Author: splicer

Actu­al­ly, my plan was for four runs: Mon­day, Tues­day, Thurs­day Fri­day. Instead I ran Mon­day, Wednes­day, Thurs­day, Sat­ur­day. Total miles this week: 17.65. I watched my pace slow as the week went on, so for next week I think I’ll short­en two of the runs and maybe make them hill runs. I can feel my legs wish­ing I had­n’t gone out today, but that’s tem­po­rary. I’m not plan­ning on rac­ing tomor­row, so the vari­a­tion from my planned … Read the rest

http://implicit.harvard.edu/

The Implic­it Asso­ci­a­tion Test mea­sures how easy it is for us to asso­ciate con­cepts to one anoth­er and pro­vides mea­sure­ments for our auto­mat­ic pref­er­ences. The results may be shock­ing as they may reveal the effect of strong cul­tur­al bias­es that the sub­ject is either unaware of or con­scious­ly opposed to.

I think of myself as a pret­ty lib­er­al guy. I believe in egal­i­tar­i­an­ism and I am a firm pro­po­nent of human and civ­il rights with­out regard to skin col­or. … Read the rest

There once was a time when Quark XPress was the gold stan­dard of design soft­ware. The Quark loy­al­ists (and I was one) would­n’t go near a com­pet­ing prod­uct even for a favor­able inter­view in Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Arts. Adobe kept on putting out «Quark Killers» with new fea­tures in Page­Mak­er and then Inde­sign, and even pulled a Microsoft by includ­ing Inde­sign in the Adobe Cre­ative Suite for less mon­ey than the price of Pho­to­shop and Illus­tra­tor togeth­er. Essen­tial­ly they paid their Pho­to­shop … Read the rest

On and off I’ve been read­ing both Stephen Cov­ey’s Sev­en Habits and a book about uncon­scious judg­ments called Blink, writ­ten by Mal­colm Glad­well. Cov­ey’s book cau­tions that one should not expect change with­out hard work and rig­or­ous, hon­est self-appraisal. He specif­i­cal­ly writes that it may be use­ful to read through cov­er to cov­er once to get a basic under­stand­ing of the ideas pre­sent­ed, but that real­ly one can­not read a book to trig­ger change and that any­one wish­ing to … Read the rest

Yeah, navel-gaz­ing. I’m read­ing more from Cov­ey’s Sev­en Habits and he describes this won­der­ful thing we have that ani­mals pre­sum­ably don’t, called self-aware­ness. He says that we are supe­ri­or and have domin­ion over the earth because of this abil­i­ty to observe our thoughts and feel­ings and under­stand our­selves as being sep­a­rate from these thoughts and feelings.

I think that’s impor­tant – believ­ing myself to be my thoughts is a trap I used to fall into. I like the way my … Read the rest

I often find myself con­fused by my own val­ues. My reac­tions to some sit­u­a­tions leave me bemused and I fre­quent­ly don’t con­scious­ly rec­og­nize the aspects that offend or please me. I do try to trust my reac­tions, but some­times it is hard to jus­ti­fy when I can’t put my fin­ger on the cause.

It both­ers me to see boss­es mis­treat or dis­re­spect their employ­ees. Even when they are advo­cat­ing on my behalf, maybe espe­cial­ly when they are, I sit in judg­ment … Read the rest

Remem­ber a few days ago when I was scoff­ing at how easy even the most dif­fi­cult Sudoku puz­zles were?

Now I’ve picked one rat­ed as easy and it’s got me stumped.… Read the rest

Sudoku seems very pop­u­lar these days, so I took the chance to try out a puz­zle in the Exam­in­er a cou­ple days ago. The dif­fi­cul­ty rat­ing was one star out of five and it sur­prised me how dif­fi­cult the puz­zle was.

As I got stumped on the last few squares I glanced back at the instruc­tions and real­ized that there was a third aspect. I’d neglect­ed to real­ize that each 3×3 box con­tained each dig­it as well as each … Read the rest