Category — Uncategorized

Joaquin Miller – Life Amongst The Modocs, 1874:

As lone as God and white as a winter moon, Mount Shasta starts up suddenly from the heart of the great black forests of California.

You would hardly call Mount Shasta a part of the Sierras; you would say rather that it is the great white tower of some ancient and eternal wall, with here and there the white walls overthrown.

It has no rival! There is not even a snow crowned subject in sight of its dominion. A shining pyramid in everlasting mail of frosts and ice, the sailor sometimes, in a day of singular clearness, catches glimpses of it from the sea a hundred miles away to the west; and it may be seen from the dome of the capitol 340 miles distant. The immigrant coming from the east beholds the snowy, solitary pillar from afar out on the arid sage-brush plains, and lifts his hands in silence as if in answer to a sign.

Bo Parfet – Die Trying:

The vast majority of people have goals. They want to work out; they’d like to eat healthier food; they have their eye on a new job; they want to start their own company; they’re trying to become better parents. They want to change and they want to improve. Yet, while they talk about this, within themselves they usually remain the same, year after year. So how do you change? One way is to make minor adjustments over the course of a lifetime. Another is the transition that occurs in response to the death or near death of a loved one. And then there are those individuals such as myself who want to change dramatically and relatively quickly. Born with limited ability, we achieve this by saying that we’re sick and tired of living a regular existence, and we stop outside the ordinary by knowingly putting ourselves in life-threatening situations, facing adversity like we’ve never done before.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita – The Predictionieer’s Game:

Diplomats are convinced that a country’s name is an important variable that helps explain behavior. That’s why the State Department continues to be organized around country desks, just as the intelligence community is organized around geographic regions. Leaders of multinational corporations take much the same view. When they have a problem in Kazakhstan, they call their guys in Kazakhstan to find out what to do. That seems eminently reasonable. Yet it is terribly inadequate for solving most problems.

Certainly knowing about places and how different they might be is important, but not as important as knowing about people and how similar they are, wherever they are. I have not arrived at this view lightly nor, I hope, in ignorance. After all, the training that led to my Ph.D. molded me into a South Asia specialist. I even studied Urdu for five years and did field research in India, so I certainly respect and value area expertise. But area studies alone are a poor substitute for the marriage of knowledge about places and the deep understanding of applied game theorists about how people decide. Surely we would think it ridiculous if chemists believed that oxygen and hydrogen combine differently in China than they do in the United States, but for some reason we think it entirely sensible to believe that people make choices based on different principles in Timbuktu than in Tipperary.

I find the following excerpt from texasinafrica to be the perfect summary of why I find Twitter incredibly valuable. Except that in my case it’s Startups + Africa and all the other things she mentions:

I’ve railed against Twitter in the past, mostly because I think it contributes to the culture of oversharing [...] But. Here’s the thing. The community of people who blog and think and write (hopefully not in that order) about African states, foreign policy, humanitarian issues, state failure, and a lot of other stuff I care about are mostly on Twitter. And it’s impossible to keep up with everything without signing up.So there you have it. I’m on Twitter in order to save time. And so far, it’s not bad.

Twitter has helped me learn more quickly – and that’s made a huge difference.