Month: July 2007
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Why I Stopped Pursuing My MBA
I have recently discontinued pursuit of my Masters in Business Administration. Accounting was fine, business law is fine, management science, IS for decision-making, and quantitative methods were all fine and dandy, but when I put all of these things together into the context of the modern business world, they suddenly stopped being fine. The business…
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Mandatory Reading: Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation”
“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” – Isaac Asimov, Salvor Hardin in “Foundation” Isaac Asimov’s Foundation A scientist, Hari Seldon, is on trial for treason. His crime: Mathematically proving the Empire will collapse within five centuries. Nothing can avert this disaster, but the Seldon warns there can be either 30,000 years of anarchy…
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Great Books: Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed It took me all of 2006 to read Jared Diamond’s novel, setting it down several times. So informationally dense, such a delluge of data, an avalanche of not just facts, but where the facts came from, how layers of archeological discoveries translated into Diamond’s conclusions was too…
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Great Books: Richard Dawkin’s “The Selfish Gene”
The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins On first read, Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene seems repetitive. Dawkins continually takes asides to remind the audience that his verbage, words like “compete,” “betray,” “steal,” etc, in describing animal behaviors are not meant to imply altruism or malevolence, but describe a behavior’s effect on a gene’s ability to propigate.…
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Things are Getting Better
The Scientific Method (Bora Zivkovic has a Problem with this diagram) Something I’m often complaining about is “common sense.” Lazy people are always just throwing up their hands and saying “Duh!” when you ask them to justify some statement that sounds right and is taken for granted. It’s always important to check and recheck our…
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My Genetic Ancestry
Paternal Ryan Somma’sPaternal DNA Results I participated in the Genographic Project last year, an ongoing effort to chart the migration of the human race across the earth using DNA testing. It was $110 for the kit, which is a bit pricey, but I was curious and glad I did it. After processing the results of…
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Great Books: “Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions”
Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions Square is a lawyer living in Flatland, a two-dimensional world that has height and width, but not length. In Edwin Abbott’s book Flatland, Square serves as our tour guide, describing both the physical and social characteristics of living in a world without depth. Flatland works on two levels: as…
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Letter to the Editor: Case closed on warming’s cause
This is a letter to the editor I published at the Daily Advance. Posted here for posterity, since they have no online archive: I applaud The Daily Advance’s new “Green Living” section on your Web site and Robert Kelly-Goss’s recent highly-informative article on global warming. However, the article did contain one factual error that needs…