Kevin Rants

Ride report for those who didn't get enough from "Zen and the Art of Motorycle Maintenance"

You can read all my mystical musings about having no expectations while muscling a 600 pound motorcycle down a windy road at midliferider.com

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Tags: OregonCoast, Midlife Rider, Mid-Life, Decision Making, Commitment

Dr. Randy Pausch. The most amazing lecture you'll ever see.

If you haven't seen this video, by all means, stop whatever it is you're doing and watch it. It will change your life.

Dr. Pausch is dying of Pancreatic Cancer. There is nothing he can do about it . . . except choose how he will live the time he has left. Incredibly inspirational.

Embedded Video

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Tags: RandyPausch, Last Lecture, Decision Making, Decision Quality

Tips on buying

There's a piece in the Contra Costa Times about a company called techbargains. The site is completely overwhelming when you go there but it's about what you think it's about. The part that caught my eye were these tips on buying. Good advice for buying anything.

Tips from the expert

Norman Fong and his fellow bargainmeisters know how to find the good deal, but for the common shopper there are a few tips one should follow.

Be patient. Don't buy it right when it comes out because the price is assuredly going to come down.

Buy opportunistically. Don't buy a camera for a vacation that happens tomorrow. Give yourself some time to find the best deal.

Watch product cycles. When one line of products is being closed out, they are much cheaper. The tail end of these cycles is usually just before spring.

Pay attention to the total bottom line price. How much you save from rebates, and not paying taxes and shipping costs can equal substantial savings.

If you see a deal on the left side or right side of search engines, remember advertisers pay to have them there.

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Tags: techbargains, decision making

More fun with statistics

This has been wandering around the internet. It's just too good to pass up. Another find examples of "fun with statistics."

Doctors
(A) The number of physicians in the U.S.: 700,000.

(B) Accidental deaths caused by Physicians
per year: 120,000.

(C) Accidental deaths per physician =  0.171.
(Statistics courtesy of U.S. Dept of Health Human Services)
************

Guns
(A) The number of gun owners in the U.S.:  80 million

(B) The number of accidental gun deaths
per year, all age groups, : 1,500.

(C) The number of accidental deaths per gun owner = .000188.
(Statistics courtesy of FBI)
**************

Statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.

Obviously, 'Guns don't kill people, doctors do.'

FACT : NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN, BUT
ALMOST EVERYONE HAS AT LEAST ONE DOCTOR.

Please alert your friends to this alarming threat. We must ban doctors
before this gets completely out of hand!!!!!

Out of concern for the public at large, I withheld the statistics on lawyers
for fear the shock would cause people to panic and seek medical attention.

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Tags: Statisitics, Guns, Doctors, Decision Making

The ethics of friendship: Where does "buddy" stop and "doing the right thing" start?

The psychodrama that is Roger Clemens, and if you don't follow American Baseball, this will seem less than a tempest in a teapot, is providing lots of opportunity for every sort of commentary. I've read some of it and was taken by the buddy vs do the right thing angle explored in a piece in the NYT called We’re Friends, Right?.

Brian McNamee, a personal trainer who worked closely with Roger Clemens, told federal investigators that he injected the pitcher with performance-enhancing drugs from 1998 to 2001.

Mr. Clemens vehemently denied the charges, and what followed was dizzying: Mr. McNamee makes pleading phone call; Clemens tapes the conversation and releases it to the press. One of Mr. McNamee’s lawyers declares, “It’s war now.”

Last week, it was revealed that Mr. McNamee has what he says is physical evidence — used syringes and gauze — that he gave to federal investigators.

Caught between the two men is the Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte, a close friend to Mr. Clemens. Mr. Pettitte has admitted that Mr. McNamee injected him with human growth hormone. All three men have dates to testify on Wednesday about the matter, and each other, before Congress. And everyone is wondering, what will Mr. Pettitte say?

Friendship hasn’t been this fraught since the days of Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky.

But to many psychologists and sociologists who study male relationships, this rift is an oft-told tale. In less-rarefied worlds — the office, college, a poker group — these experts say, men face similar choices: When do you rat out a pal? When do you stop a friend from harming someone? When do you take one for your buddy?

“These are moments when there’s a clash between two conflicting values connected to masculinity,” said Michael S. Kimmel, a sociologist at State University of New York at Stony Brook and author of “The Gendered Society.” “No. 1, you always do the right thing. And the second is, you never betray your friends.”

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Tags: RogerClemens, Andy Petitte, Monica Lewinsky, Ethics, Friends

Bush's Three Trillion Dollar Lie

The other day, President Bush submitted the first federal budget to cross the three trillion dollar threshold. It is the biggest governmental budget in the history of the world.

A person given $1 million a year to spend would need 3 million years to blow $3 trillion, what the Bush administration says the U.S. government should spend in one year. Written out, a trillion is a one followed by 12 zeros, or 1,000,000,000,000. That's a million times 1 million, or a thousand times 1 billion. There are about 6.8 billion people in the world, meaning that every living person would get $441 if the U.S. government's budget were divided up. If the money were split among the 300 million Americans, everyone would take home $10,000.

Debt: The interest on the federal debt, what the U.S. government has borrowed, would be $260 billion. The budget deficit for the proposed spending plan would be $407 billion. Gross federal debt accumulated through all U.S. history totaled $8.9 trillion at the end of fiscal 2007 last Sept. 30. That was up sharply from $3.3 trillion at the end of fiscal 2000. Even under the optimistic scenarios envisioned in the Bush budget, gross federal debt is still projected to rise to more than $12.2 trillion by 2013.

Included in this beast is the biggest defense authorization in the history of the world.

President Bush's 2009 budget request includes $588.3 billion for the Pentagon, a sum that does not include all the money that will be needed to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the fiscal year starting in October.

The proposed Pentagon budget represents a 7.5 percent increase in funding from what was allocated in the current budget. Bush's request includes $70 billion for the wars in 2009, but a further funding request will likely come sometime after Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, reports to Congress this spring on how he believes the U.S. military should move forward in Iraq.

If approved by Congress, the $588.3 billion total, adjusted for inflation, would mark the largest defense spending budget since World War II.

I suppose it should be some comfort to know that as a percent of our GNP, it's less than we spent during the last several undeclared wars (Gulf 1, Korea, Vietnam), or the last declared war.

It's also a gigantic, bald faced lie for at least two reasons.

The budget doesn't include all the money the Bush administration wants to support the "war" in Iraq and Afghanistan. No, that's still coming after General Petreus submits his report sometime in the spring. Keep in mind that one of the big talking points Nancy Pelosi carried on about when taking her new office was a demand that Bush produce an honest war budget.

The idea that we're still funding the "war" through extraordinary budget requests is, well, extraordinary. There was a logic to that in 2003. It's just politics and prevarication in 2008.

The second problem are those "rosy assumptions." This will show up principally in the negative column.

The White House predicts the economy will grow at a 2.7 percent clip this year, far higher than congressional and private economists expect, and the administration's $70 billion figure for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is simply a placeholder until the next president takes office.

The president forecasts a $48 billion surplus by 2012, keeping a promise he made two years ago when strong revenue predictions made it look far easier.

Now, he's relying on spending cuts — for everything from transportation to Medicare and Medicaid to nonprofit groups that help the poor — to do the job in order to keep his signature 2001 and 2003 tax cuts intact instead of expiring at the end of 2010.

Democrats said the forecast of a budget surplus in 2012 was based on flawed math that included only $70 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009 and no money after that.

The budget plan also fails to include any provisions after this year for keeping the alternative minimum tax, originally aimed at the wealthy, from ensnaring millions of middle-class taxpayers.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that fixing the AMT in 2012 would cost $118 billion, more than double the surplus Bush is projecting for that year.

So why am I going on about this?  Besides my general pique, it should stand out as a huge ethical-object lesson. There are all kinds of stories our elected officials tell themselves as to why the do what they do and why they say what they say. Indeed, the same is true for us. We vote for this person or that person largely because of stories we're told and stories we tell ourselves about the person's beliefs, values, or maybe credentials.

But what about telling the truth? What happened to that? It's a pretty simple test actually. If you know something to be one way and you say something different, that's not telling the truth, regardless of the reasons why you do that.  There are fancy academic terms for describing why and how people shade the truth, but the simplest one is "lying."

This budget is one gigantic lie. A very gigantic lie. "Rosy assumptions" is just a word for lying. Moving numbers out of the equation and "off the books" is lying. Failing to include expenses that you know are coming is lying.  Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

And if the budget is a lie, what does that make the man delivering it?

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Tags: budget, 2008 budget, lies, 3 trillion, deficit, surplus, President Bush, liar

A Journey into Scott Berkun

Welcome to the web C.K.Dexter Haven. This entry started out as a snip from an article on innovation in the New York Times, and ended up in a journey to find Scott Berkun, who, it turns out, not only is an innovation maven but a resident of the very same city in which I live.

The rabbit trail starts here with a snip from Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work - New York Times.

Epiphany has little to do with either creativity or innovation. Instead, innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process. Just as an oyster wraps layer upon layer of nacre atop an offending piece of sand, ultimately yielding a pearl, innovation percolates within hard work over time.

“The most useful way to think of epiphany is as an occasional bonus of working on tough problems,” explains Scott Berkun in his 2007 book, “The Myths of Innovation.” “Most innovations come without epiphanies, and when powerful moments do happen, little knowledge is granted for how to find the next one. To focus on the magic moments is to miss the point. The goal isn’t the magic moment: it’s the end result of a useful innovation.

”Everything results from accretion, Mr. Berkun says: “I didn’t invent the English language. I have to use a language that someone else created in order to talk to you. So the process by which something is created is always incremental. It always involves using stuff that other people have made.”

Following the rabbit trail, I found an interview with Scott Berkun on Guy Kawasaki's blog. The whole interview takes about five minutes to read. Here's a snip . . .

Question: What the toughest challenge that an innovator faces?

Answer: It’s different for every innovator, but the one that crushes many is how bored the rest of the world was by their ideas. Finding support, whether emotional, financial, or intellectual, for a big new idea is very hard and depends on skills that have nothing to do with intellectual prowess or creative ability. That’s a killer for many would-be geniuses: they have to spend way more time persuading and convincing others as they do inventing, and they don’t have the skills or emotional endurance for it.

Question: Where do inventors and innovators get their ideas? Answer: I teach a creative thinking course at the University of Washington, and the foundation is that ideas are combinations of other ideas. People who earn the label “creative” are really just people who come up with more combinations of ideas, find interesting ones faster, and are willing to try them out. The problem is most schools and organizations train us out of the habits.

The trail finally led me to the oracle himself. You can find Scott's blog here. Too many great posts to list. One that stands out in the spirit of this ramble is called Do constraints help creative thinking . . .

Can you be creative without constraints?

It’s a tricky question. Creative people everywhere complain that they don’t have enough resources to be creative at work. In the lingo, “blue sky” refers to a project where the sky is the limit, and it’s the creative holy grail. “If only I could get a week to think blue sky, I could do amazing things”.

But one definition of creativity is the ability to transcend constraints. To find a clever way out of a difficult situation, or use a new idea to make lack of resources an advantage. I think about the Ramones or the Sex Pistols, bands whose lack of training became an asset. Spike Lee & Richard Rodriguez, filmmakers whose first films cost less than the price of a new car.

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Tags: Innovation, decision making, Scott Berkun, constraints

Why is Arlen Specter Interested in Spygate?

Unless you follow football, you probably completely missed "spygate" last year. The short story is that the New England Patriots organization got caught "illegally" taping other team's signal calling.

There are a number of possible arguments/responses to what happened, and the resulting punishment.

• Who cares?
• Everyone does it.
• Winning is everything.
• Stealing, is stealing. It's wrong.

To that you can add another dimension. For reasons that aren't immediately obvious, Senator Arlen Specter has taken an interest in this sordid little affair and is now wondering out loud why it is that the NFL destroyed the tapes that apparently prove the case . . . evidence that everyone stipulated to by the way.

Mr. Specter said Thursday that because the N.F.L. has an antitrust exemption in relation to its television contract, the public is entitled to be sure about the integrity of the game. And he compared the destruction of the Patriots’ tapes to the C.I.A.’s destruction of tapes showing the interrogation of terrorism suspects.

“I do believe that it is a matter of importance,” Mr. Specter said at a news conference in Washington on Friday. “It’s not going to displace the stimulus package or the Iraq war, but I think the integrity of football is very important, and I think the National Football League has a special duty to the American people and, in turn, to the Congress because they have an antitrust exemption.

”Mr. Browne said, “We are having a hard time at this point trying to connect the dots between the violation of an internal N.F.L. policy and that same broadcast exemption.”

Goodell Defends Handling of Patriots’ Spying Case - New York Times

In the spirit of full disclosure, I grew up a sports fan but find I care increasingly less about what goes on, on the hardwood, the ice, the diamond, or the field. With that in mind, I really am puzzled why the US Senate gives a rip about the NFL or the MLB. I get that they both have anti-trust exemptions, but that's only trotted out parenthetically. No federal or local law was broken in "spygate." From a legal standpoint, there's no there there. The fact that the NFL destroyed some tapes should be a non-issue.

As a matter of morality or ethics, it's another issue completely. It's a set-up when you put the words "stealing" in a sentence. So it would seem that "stealing another team's signals" is an easy call. It's wrong. It fails every single ethical test. But does that mean the Senate should wade in on this? As a matter of public policy, I think the concept of separation between church and state should extend to moralizing about the behavior of public figures. There are other forums for that.

So where does that leave the ethics of sports in general?  Charles Barkley famously said in an ad for Nike that he was nobody's role model. Sports occupies a unique position in the popular imagination. Through the gauze of time, we imagine that it's a vehicle for teaching our young people about team work, fair play, practice, and hard work. Like so much else, if it was ever true, it seems more and more to be a myth rooted in very thin soil. And I think that's the problem here.

It's not so much that we're bothered by the ethical lapses of our sports heroes. It's that we're troubled by any evidence we might encounter that sports, the great ethical-proxy in chief, is so thoroughly lost when it comes to teaching the lessons we've assigned to it.

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Tags: ArlenSpecter, New England Patriots, SpyGate, Ethics, Decision Making, Roger Godell, NFL

The pursuit of happiness: A bridge too far?

A piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called Happiness hatches success — to a point caught my eye

People who say they are perfectly happy don't do as well in the workplace, in school and in the public arena as their peers who aren't quite as blissful, according to a new study.

That's good news, researchers say — the pursuit of happiness has a reasonable finish line.

Most people are happy already, or happy enough," said Ed Diener, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "We don't want people to think that they need to get rid of every negative emotion from their life."The study looked at data from the World Values Survey, taken from more than 100,000 people in 96 countries over 20 years.

The survey asked people to rank their life satisfaction on a 10-point scale and then asked questions about income, level of education, relationship status, volunteer work and political activities. It showed that generally the happier you are, the more successful you will be in work and relationships. But there seems to be a cap on the influence of happiness in some areas.

So I visited Dr. Diener's site. It turns out there is a public domain happiness scale called the SWLS that was created by Ed Diener, Robert A. Emmons, Randy J. Larsen and Sharon Griffin in 1985. It looks like this . . .

Below are five statements that you may agree or disagree with. Using the 1 - 7 scale below, indicate your agreement with each item by placing the appropriate number on the line preceding that item. Please be open and honest in your responding.

7 - Strongly agree
6 - Agree
5 - Slightly agree
4 - Neither agree nor disagree
3 - Slightly disagree
2 - Disagree
1 - Strongly disagree

____ In most ways my life is close to my ideal.
____ The conditions of my life are excellent.
____ I am satisfied with my life.
____ So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.
____ If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.

Here's how to interpret the scores . . .

30 – 35 Very high score; highly satisfied
Respondents who score in this range love their lives and feel that things are going very well. Their lives are not perfect, but they feel that things are about as good as lives get.  Furthermore, just because the person is satisfied does not mean she or he is complacent. In fact, growth and challenge might be part of the reason the respondent is satisfied. For most people in this high-scoring range, life is enjoyable, and the major domains of life are going well – work or school, family, friends, leisure, and personal development.

25- 29  High score
Individuals who score in this range like their lives and feel that things are going well. Of course their lives are not perfect, but they feel that things are mostly good.  Furthermore, just because the person is satisfied does not mean she or he is complacent. In fact, growth and challenge might be part of the reason the respondent is satisfied. For most people in this high-scoring range, life is enjoyable, and the major domains of life are going well – work or school, family, friends, leisure, and personal development. The person may draw motivation from the areas of dissatisfaction.

20 – 24 Average score
The average of life satisfaction in economically developed nations is in this range – the majority of people are generally satisfied, but have some areas where they very much would like some improvement. Some individuals score in this range because they are mostly satisfied with most areas of their lives but see the need for some improvement in each area. Other respondents score in this range because they are satisfied with most domains of their lives, but have one or two areas where they would like to see large improvements.  A person scoring in this range is normal in that they have areas of their lives that need improvement. However, an individual in this range would usually like to move to a higher level by making some life changes.

15 – 19  Slightly below average in life satisfaction
People who score in this range usually have small but significant problems in several areas of their lives, or have many areas that are doing fine but one area that represents a substantial problem for them.  If a person has moved temporarily into this level of life satisfaction from a higher level because of some recent event, things will usually improve over time and satisfaction will generally move back up. On the other hand, if a person is chronically slightly dissatisfied with many areas of life, some changes might be in order. Sometimes the person is simply expecting too much, and sometimes life changes are needed.  Thus, although temporary dissatisfaction is common and normal, a chronic level of dissatisfaction across a number of areas of life calls for reflection.  Some people can gain motivation from a small level of dissatisfaction, but often dissatisfaction across a number of life domains is a distraction, and unpleasant as well.

10 – 14  Dissatisfied
People who score in this range are substantially dissatisfied with their lives. People in this range may have a number of domains that are not going well, or one or two domains that are going very badly. If life dissatisfaction is a response to a recent event such as bereavement, divorce, or a significant problem at work, the person will probably return over time to his or her former level of higher satisfaction.  However, if low levels of life satisfaction have been chronic for the person, some changes are in order – both in attitudes and patterns of thinking, and probably in life activities as well. Low levels of life satisfaction in this range, if they persist, can indicate that things are going badly and life alterations are needed.  Furthermore, a person with low life satisfaction in this range is sometimes not functioning well because their unhappiness serves as a distraction. Talking to a friend, member of the clergy, counselor, or other specialist can often help the person get moving in the right direction, although positive change will be up the person.

5 – 9  Extremely Dissatisfied
Individuals who score in this range are usually extremely unhappy with their current life. In some cases this is in reaction to some recent bad event such as widowhood or unemployment. In other cases, it is a response to a chronic problem such as alcoholism or addiction. In yet other cases the extreme dissatisfaction is a reaction due to something bad in life such as recently having lost a loved one.  However, dissatisfaction at this level is often due to dissatisfaction in multiple areas of life. Whatever the reason for the low level of life satisfaction, it may be that the help of others are needed – a friend or family member, counseling with a member of the clergy, or help from a psychologist or other counselor. If the dissatisfaction is chronic, the person needs to change, and often others can help.

For more on SWLS, go here [clicky]

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Tags: happiness, Ed Diener, decision making, SWLS

What's your Manifesto?

I found this some years ago and was reminded about the idea of creating a personal manifesto while talking over drinks with my friend and colleague Clint Korver. I don't know Bruce Mau, but I think his Incomplete Manifesto for Growth is a fine piece of work. Here it is in part. Click the link to read the rest (and it is worth reading).

Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an articulation of statements that exemplify Bruce Mau's beliefs, motivations and strategies. It also articulates how the BMD studio works.

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

Incomplete Manifesto

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Tags: BruceMau, Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, Creative Thinking