Look, I know this is way off topic, and I’m nobody’s Lileks or anything, but I just had to share this message that I found in my inbox…
See there? It’s a restaurant and they’re serving Restaurant Quality pasta!
Pretty bold move. I hope it doesn’t come back to bite them. Because from the pictures, it looks more to me like Church-Potluck Quality pasta — or possibly even Hospital-Cafeteria Quality pasta.
But what do I know? Way to reach for the stars, Pizza Hut!
UPDATE: Instalanche. I’m so inspired by this entry’s success that I’m going to try to write several blog-quality posts over the next few days. And today at work, my goal is to make one or two middle-management quality decisions. Fingers crossed!
Look, I know this is way off topic, and I’m nobody’s Lileks or anything, but I just had to share this message that I found in my inbox…
See there? It’s a restaurant and they’re serving Restaurant Quality pasta!
Pretty bold move. I hope it doesn’t come back to bite them. Because from the pictures, it looks more to me like Church-Potluck Quality pasta — or possibly even Hospital-Cafeteria Quality pasta.
But what do I know? Way to reach for the stars, Pizza Hut!
UPDATE: Instalanche. I’m so inspired by this entry’s success that I’m going to try to write several blog-quality posts over the next few days. And today at work, my goal is to make one or two middle-management quality decisions. Fingers crossed!
I’m an E.T. skeptic. The Fermi Paradox is the reason. The Fermi Paradox asks, reasonably, if intelligent life arises easily and often, then where is everybody? As old as the galaxy is, and considering the possibility of self-replicating Von Neumann probes, we shouldn’t be able to swing a cat without hitting a Vulcan – or at least a robotic emissary.
The most likely answer attacks the premise of the paradox. Intelligent life (at least intelligent life that gives rise to interstellar civilizations) doesn’t arise easily or often. We’re alone. At least in this galaxy.
Some who have accepted this explanation of the Fermi Paradox have posited a depressing reason for E.T.’s absence – perhaps civilizations that reach our level of development tend to self-destruct.
But the great filter for interstellar civilizations doesn’t have to be in front of us. There is a good argument that it is behind us.
[According to Professor Watson from the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia] Solar models predict that the brightness of the sun is increasing, while temperature models suggest that because of this the future life span of Earth will be ‘only’ about another billion years, a short time compared to the four billion years since life first appeared on the planet.
“The Earth’s biosphere is now in its old age and this has implications for our understanding of the likelihood of complex life and intelligence arising on any given planet,†said Prof Watson.
“At present, Earth is the only example we have of a planet with life. If we learned the planet would be habitable for a set period and that we had evolved early in this period, then even with a sample of one, we’d suspect that evolution from simple to complex and intelligent life was quite likely to occur. By contrast, we now believe that we evolved late in the habitable period, and this suggests that our evolution is rather unlikely. In fact, the timing of events is consistent with it being very rare indeed.â€
We’re probably alone, but self destruction doesn’t have to be our fate. If we can make it through the next century or so, we stand a fair chance of settling the galaxy.
Via Boulder Future Salon, here’s a lecture from Carnegie Mellon University on the subject of innovation.Scott Berkun worked on the development team for Internet Explorer, where he says that innovation was his job. One interesting moment is when he claims that he managed to do some good, innovative work “in spite” of the company he worked for.
He provides some good example of innovators from a lot of different fields, pointing out that they tend to be renegades and rebels. But their most important common characteristic is that they believed in an idea that they thought was interesting or cared about, and pursued it.
Berkun starts out by dispelling what he calls the “myth of epiphany,” the notion that a mgic moment of inspiration touches innovators and moves them to make their contribution. He believes that we use the myth of the epiphany to absolve ourselves from responsibility for innovating. After all, if you don’t have a magic moment, and the “Innovation Muse” passes you by, whose fault is that?.
He uses the familiar stories of Archimedes in the bathtub and Newton and the apple to explain how the “myth of the epiphany” lets us focus on trivia — Archimedes running through the streets naked; Newton getting bonked on the head by the apple — and ignore the hard work and extensive thinking that lay behind the moment of inspiration.
He points out that creativity literature is focused on developing habits for playing with ideas, and lowering inhibitions to new ideas. The “eureka moment” has a lot less to do with the actual moment than it does with the habits of mind the innovator has developed.
He provides some great examples of how following an idea can lead to highly unexpected destinations.
For example, the guys who developed Youtube actually started out trying to develop a video version of Hot or Not. And the folks who developed Flickr were got there by way of trying to start a software company.
He closes with the story of William McKnight and 3M , explaining how a company called “Minnesota Manufacturing and Mining” (3M) came to be in the Post-it Notes business.
