The Organ

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

At 

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

H.P. Lovecraft

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_of_Charles_Dexter_Ward

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

Precursor scene:

 

[AdamSmith]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ5RVX_xM1o

 

[RA1]

14 hours ago, AdamSmith said:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ5RVX_xM1o

 

I thought the ad about flowers for your mom was more entertaining.  I only wish I could give her some. 

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

Rather very useful concept...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse_of_notation

[AdamSmith]

A Theory of Semiotics

From one's professor Umberto Eco.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco

..". the greatest contribution to [semiotics] since the pioneering work of C. S. Peirce and Charles Morris." -- Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism..".

 

"...draws on philosophy, linguistics, sociology, anthropology and aesthetics and refers to a wide range of scholarship... raises many fascinating questions." -- Language in Society..

 

". a major contribution to the field of semiotic studies." -- Robert Scholes, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism..
 

". the most significant text on the subject published in the English language that I know of." -- Arthur Asa Berger, Journal of CommunicationE
 

"Eco's treatment demonstrates his mastery of the field of semiotics. It focuses on the twin problems of the doctrine of signs -- communication and signification -- and offers a highly original theory of sign production, including a carefully wrought typology of signs and modes of production."

 

https://books.google.com/books/about/A_theory_of_semiotics.html?id=RaFrAAAAIAAJ

[AdamSmith]

 

Eco''s great precursor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce

[AdamSmith]

‘I am that I am...’

The Jewish god defining himself.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_that_I_Am

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

The world is very strange...

 

[AdamSmith]

 

[RA1]

RE: 737-800

Some airliners are complicated enough that such as captains have written a book to "explain" the "proper" flow.  This simply means that they have discovered that the flow goes better either left to right or top to bottom, etc.  I have had friends who are transitioning to new to them aircraft visit with such a book in hand, knowing I would be interested and rehearse informally with them.  The 757 and 767 series seem to be two aircraft needing a book.

Most sophisticated aircraft allow the "full" preflight to be done first flight of the day with abbreviated check lists used later.  This vid obviously was the full preflight check.

Thanks for presenting it.

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

10 hours ago, RA1 said:

RE: 737-800

Some airliners are complicated enough that such as captains have written a book to "explain" the "proper" flow.  This simply means that they have discovered that the flow goes better either left to right or top to bottom, etc.  I have had friends who are transitioning to new to them aircraft visit with such a book in hand, knowing I would be interested and rehearse informally with them.  The 757 and 767 series seem to be two aircraft needing a book.

Most sophisticated aircraft allow the "full" preflight to be done first flight of the day with abbreviated check lists used later.  This vid obviously was the full preflight check.

Thanks for presenting it.

Best regards,

RA1

My experience from 40 years (  ) studying engineering-design software is likewise that the how-to-use documentation provided by the developer is almost always incomplete, out of logical order, emphasizes the wrong things, glosses over the key stuff that is truly difficult (not wanting to admit same), etc etc.

That is too blanket a statement, but not by much.

Thus users set up independent user-group online forums, sometimes even annual meetings in person, to share best (and worst  ) best practices for working around all that.

[RA1]

On 2/11/2020 at 9:35 PM, AdamSmith said:

My experience from 40 years (  ) studying engineering-design software is likewise that the how-to-use documentation provided by the developer is almost always incomplete, out of logical order, emphasizes the wrong things, glosses over the key stuff that is truly difficult (not wanting to admit same), etc etc.

That is too blanket a statement, but not by much.

Thus users set up independent user-group online forums, sometimes even annual meetings in person, to share best (and worst  ) best practices for working around all that.

A common saying among pilots is don't touch any switches unless they are shiny.

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

This is a little bit dense, difficult, but I find ultimately rewarding-to-unravel meditation on death, its meaning, its consequences for the living, and perhaps much more.

The Owl in the Sarcophagus

Wallace Stevens

I
Two forms move among the dead, high sleep
Who by his highness quiets them, high peace
Upon whose shoulders even the heavens rest,

Two brothers. And a third form, she that says
Good-by in the darkness, speaking quietly there,
To those that cannot say good-by themselves.

These forms are visible to the eye that needs,
Needs out of the whole necessity of sight.
The third form speaks, because the ear repeats,

Without a voice, inventions of farewell.
These forms are not abortive figures, rocks,
Impenetrable symbols, motionless. They move

About the night. They live without our light,
In an element not the heaviness of time,
In which reality is prodigy.

There sleep the brother is the father, too,
And peace is cousin by a hundred names
And she that in the syllable between life

And death cries quickly, in a flash of voice,
Keep you, keep you, I am gone, oh keep you as
My memory, is the mother of us all,

The earthly mother and the mother of
The dead. Only the thought of those dark three
Is dark, thought of the forms of dark desire.

II
There came a day, there was a day--one day
A man walked living among the forms of thought
To see their lustre truly as it is

And in harmonious prodigy to be,
A while, conceiving his passage as into a time
That of itself stood still, perennial,

Less time than place, less place than thought of place
And, if of substance, a likeness of the earth,
That by resemblance twanged him through and through,

Releasing an abysmal melody,
A meeting, an emerging in the light,
A dazzle of remembrance and of sight.

III
There he saw well the foldings in the height
Of sleep, the whiteness folded into less,
Like many robings, as moving masses are,

As a moving mountain is, moving through day
And night, colored from distances, central
Where luminous agitations come to rest,

In an ever-changing, calmest unity,
The unique composure, harshest streakings joined
In a vanishing-vanished violet that wraps round

The giant body the meanings of its folds,
The weaving and the crinkling and the vex,
As on water of an afternoon in the wind

After the wind has passed. Sleep realized
Was the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect,
A diamond jubilance beyond the fire,

That gives its power to the wild-ringed eye.
Then he breathed deeply the deep atmosphere
Of sleep, the accomplished, the fulfilling air.

IV
There peace, the godolphin and fellow, estranged, estranged,
Hewn in their middle as the beam of leaves,
The prince of shither-shade and tinsel lights,

Stood flourishing the world. The brilliant height
And hollow of him by its brilliance calmed,
Its brightness burned the way good solace seethes.

This was peace after death, the brother of sleep,
The inhuman brother so much like, so near,
Yet vested in a foreign absolute,

Adorned with cryptic stones and sliding shines,
An immaculate personage in nothingness,
With the whole spirit sparkling in its cloth,

Generations of the imagination piled
In the manner of its stitchings, of its thread,
In the weaving round the wonder of its need,

And the first flowers upon it, an alphabet
By which to spell out holy doom and end,
A bee for the remembering of happiness.

Peace stood with our last blood adorned, last mind,
Damasked in the originals of green,
A thousand begettings of the broken bold.

This is that figure stationed at our end,
Always, in brilliance, fatal, final, formed
Out of our lives to keep us in our death,

To watch us in the summer of Cyclops
Underground, a king as candle by our beds
In a robe that is our glory as he guards.

V
But she that says good-by losing in self
The sense of self, rosed out of prestiges
Of rose, stood tall in self not symbol, quick

And potent, an influence felt instead of seen.
She spoke with backward gestures of her hand.
She held men closely with discovery,

Almost as speed discovers, in the way
Invisible change discovers what is changed,
In the way what was has ceased to be what is.

It was not her look but a knowledge that she had.
She was a self that knew, an inner thing,
Subtler than look's declaiming, although she moved

With a sad splendor, beyond artifice,
Impassioned by the knowledge that she had,
There on the edges of oblivion.

O exhalation, O fling without a sleeve
And motion outward, reddened and resolved
From sight, in the silence that follows her last word--

VI
This is the mythology of modern death
And these, in their mufflings, monsters of elegy,
Of their own marvel made, of pity made,

Compounded and compounded, life by life,
These are death's own supremest images,
The pure perfections of parental space,

The children of a desire that is the will,
Even of death, the beings of the mind
In the light-bound space of the mind, the floreate flare...

It is a child that sings itself to sleep,
The mind, among the creatures that it makes,
The people, those by which it lives and dies.

https://jerimadeth.livejournal.com/2466.html

[AdamSmith]

The difference between a snafu, a shitshow, and a clusterfuck

March 16, 2018

 

FROM OUR OBSESSION

How to Manage People

Advice, observations, and real-life examples.

Let’s say the situation at work is not good. The project (or product, or re-org, or whatever) has launched, and the best you can say is that things aren’t going as planned. At all. It’s a disaster, though the best word for it is the one you drop over drinks with your team and when venting at home: it’s a clusterfuck.

Clusterfucks hold a special place in public life, one distinct from the complications, crises, and catastrophes that mar our personal and professional existences. The F-Word, former Oxford English Dictionary editor Jesse Sheidlower’s comprehensive history of the term, defines a clusterfuck as “a bungled or confused undertaking or situation.” Stanford business professor Bob Sutton goes further, describing clusterfucks as “those debacles and disasters caused by a deadly brew of illusion, impatience, and incompetence that afflicts too many decision-makers, especially those in powerful, confident, and prestigious groups.”

The term dates at least as far back as the Vietnam War, as military slang for doomed decisions resulting from the toxic combination of too many high-ranking officers and too little on-the-ground information. (The “cluster” part of the word allegedly refers to officers’ oak leaf cluster insignia.)

“I have a weird obsession with clusterfucks,” Sutton tells Quartz At Work. He and Stanford Graduate School of Business colleague Huggy Rao took on the topic directly in their 2014 book Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less, though publishers demanded that the softer substitute “clusterfug” appear in the final text. (This was not Sutton’s choice: His other books include The No Asshole Ruleand The Asshole Survival Guide.)

To appreciate what a clusterfuck is—and to understand how to avoid one—it is first helpful to clarify some of the things a clusterfuck is not:

A fuck-up. “A fuck-up is just something all of us do every day,” Sutton says. “I broke the egg I made for breakfast this morning. That was kind of a fuck-up.” Whereas clusterfucks are perfectly preventable, fuck-ups are an unavoidable feature of the human condition.

A SNAFU. While sometimes used as a synonym for minor malfunctions and hiccups, this slang military acronym—“Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”—actually refers to the functionally messy state that describes many otherwise healthy companies (and many of our personal lives). A SNAFU work environment is usually manageable; one that is FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair, another military legacy) probably isn’t. “When my students with little experience go to work at a famous company and it isn’t quite as they dreamed, I do ask them if it is FUBAR or SNAFU, and tell them SNAFU will describe most places they work,” Sutton said.

 A shitshow. No less an authority than the Oxford English Dictionary describes a shitshow as a “situation or state of affairs characterized by chaos, confusion, or incompetence.” A clusterfuck may come to possess all those characteristics, but is more properly identified by the decisions that produced it than its outcome.

The three main contributors to clusterfucks

Sutton and Rao analyzed countless cases of scaling and expansion, both successful ones and those that ended in disaster. In reviewing the most spectacular failures, they identified three key factors that resulted in the kind of expensive, embarrassing, late-stage collapse that is the hallmark of a clusterfuck. They were:

Illusion. A clusterfuck starts with the decision maker’s belief that a goal is much easier to attain than it actually is. The expectation that two car companies with different languages and different cultures would merge together flawlessly, as the architects of the doomed Daimler-Chrysler merger apparently believed? Clusterfuck. The Bush Administration’s estimate that the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq would take no more than a few months and $60 billion? A clusterfuck prelude of tragic proportions.

Impatience. A misguided idea alone does not produce a clusterfuck. The idea also needs a champion determined to shove it along, usually over the objections of more-knowledgeable underlings. Sergey Brin’s reported insistence (paywall) on introducing Google Glass to the public against its engineers’ wishes turned a potentially groundbreaking piece of technology into a stupid-looking joke.

Incompetence. When errors of information and timing meet blatantly stupid decisions by people who should know better, disaster tends to ensue. Bear Stearns wasn’t the sole cause of the global financial crisis, of course, but former CEO Jimmy Cayne’s decision to spend 10 days of the 2007 subprime mortgage loan meltdown playing at a bridge tournament without phone or email access contributed to the firm’s collapse—and to the worldwide disaster that followed.

All three of these failings share a common root: people in power who don’t (or won’t) acknowledge the realities of their environment, and who don’t push themselves to confront what they don’t know. Nobody likes to spoil the heady euphoria of an exciting new project by discussing the possibility of failure. The problem is, if potentially bad outcomes aren’t addressed pre-launch, they are more likely to surface afterward, when the reckoning is public and expensive.

The antidote to clusterfuckery, Sutton argues, is a willingness to confront the possibility of failure and disappointment built into every new venture, and to plan accordingly.

He cites a favored decision-making tacticof the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman (who in turn credits it to psychologist Gary Klein). Before a big decision, teams should undertake what Kahneman calls a “premortem.” Split the group in two. One is assigned to imagine a future in which the project is an unmitigated success. The other is to envision its worst-case scenario. Each group then writes a detailed story of the project’s success or failure, outlining the steps and decisions that led to each outcome. Imagining failure and thinking backwards to its causes helps groups identify the strengths and weaknesses of their current plans, and adjust accordingly.

“People make better decisions when they look into the future and they imagine that they already failed, and they tell a story about what happened,” Sutton says. With better planning, it won’t be a story that has to be bleeped out.

https://qz.com/work/1225213/the-difference-between-a-snafu-a-shitshow-and-a-clusterfuck/At 

[AdamSmith]

On 1/16/2020 at 6:03 AM, MsAnn said:

Fascinating...So much to absorb. "I should have stayed in school longer."

I still can’t believe he is no longer here.

Very uncanny echo of losing my father when I was eight.

No trauma, just yet another unwelcome, if edifying,  education.

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]