A Couple More LSE Podcasts

That are definitely worth your time... 

Anders Dahlvig, former President and CEO of IKEA and author of The IKEA Edge, presented a talk titled The new growth strategy: How responsible companies are profitable companies.  He's not a dynamic speaker and he suffered from a persistent cough throughout, but the story of how IKEA treats its suppliers, employees, and customers stands in stark contrast to the methods applied by the likes of WalMart.  

What Money Can't Buy - the moral limit of markets, was presented by a panel composed of Professor Michael Sandel, Stephanie Flanders, Professor Julian Le Grand, Right Reverend Peter Selby.

It does my heart good to see some folks getting it right.  Give a listen.

Another Guilty Pleasure

Vies for a place in the canon...

Rock of Ages may just join a very special list of mine that contains three Roland Emmerich classics, Independence Day (1996), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), and 2012 (2009); two Luc Besson masterpieces, The Professional (1994) and The Fifth Element (1997); The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001), and Resident Evil (2002).  These are movies I will watch at any time for no reason at all.

As for Rock of Ages (which is also a Broadway musical), Rotten Tomatoes has mixed feelings about it and more than a few hardcore rockers think this movie musical trivializes the 1980s rock and roll scene.  Okay...  I never took the soundtrack of my life all that seriously, but some people do.  Rock of Ages is both silly and trivial, but it's also funny and physical.  I especially enjoyed the several Pat Benatar standards performed by a club full of seriously athletic exotic dancers...  Where was I?  Oh, yeah, Russell Brand delivers a performance that is almost nuanced compared to his other "work" and Alec Baldwin - still the most skilled of all the Baldwin brothers - continues to not take himself too seriously.  Tom Cruise channels his inner nut job, and Katherine Zeta Jones appears to have as much fun as anyone on camera.  I'm pretty sure my toes didn't stop tapping until the credits began to roll.

I Got Bored

So I monetized The Breakfast...

There's more to it than that of course.  I'm feeling like making some changes.  I started a low carb diet.  I remodeled my cube.  I purged a mess of hard copy reference documents I never used much and certainly no longer need.  Today I spent the afternoon on a blog arguing with disagreeable people (angry atheists) whom I've never met.  Where's that get fun?  This afternoon in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I guess.  Time for some changes.  Time to get unbored.

Anyway, please let me know if the ads - which respond to key words not context and are thus sometimes hilariously contraposed to the topic - interfere with your navigation, consumption, or enjoyment of my random musings.  Thanks.

UPDATE: Nothing too silly so far, ill-considered advertisement-wise.  I do however miss the women advertising T-shirts wearing nothing but one...

Image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boredom 

Not Getting Caught In A Lie

Is not the same thing as telling the truth...

The retort is paraphrased from Three Days of the Condor, one of the best spy thrillers of all time.  These days it seems that no one working inside The Beltway ever watched the 1975 classic.  [Apparently no one there watched The Battle of Algiers (1966) before invading Iraq either.  What, you movers, shakers, and influence peddlers never heard of Netflix?]

All sorts of people, some of them usually pretty smart, others not so much, are going on and on about determining who in the Obama administration leaked the details of which used the Stuxnet virus (and others) to set back the Iranian nuclear program by a couple years.

Joel Harding, author of the To Inform Is To Influence blog, last week posted a piece titled The Atomic Bomb of Cyberspace, in which he laments

It’s official.  The United States of America was the first to use an atomic bomb against an enemy and now the United States is the first to have acknowledged using a cyber weapon against another country.  We are now certified bad guys to the rest of the world.

We are the first nation-state to admit to having used a cyberweapon on another nation-state.

To whoever leaked the information from the Obama administration, for whatever purpose, you have now doomed the United States to a terrible legacy forever.  Now the United States will forever lose the war of ideas when it comes to innocence.

To which I reply, if this is a “terrible legacy” then responsibility for it resides with those who unleashed Duqu, Stuxnet, and Flame, not those who leaked the truth about it.  We will “forever lose the war of ideas about when it comes to innocence” because we are guilty of the act, not because our lying about being innocent didn’t hold up.  We will be credited with first use of cyber weapons because we used cyber weapons first, not because we failed to maintain (as with our drone attacks in Pakistan, a rather transparent) deniability.

Do I care that we wrecked Iranian centrifuges?  No, not at all, and all the better we used USB drives instead of MOPS or nukes.  Should the leaker stretch a rope for committing treason?  Maybe, but let's not pretend the responsibility for our Stuxnet legacy lies with anyone other than the paymaster behind Project "Olympic Games."

Image credit: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/06/flame-tied-to-stuxnet/

Julian Jaynes and Our Bicameral Past

Traipsing along the fringe between science and pseudoscience...

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes is an interesting if dated perspective on the emergence of human consciousness. Fascinating idea, but not one I find compelling at first read.  Was Jaynes an intellect ages ahead of his time or a nutty professor with a quirky theory?  There's something to his idea, but I can't quite make sense of it.  Another book on my reading list, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist, may help me flesh this out.