Holy crap-a-moly, this song is intense. Cosmic Love by Florence and the Machine. I think its from that popular movie series about werewolves or vampires or something… can’t say the pop-culture ties dilute its awesomeness.
This is musical-shiver level stuff.
This is the kind of music that, after you’ve run 20 miles and you’ve 6 more to go, searching for something, anything, to move your tired body forward, you turn on for the feel of pure epinephrine pumping out of the adrenal glands and hitting your lungs, muscles, eyes simultaneously.
The Giving Pledge, where billionaires pledge to give over half of their worth to charity. Warren Buffet, who is giving over 99% of his worth to charity:
I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves
the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal,
rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from
parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing
of securities with sums reaching into the billions. In
short, fate’s distribution of long straws is wildly
capricious.
Three dimensional television is the dumbest thing I have ever heard of. It’s not the glasses that bother me. It’s the fact that the extra dimension is superfluous: two dimensions are perfectly evocative of reality. I believe that adding a third dimension just gives the TV networks and movie studios an opportunity to charge more for their broadcasts and films.
Moving pictures with sound: more realistic.
Moving pictures in color: more realistic.
Moving pictures in 3D: distracting.
Did I mention stupid? Dumb, stupid, stupid, dumb 3D TV.
My sister (who just got her PhD in applied mathematics) Katy sent me a great article about a talking, learning 5-year-old intelligence research parrot named Alex (parrot) - Wikipedia:
He called an apple a “banerry”, which Pepperberg thought
to be a combination of “banana” and “cherry”, two fruits
he was more familiar with.
This part is great, too:
If he said “Wanna banana,” but was offered a nut instead,
he stared in silence, asked for the banana again, or took
the nut and threw it at the researcher or otherwise
displayed annoyance, before requesting the item again.
When I was little young fellow, I loved to go to the car wash with my Dad. On bitterly cold days, we’d sit in the line-up for a car wash, listening to Car Talk on NPR. At the high-intensity air-dryer at the end of the wash, I looked at the windshield wipers fluttering in the wind. I still my remember my stupid little joke that I thought was so funny at 7 years old: “It looks just like a nervous bride on her wedding day!”
I guess I’ve never been that funny. I love analogies, metaphors, imagination, and I’m fond of irreverence and non-sequitors. I agonize over stupid things I’ve said, over-analyzing and over-thinking previous conversations. This is interesting, because sometimes I have a reason to agonize — I tend to struggle with describing things… I’ve been working really hard on proper nouns. Otherwise it’s — we went to that theater to see some movie with that one actor written by the guy from *snap snap* who rebooted that franchise. What’s more, I’m terrified of hurting other’s feelings, and I favor the most gentle forms of humor possible: ones which hurt and offend nobody.
As a conversationalist, I need some practice.
It’s all stuff I’m working on, especially because imagination and irreverence are completely out of place in doctor-patient relations. I have found, however, a few great rules to follow in casual conversation:
Listen your ears out. Listen so hard that you think
you’re right there by this person in whatever
event they’re describing. If their dog puked on the
carpet this weekend, you’re right alongside them, trying
to clean it up… imagining how awful that must be.
Listening will bring up things you can relate to in your own mind: “oh yeah, I remember cleaning up cat hairballs.” Do not share these things unless they’re short and do a great job of furthering the person’s point. If you’ve cleaned up any sort of animal refuse, don’t bring it up. If you’ve also cleaned up pomeranian vomit from wool shag, now would be a good time to offer tips on cleaning products. Your job, however, is to keep the person talking about themselves. Which brings me to the next point.
Keep your conversational partner talking about themselves. They are not listening to stories from your weekend, however much they may feign interest. Stay one step back from “and how did that make you feel?” but keep them talking.
Remember. The best way to pick up the conversational thread is the follow-up. The fact that you remembered will touch a deep, primal chord in this person. They will feel cared for, though they won’t necessarily realize this. (Corollary: don’t remember too much. People love to feel cared for, but dislike feeling stalked. If you do remember every detail from the conversation, you should hide this fact.)
When the person is new, use open-ended initiators. I always have liked “How are you today?” with my patients. It is too formal for casual interaction, so I leave those examples as an exercise for the reader. Anyhow, seemingly simple questions help you immediately gauge your interaction: did they immediately skip to politics? Are they in pain that should be addressed? Did their response exhibit an equivalent understanding of the rules of conversation? As quickly as possible, you must figure out what is safe ground and what are risky areas.
Understand how your conversational partner uses fillers between utterances. Some people appreciate you completing their thoughts, as doing so indicates to them that you are tracking their thought process. Others will immediately, almost unconsciously, contradict your attempts to show you are listening. In those cases, it is best to withdraw into vague, positive affirmations. Some people would rather argue than converse.
Most of you understand these things instinctively. I did not, and sometimes still do not. I vividly remember sitting in band class in ninth grade. It was a Monday. A guy I knew struck up a conversation with a girl on whom I had a crush. “So, how was your weekend?” A synaptic foghorn went off in my conversationally stunted adolescent mind. AHA. THAT’S what you’re supposed to do to start a conversation! It’s been an uphill battle ever since. I’ll fight on.
I’ve been thinking about this one for SEVENMONTHS, and finally decided stopped being lazy enough to post it. Denmark Thrives Despite High Taxes:
Mr. PETERSEN: Yeah, there’s a kind of slack in the
system.
KESTENBAUM: Denmark has an interesting kind of
hybrid economy. It has this huge welfare state, but it
has also fiercely embraced a lot of free market ideas.
The unemployment benefits are generous, but it’s also
very easy to fire people. That makes the economy nimble.
Employers can get rid of workers when they dont need them
and hire them back quickly when they do. Petersen says
losing your job here is just not that big a deal.
Now,
all countries face choices like this: How do you want to
set up your economy? Those decisions shape how you live
and your psychology. In Denmark, for instance, there
aren’t severe class distinctions because the poor get
helped, the rich get taxed, so everyone gets squashed
into a big, fat middle class.
One economist told me:
Look, we dont have any geniuses and we dont have the best
pro athletes - they leave because of the high taxes - but
overall we’re doing well.
Naturally, there are some concerns about just being average as a nation. However, with so many people falling out of the United State’s middle class, I think something has to change the distribution of wealth.
I hear all these arguments about raising taxes and welfare: “oh the government’s inefficient” or “I don’t want my money going towards some low-income person who puts rims on their car and gets a cell phone before buying food” or “I worked too hard for what I’ve got to waste it”. These are simply rationalizations for not wanting to part with money. If you don’t want to give other people money to help them, just say that. Don’t do a bunch of logical gymnastics around the issue — you’re either comfortable with trusting your money to a greater good, or you aren’t. Just say which one, and we’ll stop wasting one another’s time.
A banana equivalent dose is a concept occasionally used
by nuclear proponents to place in scale the dangers
of radiation by comparing exposures to the radiation
generated by a common banana.
I was able to determine that a panoramic x-ray for your head is the equivalent of eating about 150 bananas:
0.009863 millirems per banana
15µSv / pan * 1 millirem / 10 µSv = 15 millirems / pan
15 millirems / pan * 1 banana / 0.0099 millirems = 150 bananas
I hope to break that one out to a patient… when I find the right combination of intellectual curiosity and concern for x-rays in a patient. That may, possibly, be never.
Implicature is when you suggest an idea by what you say, but your words don’t have to be taken that way. And, well, I guess there’s a whole field of linguistics where people structure how we talk with one another into ordered rules. For example, Gricean maxims deal with assumptions about your conversational partner: that their contributions are relevant, clear, true, and that they aren’t too long-winded in responses. However, the rules still work when we choose to break (flout) them:
Speakers who deliberately flout the maxims usually intend
for their listener to understand their underlying
implication. In the case of the clumsy friend, she will
most likely understand that the speaker is truly not
offering a compliment. Therefore, cooperation is still
taking place, but no longer on the literal level.
Conversationalists can assume that when speakers
intentionally flout a maxim, they still do so with the aim
of expressing some thought. Thus, the Gricean Maxims serve
a purpose both when they are followed and when they are
flouted.
Why Parents Hate Parenting — New York Magazine is a great summary of the research findings that having kids makes people less happy. However, it teases out exactly what that means. For example, it’s the moment-to-moment happiness that people lose out on when they have kids. They have less freedom to do what they did before. “Small cracks” in their relationship with their spouse (which is integral to happiness) become “huge gulfs” under the pressure of children. What’s more, the later people wait in life, the more autonomy and enjoyment they have experienced from working and socializing, and therefore the more they give up when they do have children. My favorite part, however, was the idea that it isn’t so simple as moment to moment happiness… there’s a larger factor, one of purpose, to consider:
When I mention this to Daniel Gilbert, he hardly disputes
that meaning is important. But he does wonder how
prominently it should figure into people’s decisions to
have kids. “When you pause to think what children mean to
you, of course they make you feel good,” he says. “The
problem is, 95 percent of the time, you’re not thinking
about what they mean to you. You’re thinking that you
have to take them to piano lessons. So you have to think
about which kind of happiness you’ll be consuming most
often. Do you want to maximize the one you experience
almost all the time”—moment-to-moment happiness—“or the
one you experience rarely?”
Which is fair enough. But
for many of us, purpose is happiness—particularly those
of us who find moment-to-moment happiness a bit elusive
to begin with. Martin Seligman, the positive-psychology
pioneer who is, famously, not a natural optimist, has
always taken the view that happiness is best defined in
the ancient Greek sense: leading a productive, purposeful
life. And the way we take stock of that life, in the end,
isn’t by how much fun we had, but what we did with it.
(Seligman has seven children.)
The article goes on to say that the feeling of regret is much more powerful for things you have not than for things you have. I have found this to be extremely true. There was a free Dashboard Confessional concert at St. Thomas that I didn’t go to because I was studying some thing. I can’t remember the thing, but I’ve always regretted not going to that concert. I regret not figuring out how to study in college, and missing many things as a result.
