This American Life article on Baghdad Workers

I am not a big fan of "This American Life". It is usually too crazy or too left leaning for my tastes. Today, though, there was a fantastic article on two guys who worked their way to Baghdad and started working. It is in Act 2. Listen to the whole thing, because it had a dramatic ending.

Life Lessons - The fine art of water-balloon tying

A great afternoon, heading into summer. I spent a few minutes this afternoon passing on a crucial life skill to my sons. Most dad's would pass on business skills, discussions of the opposite sex, or fighting arts. Today, though, I transcended all these more mundane topics and passed on the fine art of how to tie a water balloon. A skill much used in the summer months at our house, this crucial skill is slowing dying in the U.S., I am afraid. More water balloons, anyone?

The Creative Process

Had some interesting thoughts and personal revelations, this past weekend, on the creative process. You always hear the phrase that art is for the artist. I never really and truly understood this until working on this blog, youtube video and flickr photos. These creative outputs (you can judge the level of creativity :-)) are fun to work on, even when no-one reads the blog, reviews the video or looks at the photographs. I enjoy the output, for the sake of the output.

Anyway, it is late in the day for too many deep thoughts.

Randomness and Life

I am always fascinated by the view of life as a random machine. By this I mean that many factors of life are exposed to random effects, which can leave us feeling like small particles suffering from Brownian motion. Life's many aspects can be viewed as a string of independent (or dependent, based on your beliefs) probability functions.

In the view on success, education, clear thinking, and prudent behaviors all simply increase the probability of success. They do not guarantee it. Evidence to these facts is available. Observe simply that there are a lot of smart, talented people who are not remarkably wealthy nor overtly successful. Also observe that there are people who are successful who are not remarkably bright. Randomness works both ways. Now, taken over the entire spectrum of humanity, the probabilities are spread and show that successful people are usually bright and unsuccessful are usually not, but that simply reinforces the probability viewpoint.

Randomness in life also is manifest in the actions and interactions of our lives on the planet. The car wreck, exposure to sickness, choice of small action which cascade to disaster all can show the interaction of randomness with our lives. The positive of this randomness is shown in avoidance of tragedy.

I have to say that I am most certainly not negative on the random effects in life. I truly believe that, without the random interactions and their effects on life, we would live in an exceedingly boring existence. I encourage us all to recognize the randomness as valuable, do our best to work through the negative effects, make the best of our situations and keep chugging. What else are we to do?