Unfilterd ramblings from a mostly wellbalanced man @krombein - Tumblr Blog

Christmas Eve Ever Snow

A six-year-old who throws a tantrum and refuses to go to school is escalating into the urgent. Going to school every day is important. Mollifying an angry customer is urgent, building systems and promises that keep customers from getting angry...

I know all of this, but it's still helpful to read it again.

I remember the WTO riots in Seattle in my sophomore year of college. My roommates and I didn't go to any classes. We just sat in the living room of our apartment and watched the news all day. It was fascinating and memorable--I still remember it today. But I'm not a better person because of it.

#priorities productivity

8 Yardsticks

"8 Yard Sticks on the Metrics of Real Education" From "Weapons of Mass Instruction" by John Taylor Gatto

Self-Knowledge. Without it you are lost and will flounder again and again. Have you introspected enough to know your own character? Proclivities? Strengths? Weaknesses? Blessings? Curses? How much did you High School giving you to accomplish this?

Observation. Your powers of observation in any situation should be razor sharp. At will, you should be able to function as an objective camera; sucking in data for later analysis. Can you read the primary documents from every age and date and place, or must you take someone else's word for their meaning?

Feedback. Are you rigorously trained to pick up clues about yourself, the reactions of others and signals from the environment? Do you have trouble accepting criticism and evaluating its worth? If you rely as test scores and teacher evaluations as stars to steer by, you in for a shock when you discover discrepancies between what you have been taught to think and reality.

Analysis. Can you take a new problem, break it into structural and procedural elements, gauge the relationships among those, recognize outside influences, and do all this without expert help?

Mirroring. Have you learned to be everyone else as well as yourself? Can you be a chameleon. Or are you trapped in your own tight skin the way little people are? Can you fit in to every group--even a group of your enemies. Opting in and out as you please, yet remaining yourself?

Expression. Do you have a voice that's your own? Can you deliver that voice with clarity in speaking and writing? Without that your ability to recruit allies will be feeble and you will likely be swallowed up by someone who's expressiveness is superior to your own.

Judgment. Can you evaluate dispassionately? Can you see through falsehood? The society you are entering is a house of mirrors. Little of what you see and few that you meet will be what they appear. The most attractive personalities are invariably dishonest. How much chance to develop judgment and test it?

Add Value. Do you add value to every encounter? To every group of which you are a part? Do you even know what that means? If you aren't worth something to others, then truly, you are worthless.

These are Gatto's version of the minimum outcomes for a successful education. I've always said that for a product of public school, I turned out alright. I'd give myself a B or B- (which is hilarious that after considering Gatto's story, I still think of it in terms of letter-grades.) But really, I think I'm probably more like a C- based on his "yard sticks." I'd say I'm barely adequate at 1, 2, 4, 6, and 7. I'm pretty terrible at 3 and 5, and as much as I want to say I at least mostly satisfactory at 8, I'm probably overestimating.

I would love for my kids to say that they came out further along than me. I guess its time to use my #4 skills and reverse engineer a plan for them...

#school education BartlbyProject IWouldPreferNotTo

Engineering Language

For anyone that's curious, and a nerd about engineering and being precise with your words, here's an interesting reflection on confusion between engineering terms and common speech.

The author is trained as a civil engineer [I believe] and for the last couple decades has worked as a failure analysis consultant. My only critique is his claim that engineers are "bastard children of scientists and tradesmen." I prefer to think of scientists as un-applied engineers, and engineering to be the superior discipline. According to Hannah Arendt definitions in The Human Condition (which will either put your to sleep or fascinate you) Scientists are "workers" and Engineers are "actors". But I digress, it's a good nerdy article…

#nerd #engineering #english

Just learned a little about the Boxer Rebellion in China. The Boxers were also known as The Righteous Fists of Harmony—which is a pretty fantastic name (too bad they were characterized as rebelling against Christianity and missions).

It makes me think a play on it might be a good band name though: The Righteous Fifths of Harmony.

Community vs Network

I just read a post over at Art of Manliness about the difference between communities and networks. I haven't thoroughly processed all of it, but I think that for those of us in the process of unplugging and recovering from Mars Hill, there may be something in there regarding whether or not Mars Hill was a legitimate community or a network and what that means for us as we recalibrate to new communities elsewhere.

What do you think?

Without the rule of law we are as but gibbons in the jungle. Right?

Point taken, but the rule of law can be despised externally or corrupted internally. When it has been thoroughly corrupted internally, as it has been with us, and it eventually gets to the stage where the problem is noticed from the outside, the outsiders are not the ones causing the problem. If we want the rule of law, then the law needs to stop beclowning itself. If conservatives inside the Beltway are truly concerned to protect the rule of law, they need to stop trimming their sails so much, and start fighting for the rule of law right where they are. They need to do this instead of tut-tutting when people out in the heartland start saying enough.

Increasingly, I feel like things I see and hear in the news have multiple meanings and could be applied in several ways to several circumstances all at the same time. Maybe this means history is closing in on some sort of singularity...

Only if their imagination is captured will most give a fair hearing to the strong arguments for the truth of Christianity.

#theology #faith #christianity #pascal

"We cannot love our neighbor by encouraging them to engage in actions that invoke God's wrath (Ps. 5:4-5; Rom. 1:18). As Christians we may be required to tolerate ungodly behavior, but the moment we begin to endorse the same then we too have become suppressers of the truth. We cannot love our neighbor and want to see them excluded from the kingdom of Christ (Eph. 5:5)."

I generally like Freakonomics, but are they right about marriage?

Freakonomics Radio just release the second part of of their two-part series on how marriage is changing. One of their assertions has to do with the oft-repeated statistic that "marriage makes people happier." They claim, rather, that happy, well-adjusted people, are the more likely group of people to get married--it's not so much that marriage makes people happier, but if you're married, you're likely the kind of person that is generally happier. In that sense, they argue that it's a self-selecting group.

Listen Here

My question: is that true? On the surface is seems like they may have something there. As nerds with only a little bit of statistical training are fond of repeating, "correlation is not causation." Just because married people tend to be happier, that doesn't necessarily mean that marriage makes people happier.

But, one of my favorite authors and speakers on marriage, Gary Thomas, has something different to say. The intro-thought and subtext of his fantastic book Sacred Marriage is this: "What if God designed marriage to make you holy more than happy?"

"See!" you say, "Married doesn't make you happy!" Bear with me though. While I'll admit that there has been some recent evangelical backlash against this idea, and I'm happy to concede that marriage is not only designed to make you holy, lets stop and think about what being "holy" really means. Let's simplify it and say that being made "holy" means being made more like God. I would argue that the more like God and in alignment with Him that you are, the happier you are going to be.

Further, I have to object to the relative idea that the "kind of people who get married are the happy, well-adjusted people." While, in broad strokes, there might be a small bit of truth to that, we all know first hand, that people who get married are JACKED UP. We are all sinner and as James 3:2 puts it, "we all stumble in many ways." I've known many, depressed, addicted, compulsive, selfish, narcissistic, unstable, and/or lazy jerks who have somehow managed to get married. I also have seen many of them grow in holiness through the crucible of their marriages. I am one of them. And I am definitively much much happier because of my marriage.

#theology #economics #marriage #happiness

"He can no longer have God for his Father who has not the Church for his mother; … he who gathers elsewhere than in the Church scatters the Church of Christ."

#theology #church #ecclesiology

Thoughts on building a business

As of late, I've had several conversations with a number of different people about Jim Gilmore and his amazing business development insights. I'd forgotten about how awesome his stuff is until I started telling others about it.

I definitely recommend that you go pick up a copy of Authenticity or Experience Economy.

I love his Economic Theory of Everything:

Anytime you customize a commodity, it becomes a product.

Anytime you customize a product, it becomes a service.

Anytime you customize a service, it becomes an experience

Anytime you customize an experience, it becomes a transformation.

For anyone looking to make their role, job, business more enticing and successful that than their competition, figure out how to customize what you offer, so that you move up that ladder at least one rung.

#bus #philosophy #books

Dr Drang apparently discovered something at about the same time that I did--that's it good to always have paper with you. (I supposed that's not too suprising since he and I are both engineers... great minds thinking and whatnot...) I pretty much do the exact same thing as him except that I don't use a pen. Instead, I found these great Pilot G2-Mini pencils--which feel exactly like the G2 pens, which are far and away my favorites. The pencil takes up almost no space in my pocket and the tip is retractable, so there's no worry about ink leaking in your pocket or poking a hole in it. A small moleskine and the G2-mini are now essential parts of my EDC (everyday carry).

Also, I hunted around and found some B lead. The HB lead just isn't soft enough for the big-fat lines that I use in my sketches and broad-stroke notes.

#EDC #workflow #gtd

Last night’s debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham attracted a huge international audience and no shortage of controversyâeven before it began. Bill Nye, whose…

Here's a great review of the debate last night between Ken Ham and Bill Nye. I didn't see it, but Mohler seems to convey that it was a worth while thing. He also seems to indicate that Ham managed to come off as much less of a nut that he usually seems to be.

#debate #science #creation #evolution

DrDrang has a good post about touch screens and notebooks and whether or not they should co-exist in one device. Personally, I think the idea of having a notebook with a touchscreen would be horribly obnoxious. I'm all about optimizing the way that I interact with my computers to minimize the number of steps required. Having to stop using a trackpad or keys to reach up and tap the screen makes things harder, not easier.

What would be awesome and would make sense, I think, would be to turn the entire trackpad/typing surface into a touch screen, in addition to the clamshell screen. The newer MacBooks already have glass trackpads that support gestures. Just make that the whole surface and put a screen behind it. It'd be like having an ipad built into a MBP. And if the screens were connected and you could drag windows down, or hide the trackpad and keyboard when you didn't need it, that would be whole loads of useful.

#musings #technology #apple

Seth has some good things to consider about conference calls. The same can be said, I think, for video conferences.

I think #7 was very well put.

I have noticed, on the Internet and elsewhere, that when a pastor says something angular, the kind of thing that provokes questions and/or consternation, a very common stock response emerges. That response is that such behavior is not very pastoral.

I was once told that I had not "been very pastoral". Certainly, there have been many times that I was not. However, the time I was confronted, was one of those times that Doug is talking about.

#ministry

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Unfilterd ramblings from a mostly wellbalanced man