The recent drop in home prices in the U.S. (see here) has been easy come, easy go for most people. Yet, while news writers are banging on the drums of doom about the drop, they didn’t seem so concerned about the real problem - which was that people bought foolishly on the up-swing. In fact, many news writers were happy to encourage the over-leveraging (very little down mortgages from people without the likely economic resources to afford a drop) or reckless consumption (people borrowing on their increased home prices in order to buy vacations, fancy cars, and so on) that caused a large amount of the problems, peddling stories of seemingly infinite sunniness in a situation where it was reasonable to attribute a significant chance that it was a bubble market in many places in the U.S.

There is a saying about how great dangers can lurk in your seeming success - the problems with the U.S. economy came because people were not tempered enough in their evaluations of their previous seeming economic ’successes’.

Here is an interesting comment on market ‘unregulation’ (via Fumbled Mumblings).

Recently, a link sent by a correspondent raised my ire. It was to a link to this article on the rankings of American Presidents by a group of historians (full rankings available here, with specific attributes on the right-hand side of that page).

These two sentences in the article in particular spurred me:

“[Bush] was ranked 25th in crisis leadership and vision and agenda setting. In contrast, Lincoln was ranked in the top three in each of the 10 categories evaluated by participants.”

This survey of Presidents was timed to coincide with (surprise) Lincoln’s birthday.

I am not particularly warm towards Bush’s Presidency, but anything rarefying Lincoln’s bloody achievements galls me (as my interlocutor knows).

This elicited three e-mails from me before he could respond, quoted partially as follows:

First:

That was Bush’s error - not precipitating a large enough military crisis that led to hundreds of thousands of Americans dead so as to be considered among the top 3 at crisis leadership!

Next e-mail:

The best Presidents in terms of crisis leadership were probably those at the bottom of the list, because nothing seemed to happen while they were President - they defused crises before the situations were perceived as such. I’ll take a Coolidge (32nd in crisis leadership) over a Lincoln (1st in crisis leadership) or F. Roosevelt (2nd in crisis leadership) any day, thanks.

Finally:

N.B.: Now that you’ve got me writing, talk about the “greatest Presidents” or who is the best in a serious journalistic context is the sort of talk that I find a little … creepy. It smacks of some sort of quasi-deification, hero-worship, or whatever (especially when done in conjunction with the 200th birthday of one of them). In a democracy, leaders should be tolerated - not canonized and venerated. (I’ve found this especially concerning with the recent front-page magazine treatment of the most recent President - yuck).

This will be my last e-mail on this subject.

For now. :)

Hopefully this post will achieve its cathartic effect.

I have recently switched from Firefox Live Bookmarks to Thunderbird RSS for following blogs. With Thunderbird (see here), blog posts are treated like incoming e-mail. This is very neat. You can specify how often Thunderbird will check for new posts - or check manually - and when they arrive they look like new e-mail look. (You then keep a local copy of the blog post in Thunderbird, which can be useful for future reference, or click a link at the top of the blog post to view the actual posting through your web browser.)

The way I used Firefox’s Live Bookmarks, blog names were listed across the top of the screen, and to find out if there was a new post I had to click on (each) blog. That would drop down a menu and I would have to recognize if one or more were new. (You can have them displayed in a sidebar, but I find it takes up too much screen space.) With Thunderbird, a little number appears next to any of your blog names, indicating how many new posts have been retrieved, and you can view the status of all the blogs at a glance from the main Thunderbird sidebar (which I have displayed anyway in Thunderbird). This way, you can centralize your information into your e-mail client moreso, and can read the posts at your leisure, whether online or not.

As metaphors can help people to understand unfamiliar concepts with familiar ones, it seems pretty straightforward that metaphors in computer programming can be very helpful. Since I tend to think highly visually, I have problems with computer programming (which tends to be more naturally suited to people who think “algorithmically”).

When I was studying mathematics, one of the tricks I used to turn Bs into A+s was to figure out how to turn whatever new mathematical concept or equation that was in front of me into a visual representation.

In computer programming, some of the names for concepts lend themselves naturally to visual representations. A ’stack’ is like a stack of bricks, where the first one put down is the last one to be removed, as if you are building or tearing down a wall. A ‘queue’ is like a queue of people, where the last one to be added is the last one to reach the front desk. It’s easy to think of these concepts visually. What about an ‘array’, though? It’s not really that visual (perhaps you can think of an array of things in front of you, but that doesn’t capture the importance of the concept for computer programming). Replacing it with “cubicles” might be more useful. A single-dimensional array is like a line of cubicles. A 2-dimensional array like a wall of cubicles, a 3-dimensional array like a cube of cubicles, and so on. (You can even #define cubicles array and then program with the new name.)

One set of words that is particularly ill-chosen is “compile” and “link”. Uh, guys, these are almost interchangeable in terms of what they suggest to a regular English language person. You don’t need to use an abstract word to describe an abstract process. Rather, you can bring an abstract concept to life by using a concrete word to describe it. Instead, computer programming is littered with zombie concepts - poor, atrophied words that at one point probably had some life in them.

(”Compile” is a good example of this happening. It is probably from L. compilare, which means to plunder. The link is probably from the very visceral situation of piling goods together at some point in the plundering process. This was then borrowed for the concept of putting various written materials together into a single document. Perhaps it was a lively word when this first was done, but in the current context it simply brings to mind a vague notion of putting documents together.)

I’m sure this has been done, but it would be interesting to try a development environment where you can actually insert little icons that visually represent some common functionality, such as a “for” loop (a little motor at the top with a chain with a number next to it that represents how often it will loop?).

“Just a few words on time management. Forget all about it. [...] Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.” (p.65, 4HWW)

The basic idea is to transition from time management (how do I fill up a certain amount of time?) to priority management (how do I do the most important things in the least amount of time?). Most businesses use the time management model (you have 8 hours a day to fill up, so how shall we fill that time?). Output based consultancy more naturally lends itself to priority management. If you own your own business, priority management becomes more important. For example, you can easily put in 8 hours and create $0 more value for the business. On the other hand, you can work 1 hour and create $5,000 in value for the business. It depends on whether you are working on the right things - i.e., prioritizing well. As Ferriss mentions above, the catch is that these important things are often uncomfortable, typically because they require us to grow.

I have adopted the idea of writing down the 3 top things I want to accomplish in a day (also from 4HWW). I write these on a Sticky Note and put it somewhere on my desk where I can see it easily. If I complete those 3 things, I then give myself permission to feel good about what I’ve accomplished in that day - regardless of how long it took.

Yesterday, for example, my number 1 priority was completing a project that had bothered me with vague worry and guilt (for not completing it!) for months now. In the end, it took 2 hours. I think I spent more time internally complaining about it than that. It was an important but uncomfortable action.

Going on an idea here, I’m now checking my e-mail 3 times a day, instead of having it automatically download every 10 minutes while my e-mail program is open …

It’s ironic that everybody was complaining about high oil prices half a year ago, but they didn’t realize that it kept the Canadian economy afloat.

Sacha’s note above reminds me of a song I learnt when I was a child, that starts with 10 bears in a bed and the little one feeling crowded and ends, after 8 have fallen out and the 9th is about to because the little one keeps saying that he’s crowded, with

And the little one said

“I’m crowded! Roll over!”

So they all rolled over and one fell out,

Just one in the bed and the little one said

“I’m lonely!”

I guess some Canadians are feeling lonely now …

Taken from the comments section here, it’s a quotation from chef Bobby Flay:

Take risks and you’ll get the payoffs. Learn from your mistakes until you succeed. It’s that simple.

In what way is 100 a relevant number? If we had a base 8 number system, would the announcer intone “What will happen in the first 64 days of this administration?” It’s as if a poetic device (for example, 10,000 days = evocative of a long time) - actually, a rhetorical device - became the misguided basis of public policy decisions.