“Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything better.” Albert Einstein
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Archives
A reminder
Oct 26, ’14
4:39 PM
One more
Dec 31, ’13
11:11 AM
The Layers
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
A new life
Dec 30, ’13
6:32 PM
“I can hardly wait for tomorrow, it means a new life for me each and every day.”
Thank you, Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006)
The gift of life
Dec 29, ’13
8:30 PM
When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this … body of work … is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.
Stanley Kunitz, Poet Laureate
Posted on the third anniversary of my mother’s death
What we call feedback rarely is
Sep 25, ’12
7:52 PM
In order for people to grow, adapt, and perform at their best, they need information about their own performance. One source of information—feedback—has earned a bad reputation. The word first came into the language to describe the self-correcting information built into mechanical systems and electronic circuits. Information was fed back into a system as a means of regulating system performance.
Thermostats, for instance, feed back information in order to maintain a set
Monkey bar beliefs
Sep 11, ’12
10:42 AM
I went to the gym today for my usual workout. The gym was closed last week while the owner and personal trainers completely reconfigured it. When I arrived today, it was substantially different. One of the changes was the addition of a set of monkey bars, suspended from the ceiling about 8 feet off the ground.
I kept looking at them during the first half of my workout. As a kid, I’d tried countless times to
Witnessing
Nov 15, ’11
5:42 PM
I’ve not written lately. I’ve been enchanted with this November autumn.
Brilliant colors …
bold and delicate shapes …
Is your pumpkin light flickering?
Oct 29, ’11
4:51 PM
“It’s been great talking with you, but I feel my pumpkin light flickering.” That’s an escape strategy one of my clients uses with talkers who are unaware that their listeners are no longer listening.
I loved the whimsical quality of it … which may be why it helped me see my own light flickering
Participate in the unfolding
Oct 8, ’11
5:32 PM
There’s a whole field of attention studies illustrating that what we see and what we perceive are different things. Sight is governed by one set of structures in the brain, and perception by another. So we actually see far more than we perceive or are cognitively aware of. [For an example, check out the YouTube observation test .]
What happens is that part of the brain is only responsible for processing what enters our visual cortex; that’s all it does. And another part of the brain is busy
Breaking the speed of light
Sep 30, ’11
9:29 AM
On 22 September, a group of Italian scientists reportedly broke the speed of light. They were measuring a beam of neutrinos sent from Geneva, over 500 miles away. The science is way too complicated for me. But the notion that this effort may overturn one of our most fundamental “laws” of physics fascinates me. Astrophysicist Adam Frank says that what’s being challenged here is “the structure of causality in the Universe” because it’s based on “an absolute cosmic speed limit.”
We’ve heard for a century-plus that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Our experience and all of our learning are based on the notion of time as linear. And if that turns out to be a faulty assumption,