Work-Life Balance: Juggling, Spinning or Surfing?

I have encountered three metaphors for what most people call the ‘work-life balance’ issue. These are: juggling, keeping multiple plates spinning on sticks, and surfing. Each has its strengths and flaws. All share in common the problems that arise from calling the whole thing a ‘balance’ problem in the first place, but the ‘balance’ point of view has some merits. Here is a straight-faced analysis. I conclude that ‘surfing’ is the best-of-breed within the whole ‘balance’ category or metaphors. Here is why.
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BBC Documentary Featuring Gregory Chaitin

For those of you following my series on digital physics (the first part, on the reality of the real line, and the second part on the relevance on cellular automata  have been posted), you will like this documentary on the nature of infinity by BBC. It features Gregory Chaitin, whose work I covered in the first part.

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Book-Reading Meme

Nandini tagged me to participate in a meme on books. Not exactly how I’d break down my reading tastes, but I suppose I have to be a sociable blogger. So here goes, the books in my life parsed through a dizzying array of angles:

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August-ish 2007 Roundup

Okay, so I am not clockwork regular in posting roundups, but at least it’s here. August and the first week of September saw a good deal of interesting activity on Ribbonfarm. Two minor milestones: first, I crossed 100 comments for a base of 27 articles, so that’s still nearly 4 comments per article, which makes me happy. Second, I got my first ever traffic spike from a social bookmarking site (StumbleUpon) — the piece on cartograms generated the spike (probably thanks to reader Kapsio posting a link to it at a popular data visualization site — thanks Kaps!). Anyway, here is a summary of the posts since the last update:

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Digital Philosophy II: Are Cellular Automata Important?

The assertion that the universe is a computer (or rather, a computation) might seem like an egregious category error — computers after all are things made from the ‘stuff’ of the universe. To take digital philosophy seriously we need to get past this non-trivial barrier to comprehension. The idea is that computation is not a metaphor for the universe, nor is the physical evolution of the universe analogous to computation. The idea is that the universe can be said to be a gigantic ongoing computation just as it can be said to be a bunch of particles interacting energetically via some laws. In the first part of this series, we looked at the prerequisite idea that the continuum (or real line) might not be so real. In the next part, we’ll get to the latest ideas, from quantum computing scientists like Seth Lloyd. But before we get there, we need to talk about Von Neumann, Stephen Wolfram and Cellular Automata, an approach to digital philosophy (and physics) that I think is wrong, but nevertheless very illuminating.

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Seth Godin’s Dip and Multi-armed Bandits

Seth Godin, who I first discovered through his bestselling Permission Marketing has made something of a specialty of writing compact and focused books around single clear ideas. His latest, a tiny little book called The Dip, is his most abstract yet, but still fits the mold and develops a single punchy idea. The idea is this: there is a transient dip in the effort-to-returns graph of any project, and deciding what project to quit, and when, in terms of this graph, is a critical skill. It is almost too much of a complex idea for him to handle, but he just makes it. It is interesting to see him arrive at a fresh insight into a problem that has nearly a half-century long history in the context of an academic model of decision making called the multi-armed bandit. His fresh and original take provides some insight the bandit mathematicians never stumbled upon, but at the same time, he seriously underestimates the complexity of the idea, and the difficulty of operationalizing it.

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Meditations on Cataloging the Telluride Library

In the winter of 2001, for a variety of deep and compelling reasons, I found myself faced with the prospect of spending yet another vacation alone in Ann Arbor. Having previously learned everything that being miserable and bored has to teach, I doughtily resolved to explore other dimensions of enforced solitude. So, with an inspiring vision of myself as a latter-day Thoreau in mind, I made myself a plan for living a life of soul-cleansing monastic discipline within the confines of Telluride house for two weeks. [Read more…]

Dan Pink, Howard Gardner and the Da Vinci Mind

Do labels like “broad thinker,” “generalist,” “synthesizer,” “right-brained,” or “conceptualizer” get at aspects of a coherent personality type? Call this mind the “Da Vinci” mind for short. Recently, two rather interesting takes on such minds have appeared: A Whole New Mind (WNM) by Dan Pink and Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner. Do you have what these two authors think is the kind of mind that will dominate the future? Are you sure you want such a mind, even if they are right? Let’s get to the answers through some right-brained meandering.

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The Twitter Zone and Virtual Geography

My previous post on the 50-foot-rule led to an interesting exchange with reader tubelite, which led me to a more sophisticated appreciation of the idea behind twitter.com, and introduced me to the interesting ideas of Dunbar’s number and the Monkeysphere. After mulling the straggling exchange, and starting with tubelite’s insight that the 50-foot zone is really a zone of random background social noise, I came up with a map of modern virtualized society. At the heart of it is the new form of the 50-foot-zone, the twitter zone. Here’s the map.

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Open Innovation, or is Business War?

The catchphrase of Henry Chesbrough’s work on innovation (a doctrine called “open innovation” and described in Open Innovation, 2003, and Open Business Models, 2006), is “not all the smart people work for you.” The key operational message that corporations seem to take away from it though, is “buy and sell intellectual property vigorously and throw some money at universities.” Somewhere along the way unfortunately, a sophisticated reconstruction of the logic of innovation becomes reduced to quick-money recipes. Part of the blame rests with Chesbrough himself, for raising and framing a very important subject, but then being somewhat timid about running with the idea to some daring conclusions. In this article, I am going to rush in foolishly where, apparently, Henry Chesbrough fears to tread. I’ll interpret the idea of open innovation as business is not war, and you’ll see where that line of reasoning takes us. [Read more…]