess up afterwards."

Wise words thought I.

But I heard wiser ones on CBC Radio 2 last week:

"My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance."

Happy holidays
--ml
tags: house cleaning, aphorisms

Moderation, Me Dears

Moderation is all in all.
So be moderate in all things ...
Especially moderation.

--ml
tags: Feast of Holidays, Thanksgiving, aphorisms

If You Don't

Upper Left provides a jump off point:

base (bās) (n.)116240627907725424">

A supporting part or layer; a foundation.

A basic or underlying element; infrastructure.

If you don't understand 'base', it is 'infrastructure'.
Comprende?
--ml

Analects of Management

My boss:
"My knowledge is a mile wide but only an inch deep.
When I need to go deeper you will provide."
--ml

Technorati Tags: Analects of Management

Word Play

"The great tragedy of Science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."

-- Thomas Huxley

Link
-- ml

Technorati Tags: Thomas Huxley, cholesterol myth

What Were We Doing?

Tom Allen, host of CBC's Music & Company, just remarked to the effect of:

Man has been farming for 7,000 years. Life began three and a half billion years ago. What the heck was he doing all those years before he started farming? We don't know.

Perhaps. But it sure looks like it took a couple of billion years for us to get stupid enough to belive we had to work for a living.
--ml



Technorati Tags: Tom Allen, CBC, farming, hunter-gatherers

Training

The suddenly old kitten trains the new kitten.
--ml
cat blogging

Too Good to Pass Up

John Scalzi mentions:

There's a saying out there known as the Napoleon-Clarke Law which states, in a twist on Arthur C. Clarke's comment on technology, that "any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

--ml

Analects of Management xiv-anon.

Regardless of how many "grown-ups" he had around him, he was the head of the organization and the organization was a reflection of him. They always are.

Super. Saved the quote. But not the link. Apologies to the author, but the thought is too good not to share.
-- ml