Category — Treats

Holocaust surviver and psychologists Viktor Frankl delivers an amazing speech on searching for meaning and thinking the best of people. And as Goethe agrees with him, it must be true.

If you haven’t read his memorial from Auschwitz, Man’s Search for Meaning, you should

In their Questions of the Week column, Foreign Policy claims that Britain’s newly elected David Cameron and Nick Clegg are the Doublemint Twins. Me and The Sundance Kid are offended. We are the real Doublemint Twins. There is no way Nick and Dave are anywhere near as suave as us, nor as good at making nice sketches of sandy blond passersby.

Here are some enlightening quotes we found on the internet:

Ultimi Barbarorum:
If the Fed, especially under Greenspan, was always the loving Mommy, the Bundesbank was the harsh Prussian Vater, prepared to let its kids die if they thought it was good for them.

The Economist:
Anybody who has ever taken a meeting knows that trying to hold the attention of people with BlackBerrys is like trying to teach Latin to delinquent teenagers.

Wikipedia:
Financial Times, which named Blankfein as its “2009 Person of the Year,” stated: “His bank has stuck to its strengths, unashamedly taken advantage of the low interest rates and diminished competition resulting from the crisis to make big trading profits.” Critics of Goldman Sachs and Wall Street have taken issue with those practices.

and finally do think beyond, do some Kaupthinking:

thanks to Ultima Barbarorum for sharing this one and also offering some excellent comments.

In connection with this year’s women’s day celebration in March, my younger sister who is a Seargeant in the Royal Norwegian Air Force was interviewed by an “investigative journalist” from NRK making a piece about women in traditionally male occupations. She recounted to me a part of the interview that did not make it past clipping. It went something like this:

Interviewer: Have you ever experienced gender discrimination?

Sunniva, female Air Force Sergeant: No, I can’t recall any situation where I have been discriminated against.

Interviewer (a little surprised): But, you must have… Eh, well, I have heard stories about women in the military…

Sunniva, female Air Force Sergeant: I can only speak for myself, but I have never experienced anything like that.

Interviewer: Well, have you ever experienced ALMOST being the victim of discrimination?

Sunniva, female Air Force Sergeant: Eh, no…

Interviewer: OK, so you don’t feel like you are being discriminated against, but do you think that some other women perhaps could feel like they were if they had your job?

…

I feel so much safer now that I know that the media is investigating hypothetical gender discrimination.

Some recent and interesting articles, all very recommended:

An excellent article on zoophiles, animal lovers – there is more to human sexuality than I would ever have expected and somehow horses are particularly attractive

Steve Randy Waldman explains why measuring bank balance sheets (capital) is impossible

A report from Morgan Stanley on the emerging global trends of internet usage, especially mobile

Dani Rodrik on the return of industrial policy – governments can pick winners

How to make a  freestanding handstand Push-Up – my goal for the next year

Stiglitz on an agenda for reforming economics at the newly established, Soros-financed, Institute for New Economic Thinking (video)

Learning by analogy:

sometimes supposed solutions make the original problem worse. In whale-removal as well as in economics.

I just came across a post at the North Korea Economy Watch blog linking to North Korean comic book translations made by Heinz Insu Fenkl, an associate professor in the department of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz . As such, I have spent the last couple of hours or so reading about the Great General Mighty Wing and the Kim Brothers in Blizzard in The Jungle. It is easy for those of us who grew up after the end of the cold war to think of authoritarian dictatorships and ultra-explicit propaganda as relics of the distant past. These North Korean comics sadly remind us that this is not the case. They are, however, [Read more →]

Thanks to Ulf Jakob, an avid Evolution-Revolution reader

Working in business might be quite challenging

via Locklin on science

-JHA