Every company needs a compelling origin story. An origin story reveals how a character became the protagonist (or antagonist), usually providing a compelling event which explains their intentions or behavior. Comics and movies use origin stories to explain how characters got their superpowers or why they are supervillains. Recently, entertainment companies have rewritten the origins…
Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened. This optimistic quote is frequently attributed to Theodor Geisel (aka the popular children’s author, Dr. Seuss). In fact, the saying likely pre-dates him by 100 years and should be attributed to the poet Ludwig Jacobowski. Regardless of the true origin, it’s a useful quote to pull…
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. This colorful phrase, called Hanlon’s Razor, explains that people aren’t always out to get us; sometimes they just make mistakes. It’s a practical application of Occam’s Razor which states that, everything else being equal, the simplest solution is usually the best one. Hanlon’s…
For many years, I used to brag about how little sleep I needed. 5 or 6 hours was plenty; 7 was a luxury. I even once blogged about the benefits of resting as an alternative to sleeping. I’m not alone. Many (perhaps even most) of my colleagues / acquaintances have told stories about getting very little sleep…
In the climactic scene of the movie A Few Good Men, Lieutenant Kaffee (Tom Cruise) demands the truth from a testifying Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson). Jack’s response is a cinema classic: You can’t handle the truth! It’s a mesmerizing scene which contains an interesting psychological tidbit. People often rate honesty as the most important value…
These three laws, simple as they are, form much of the basis of probability theory. Properly applied, they can give us much insight into the workings of nature and the everyday world. – Leonard Mlodinow That quote is from Leonard Mlodinow’s book, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. The book contains examples as…
On Thursday June 1, while many Californians – including me – were watching the Golden State Warriors defeat the Cleveland Cavaliers in game one of the NBA Finals, Ananya Vinay, a 12-year old from Fresno California, correctly spelled ‘marocain’ to win the 2017 Scripps National Spelling Bee. I might have guessed the correct spelling for…
Leonardo da Vinci might have been one of the earliest adopters of exponential thinking. da Vinci was born more than 500 years ago in semi-rural Tuscany to parents of modest means. Despite little access to formal education, he was able to extrapolate forward-thinking ideas about subjects as diverse as architecture, engineering, mathematics, urban planning, science…
When I ask people to name the most revolutionary technology, the most common answers are the Internet and the mobile phone. Both have certainly fundamentally changed our lives and it is difficult to imagine living without either of them. But a case can be made that the telegraph was just as impactful. The telegraph, for…
I’ve been doing some spring cleaning and stumbled upon one of my favorite University textbooks: Tversky and Kahneman’s “Judgement Under Uncertainty”. This book taught me the basics of probability, a ridiculously useful skill which I’ve relied on far more frequently than I ever would have imagined. A better understanding of probability can help us overcome…