Find of the day

[BrucePartington]

Originally Posted by Platapus

I thought Leonard Nimoy said that.

Been playing Civilization IV, have we?

[Oberon]

"Beep...Beep...Beep...Beep...Beep...Beep...Beep... Beep"

[BrucePartington]

Originally Posted by Oberon

"Beep...Beep...Beep...Beep...Beep...Beep...Beep... Beep"

I think he was a bit off tone there.

[Skybird]

John Stuart Mill, 1859 - On Liberty

In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34901

What sets Mill apart from many other early thinkers of libertarianism, is that he was aware of that any libertarianism and any liberal tradition would erode its own basis in people's sympathy and thinking, if such a tradition would focus exclusively on the issue of propagating the ideal capitalism alone. He was a prophet there, especially proven right by the role of total and complete meaninglessness libertarian parties nowadays play in Europe. People do not like to be free and self-responsible, they prefer to be fed and nursed and nannied by states and parties from the cradle to the grave, that is far more attractive for most, an they give up freedom all too easily to get that. And America: one can hardly argue that when the Democrats are socialists, the Republicans thus are libertarians. They are not - and not so by a very wide margin.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

That's no good you want the Walter Hicks 125.

Looks interesting, I'll try to find that...cheers.

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

Looks interesting, I'll try to find that...cheers.

As far as I know St Austell is the only source, I always pick up a few bottles on the way back from Meva.
It's a much cleaner taste than Woods.
Put it on next years birthday list

http://www.staustellbreweryshop.co.u.../125-navy-rum/
They don't deliver to Ireland

[Skybird]

"Me and them"

[Skybird]

Laurence J. Peter - The Peter Principle

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

The Peter Principle is a special case of a ubiquitous observation: Anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails. This is "The Generalized Peter Principle." There is much temptation to use what has worked before, even when it may exceed its effective scope. Peter observed this about humans.

In an organizational structure, the assessment of the potential of an employee for a promotion is often based on their performance in the current job which results eventually in their being promoted to their highest level of competence and potentially then to a role in which they are not competent, referred to as their "level of incompetence". The employee has no chance of further promotion, thus reaching his or her career's ceiling in an organization.

Peter suggests that "[i]n time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties" and that "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence." He coined the term hierarchiology as the social science concerned with the basic principles of hierarchically organized systems in the human society.

He noted that their incompetence may be a result of the skills required being different rather than more difficult; by way of example, an excellent engineer may find that he or she made a poor manager due to a limitation of the interpersonal skills required by a manager to effectively lead a team.

Rather than seeking to promote a talented “super-competent” junior employee, Peter suggested that an incompetent manager may set them up to fail or dismiss them because they will likely "violate the first commandment of hierarchical life with incompetent leadership: [namely that] the hierarchy must be preserved".


There are methods that organizations can use to mitigate the risk associated with the Peter Principle:

- Refrain from promoting workers based on their current performance without proof of their abilities to succeed in the desired role.
- Provide in-service training for the desired roles for those being considered for promotion.
- Provide a parallel career path for good technical staff, possibly with the offer of additional pay, perks or recognition without requiring promotion to management, similar to a warrant officer in the military.
- Implement an Up or out approach as authorized by the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act for the United States Armed Forces and by manning control policies within the British Army, in which personnel who are not promoted above certain ranks within the fixed number of years are deemed to lack the necessary competence and are likely to be dismissed. Some larger businesses, notably major international management consultancies/accountancy firms including McKinsey, BCG, and Bain use a similar method, or the 'vitality curve' or 'rank and yank' used by GE where employees who are ranked in the bottom 5-10% on performance are likely to be fired.


Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda and Cesare Garofalo used an agent-based modelling approach to simulate the promotion of employees in a system where the Peter Principle is assumed to be true. They found that the best way to improve efficiency in an enterprise is to promote people randomly, or to shortlist the best and the worst performer in a given group, from which the person to be promoted is then selected randomly.For this work, they won the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize in management science.

A similar theory was proposed by Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon series. In his 1996 book, The Dilbert Principle, Adams suggested that "the least smart people are promoted, simply because they’re the ones you don't want doing actual work." In other words people are promoted because of their incompetence in their current role, rather than their competence. Others have suggested the "Peter Principle in reverse," a management strategy of deliberately promoting an employee beyond his or her level of existing competency.
Forerunners

In the 1910s, José Ortega y Gasset suggested that: "All public employees should be demoted to their immediately lower level, as they have been promoted until turning incompetent".


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

That Laurence also had a most original sense of humour that reminds strongly of those quotes you remember from Churchill, can be seen here

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/au...e_j_peter.html

[Skybird]

Animated cultural history

An animation that shows the places of birth, moving patterns, and places of death of the 150,000 most influential cultural contributors and remembered persons of the past centuries.

Blue dots are places of birth, red dots are places of death.

Europe:


Note the difference between France and Germany: the massive centralization in France where all activity aims and movers towards Paris, and the level of activity covering all of Germany.

America:

Going West!

Abstract

The emergent processes driving cultural history are a product of complex interactions among large numbers of individuals, determined by difficult-to-quantify historical conditions. To characterize these processes, we have reconstructed aggregate intellectual mobility over two millennia through the birth and death locations of more than 150,000 notable individuals. The tools of network and complexity theory were then used to identify characteristic statistical patterns and determine the cultural and historical relevance of deviations. The resulting network of locations provides a macroscopic perspective of cultural history, which helps us to retrace cultural narratives of Europe and North America using large-scale visualization and quantitative dynamical tools and to derive historical trends of cultural centers beyond the scope of specific events or narrow time intervals.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6196/558

[Skybird]

Claude Debussy - Claire de Lune



The pianist is Francois-Joelle Thiollier. I like Debussy very much and have listened to many different pianists. The overwhelming majority of them play Debussy either way too fast, or with almost kitschig emotional hyperdrive, but with Debussy it is a bit like with Chopin: the music already is emotional the way the composer has set the accents and directions for how to play it - leave it to that and do not add more emotion, else you easily overdo things. Thilloier gets the balance between sober expression and subjective interpretation right, for me he is the reference when it comes to Debussy, and I compare every other pianist to his four albums with Debussy's piano works. Although having won many classical competitions in his younger years, almost nobody knows him, which surprises me until today. For playing Debussy, he is my first choice interpret.

[Skybird]

Dubai Duty Free Shergar Cup in Ascot

[Skybird]

The Tragedy of the Commons



I mentioned it earlier when quoting Jared Diamond some years ago, but back then did not know the English term for what in German is called "Drama der Allmende".

The metaphor illustrates the argument that free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource ultimately reduces the resource through over-exploitation, temporarily or permanently. This occurs because the benefits of exploitation accrue to individuals or groups, each of whom is motivated to maximize use of the resource to the point in which they become reliant on it, while the costs of the exploitation are borne by all those to whom the resource is available (which may be a wider class of individuals than those who are exploiting it). This, in turn, causes demand for the resource to increase, which causes the problem to snowball until the resource collapses (even if it retains a capacity to recover).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

[Skybird]

Thomas Paine (1791) - The Rights of Man

http://www.ushistory.org/paine/rights/index.htm

Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one
...)
The idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureat.
(...)
I speak an open and disinterested language, dictated by no passion but that of humanity. To me, who have not only refused offers, because I thought them improper, but have declined rewards I might with reputation have accepted, it is no wonder that meanness and imposition appear disgustful. Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.

What impresses me in Paine is not always his defence of democracy and condemnation of aristocracy (obviously there are quite some - imo - hyper-idealistic assessments that I do not fully agree with, since I oppose BOTH democracy and feudal state orders), but his absolutely believable attitude of honesty and humane noblesse.

I must find in English some introduction to the ancient Greek views of democracy. That should be an eye-opener nicely contrasting against Paine.

[Skybird]

The beauty of abandoned places

http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/lo...ke-117190.html

[Skybird]

Maximilian Bode (2012) - Bombs