We = (what we eat) – (what they eat) « Jon Udell:

We have traditionally measured the energy content of food by comparing input (the food we eat) and output (the feces we excrete). Burn both in a calorimeter, subtract, and the difference is the energy that was extracted from the food.

Yes, but extracted by whom? Or rather, by what? The energy that we humans take from our food has almost all been extracted by the time it reaches the end of the small intestine. But it has a long way to go yet. It must also pass through the large intestine, where dwell a myriad of gut flora. And they, Wrangham says, are hungry. If you eat a raw banana you only get some of its energy, and they get most of the remainder. If you eat a cooked banana, though, you get a lot more of its energy and leave less for them. The end result looks the same, but the internal distribution is quite different.

So you need to compare the energy in food entering the mouth to the energy remaining in the digestive products leaving the small intestine. Only then does the dramatic difference between the energies we get from raw versus cooked food become evident.

This is a great parable about instrumentation, measurement, knowledge, and epistemology. What other profound errors of basic understanding arise from misplaced instrumentation? And what might we learn by making simple — and in retrospect obvious — adjustments?

(Via kottke.org.)

Labels: links, networking

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Richard Dawkins: the truth dogs reveal about evolution:

We are puzzled, because our own risk aversion (or that of our safari guide) keeps us firmly inside the Land Rover even though we have no reason to think there is a lion within miles. This is because we have nothing to set against our fear. We are going to get our square meals back at the safari lodge. Our wild ancestors would have had much more sympathy with the risk-taking zebras. Like the zebras, they had to balance the risk of being eaten against the risk of not eating. Sure, the lion might attack; but, depending on the size of your troop, the odds were that it would catch another member of it rather than you. And if you never ventured on to the feeding grounds, or down to the waterhole, you’d die anyway, of hunger or thirst. It is a lesson in economic trade-offs.

The bottom line of that digression is that the wild wolf, like any other animal, will have an optimal flight distance, nicely poised — and potentially flexible — between too bold and too flighty.

Labels: leadership, links

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A Little Less Conversation:

As companies expand, the people within them start to specialize. At such a point, some managers will conclude that they have a “keep everyone on the same page” problem. But often what they actually have is a “stop people from meddling when there are already enough smart people working on something” problem.

(Via Joel on Software.)

Labels: leadership, management

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Seth’s Blog: No, everything is not going to be okay:

Finding the bravery to shun faux reassurance is a critical step in producing important change. Once you free yourself from the need for perfect acceptance, it’s a lot easier to launch work that matters.

Labels: leadership

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Beyond death and taxes, there are few things in life that you can count on:

• The Speed of light in a vacuum, c
• The Newtonian gravitational constant, G
• The Planck constant in quantum mechanics, h

There are other things in life that never change:

• If you work for a living, you will have meetings

Meeting or Coffee?

It helps to know why you are having a meeting. Your meeting should have a goal. You should probably decide on the goal of your meeting before you even start working on an agenda. Here are some typical meeting goals.

• Foster relationships — It is important to have understanding, respect, and trust between professional peers. If the workplace does not provide sufficient social contact, it may be necessary to dedicate a specific time to fostering relationships. Meeting for coffee or lunch may be appropriate. A meeting with a different purpose may serve as an excuse to foster relationships, but do not expect it.

• Elicit information — One reason you want professional relationships is to provide a knowledge base to test your ideas. You can take advantage of the experience of others to identify technical, political, cultural, and procedural issues with your ideas early in their development.

• Make a decision — Once you have possible approaches to your idea, or possible solutions to your problem, you might want to hold a meeting to decide which one to pursue.

• Receive feedback — Having selected an approach, you probably want to find out what others think. This feedback can help you refine your approach to avoid potential pitfalls.

• Make a plan — Now that you are confident in your approach, you can meet with your team and develop a plan of attack.

• Get status — If you have been working through your plan, you will want to find out how your team members are doing. There are many ways to do this, but some people like to use meetings for this purpose.

• Solve a problem — At some point, one of those status items will be the identification of a problem. A meeting can be a good place to work quickly and cooperatively to find a solution to a problem.

• Produce a work product — Occasionally the goal of a meeting will actually be to do work. This can be the case when the output from your team is a document like a specification, a report, a recommendation, or a business proposal.

• Report information — When you have worked and worked and finally accomplished something, you might want to tell people about it. A meeting can provide a venue for that.

In a healthy work environment, you may be able to accomplish all of these things without holding a formal meeting. Would that we all had healthy work environments.

You should decide on a single goal. If you cannot, you might want to think more about the question. If you still cannot, you may need more than one meeting. Holding a productive meeting is hard enough without trying to accomplish multiple goals.

Labels: goals, management, meetings, quotes

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How to Change the World: The Seven Sins of Solutions:

We do naturally do the “Yeah, but…” dance in which we stifle, dismiss, and second-guess ideas. It’s ideacide, pure and simple. And it’s not just others’ ideas we stifle; we often do it to our own and kick ourselves later when someone else “steals” our great idea. Remember how Decca Records rejected the Beatles? “Guitar bands are on the way out.”

Labels: leadership

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How Successful CEOs Respond to Failure – David Silverman – Harvard Business Review:

“Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure — or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that’s where you will find success.” — Tom Watson, founder of IBM

Labels: leadership

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Poisoning the well – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Poisoning the well (or attempting to poison the well) is a logical fallacy where adverse information about a target is pre-emptively presented to an audience, with the intention of discrediting or ridiculing everything that the target person is about to say. Poisoning the well is a special case of argumentum ad hominem, and the term was first used with this sense by John Henry Newman in his work Apologia Pro Vita Sua.

The origin of the term lies in the ancient practice of pouring poison into sources of fresh water before an invading army in order to diminish the invading army’s strength. In general usage, poisoning the well is the provision of any information that may produce a biased result. For example, if a woman tells her friend, “I think I might buy this beautiful dress”, then asks how it looks, she has “poisoned the well”, as her previous comment could affect her friend’s response.

An even simpler example of poisoning the well is by tautology and definition, or circular reasoning. This is similar to equivocation, where the use of words communicate a confusing meaning (often called a subtle lie). For example, if one starts an argument with “Everything I say is correct, no matter what you say”, the well is poisoned and nothing a person says (be it true or false) will matter by the initiator’s definition.

Labels: language

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The Guts of a New Machine – NYTimes.com:

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s C.E.O. “People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

(Via PEG on Tech.)

Labels: quotes

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Pinboard Blog:

Our technical goals are to never lose data, be very fast, and favor boring and faded technologies where possible. A rule of thumb that has worked well for me is that if I’m excited to play around with something, it probably doesn’t belong in production.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Labels: links

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