In my literary travels, I recently learned that Helvetica was originally called… Neue Haas Grotesk. And indeed, the name was changed for marketing reasons.
That reminds me of the case of the Chilean sea bass, the yummier-sounding fisheries label for the creature otherwise known as the Patagonian toothfish...
(image from Wikipedia)
Back from a Rockies roadtrip with the in-laws, the highlight of which was when a black bear family — a mother with two cubs — sauntered past our (parked) car on the road to Miette Hot Springs, near Jasper. Below was the best picture: with my photographic skills, I managed to override the autofocus feature on the camera on the others. 
We first noticed the stopped cars on the other side of the road, so we turned our hazards on and idled our way forward. When we saw the bears heading our way, we parked, not wanting to distract or otherwise irritate the ursine family. After picking at some roadside dandelions, the mother bear decided to cross the road — and the cubs followed, in tow. I didn’t appreciate how much they actually look like teddy bears. Now, the term “teddy bear” comes from an incident between a bear and US President Theodore (”Teddy”) Roosevelt. But unlike legendary Simpsons-hometown founder Jebediah Springfield, Roosevelt neither killed nor was killed by that bear.
As the mother bear passed by the driver’s side front-bumper, cubs in tow, it belatedly occurred to me to roll up my window. 
Still, it was very cool to come within about five feet of a sloth of bears in the wild — sloth being a term for a group of them, like a “murder” of crows, “crash” of rhinos, “clowder” of cats and personal favourite, “bloat” of hippos. It was cooler still, that we were safely ensconced in an automobile at the time.
The photo also got picked up by Yves Smith on her economics blog, one of the half-dozen or so on my daily reading list. It was Sunday’s “antidote-du-jour“. The backstory to her pseudonym is that it’s a play on the Biblical Adam and Eve, and Adam Smith being the codifier of capitalism.
We recently covered Jim Collins’ book Good to Great, in our business book club.
The tome is responsible for popularizing the hedgehog metaphor, namely that a company should stick to what it’s best at, and not diversify into other sectors where it has no competitive advantage. (I’ve heard of this kind of diversification being jeered as “deworsification” by irritated investors. )
I’d heard that the fox / hedgehog contrast originated from Aesop’s fables… but when I double-checked, it turns out that Aesop’s fox/hedgehog story was a parable about how when the proletariat overthrow the bourgeoisie, it just leaves a power vacuum for a new and even-more-rapacious aristocracy to move in. Or at least, that’s how Marxists would put it.
Turns out the fox-and-hedgehog comparison comes from an even more obscure Greek guy, Archilochus, who said: “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. That’s about the only thing of his that’s survived. Who knows — but for selective scribes, equally pithy aphorisms about, say, the hippo and the oxpecker, or the cat and the giraffe, might have inspired future business books! (Hippos and oxpeckers are symbiotic species, while I chose cats and giraffes arbitrarily.)
Now, the real test as to whether the fox-and-hedgehog parable holds true, is whether there are more foxes in the world, or hedgehogs. Sadly, I couldn’t find any population numbers in a quick online scan. Though given how dumb hedgehogs are reputed to be, I’d sort of imagine foxes would be more genetically successful… which would contradict the saying.
(Mind you, foxes are near-top-of-food-pyramid predators, and there are generally far fewer such predators than any prey species.)
Joseph Campbell identified the hero’s journey (or in his words, the monomyth) in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, about sixty years ago. One would presume other students of mythology came to much the same conclusion at some point in the past few millenia, but didn’t have the good fortune to live in an era of cheap communications media where their ideas could get widely recognized.
In a sentence, the hero undergoes a three-fold adventure of departure - initiation - return. The formula was closely followed by the Star Wars and Matrix franchises, and virtually every TV or movie writer I’ve spoken to has brought the hero’s journey up in conversation, unprompted.
Which got me wondering what the heroine’s journey is: most of the above stories are targeted to men. There’s no Wikipedia entry for the topic, yet.
When I think of the literature-targeted-to-women that I’ve read, the books by Jane Austen jump foremost to mind. But whereas heroes from Gilgamesh onwards have tried to grow into their destined roles… Jane Austen’s heroines (at least from Pride and Prejudice and Emma) found husbands.
When speaking with a female writer friend recently, she pointed out that Harlequin Romances are pretty much the world’s best-selling fiction genre; they sell 130 million books per year. Harlequin the company (a Canadian one, no less!) has six imprints for its female readers, and the Harlequin brand itself includes:
Whatever the archetypal heroine’s journey is, I’m sure it’s captured somewhere in the Harlequin literary formulae. And if there are cultures around the world with strongly different heroine mythology-types… once suspects that Harlequin’s cultural juggernaut will supercede those other traditions within decades of entering that particular literary market.
I’ve been using the ideas from David Allen’s Getting Things Done at work for about a year now, and despite my undeniable novicedom, have found it invaluable: I feel like a Stone Age artisan newly introduced to bronze!
Like so many transformative tools, the basics are delightfully simple — but like eastern martial-arts disciplines with which it shares… well, virtually nothing, the arresting simplicity takes years to master.
Actually, I jest — the end-goal of GTD, as it’s known to its acolytes, is to allow the practitioner to engage in their life and work attentively, undistracted by other action-items and to-do’s that might otherwise clutter the mind. Which means it’s basically the Zen ideal of mushin, or “no-mind”, dressed up in 21st-century American secular idiom. And mushin plays a central role in every eastern martial-arts discipline I’ve chanced to read up on. So GTD does in fact share a common fundament with karate, judo, aikido, and their cousins.
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For me, the biggest GTD learnings have been:
Most gratifyingly, the “outsourcing” of my memory to Outlook has let me clear my mental cache of those things-to-remember that always floated around in the back of my mind, depleting my concentration. So now, instead of multitasking, I can monotask. That is, I can direct 100% of my focus to various tasks-at-hand, instead of only offering 90% (because the other 10% needed to be held back to avoid forgetting other action items).
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With my quantum leap in workplace productivity, it was a rashworthy irritation that I couldn’t apply similar methods at home with Gmail, given its more limited architecture.
So discovering GTDInbox a few days ago was a real psychological emollient. A Firefox extension, it layers a GTD-friendly interface onto the Gmail interface.
Within a few hours, I’d decluttered my Gmail Inbox from about 170 to under 50 items — one screen. And there’ll be a few whoops (as in plural-of-the-celebratory-whoop, not as in gentle-expletive-indicating-accident) of joy in the living room when I attain the mythical state of “Inbox Zero“.
Late last year, one of the executives asked me to help write a paper on the future of energy.
McKinsey & Company have now published it.
Other authors in the series include:
Cooler still, as this unPhotoshopped screengrab shows, we’ve got the top spot in the Energy section!! (For now.)
Even cooler still, McKinsey had originally intended to circulate the essay collection at the World Economic Forum at Davos. (Ultimately they published a subset, and ours didn’t make the cut.) So I came within an editor’s whim of being able to put “…his work has been circulated at the World Economic Forum at Davos…” on my resume!
A long-form version of the essay will be made publicly available soon; I’ll link to that in due course.
Meanwhile, I think I’ll take a few more days off blogging to bask in the quietly ecstatic glow.
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(click to enlarge)
As a follow up to the Peter Senge lecture (previously noted here) I should note that there was an awkward moment during the Q&A when a participant demanded to know why Mr. Senge hadn’t discussed the need for ethical vegetarianism, alongside his discussion of the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the other damage we are wreaking on the environment. To his credit, Mr. Senge deflected the question nicely, acknowledging the reduced footprint of a vegetarian diet, then segueway-ing into a discussion on the need for collaborative instead of confrontative approaches.
Because the other participant — as well meaning as they were — was a fratricidal ally, turning their fury on the very like-minded people they need to leverage, to get their own message heard. Such splintering seems pretty common in environmental circles; I can imagine an activist vegan calling out the aforementioned participant and arguing that ethical vegetarianism wasn’t enough, and that veganism was the way to go. And so forth. It’s like the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the People’s Front of Judea, the Judean People’s Front, the Judean Popular People’s Front, and the Popular Front of Judea don’t speak to each other.
On the far-left side of Canadian politics, the Marxist-Leninists and Communists certainly don’t seem to talk, as evidenced by data from the last election. On the other end, it took a very long time to unite the Canadian right, with the Progressive Conservatives (”right lite”) and Alliance party (”far right” by historical Canadian standards) eventually merging into the Conservative Party, after a decade of counter-productive internecine strife. (I’m counting from the 1993 election, a breakthrough for the Reform Party, to the 2003 merger.)
Fratricidal allies make it tougher for an umbrella movement (in this case the environmental movement) to gain critical mass, as they disrupt the umbrella movement’s messaging. Such withering criticism would be seized on by opponents to delegitimize the umbrella movement’s efforts, ultimately impairing the fratricidal ally’s own goals.
A more productive long-term strategy would probably be to gain buy-in from the umbrella organization. But as long as there are absolutists out there, I suppose there’ll be plenty of people trying to catch flies with vinegar instead of honey. Given the urgency associated with climate change, I can see how various groups might feel there’s not enough time to build influence in the greater movement, and thus switch from “friendly” to “fratricidal” tactics.
A New Scientist article from a few years back suggests that vampire legends were how our ancestors tried to explain rabies. Interesting to think of vampire stories as educational tools.
Nowadays, of course, kids learn about rabies through Old Yeller, that “sick doggy snuff film”, to quote Phoebe from Friends.
[Rabies/vampires] is then analogous to [Williams Syndrome/elves]. The latter is a genetic disorder which causes elfin features and a love of music, clearly the inspiration for elves in various fairy tales.
Returning from Boston, I picked up a copy of La Presse, to keep my French limber — at least on the reading side of things.
I was surprised that the Montreal Canadiens were always referred to in the singular: as le Canadien. Indeed, in La Presse’s sports section, the hockey tabs are for Canadien (no “s”) and Senateurs.
Wikipedia confirms that this is a common Francophone designation for the Habs. Strangely, les Nordiques de Quebec was always conjugated in the plural.
Sadly, the Nordiques’ season-by-season NHL record doesn’t appear to be in Francophone Wikipedia — perhaps someone will put that right. Even me. Given enough time.
“Someone” suggested an aggressively catchy title for the upcoming DeSmogBlog book.
I hope they’re one of the three finalists.