Category Archives: out of the box

Cutthroat Diversity

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Thrones SYGU‘d in a significant fashion this year picking up Emmy awards for Outstanding Drama Series, as well as Outstanding Directing, Outstanding Writing, Outstanding Casting, Outstanding Supporting Actor, and Outstanding Special Visual Effects among others.

Season 6 premieres two weeks from tonight and will essentially feature brand new content that George R.R. Martin has not yet written.  So now all the snobby GoT book nerds will have to wait an entire week to find out what happens just like the rest of us plebs.

***HBONOW is now available exclusively online for a 30 day free trial available here.***

*** SPOILERS AHEAD ***

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Native Province

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Eight time Emmy-award winning Showtime series Homeland concludes its 5th season tonight as it continues to tackle current real world issues, like ISIS’ proclamation of a world-wide caliphate that aims to “redraw the map” in the Middle-East, and ISIS’ attack on an innocent European city in the name if Jihad.

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Homage to World

Go Ask Alice,
When she is ten feet tall
And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you are going to fall.

Tell them a hookah-smoking, caterpillar
Has given you a call
Call Alice
when she is small.

She came into my focus, late: when I was 29 years old.

I really didn’t see her clearly when I was young.  She was Pollyanna to me.  The Energizer Bunny personified.  My Gaia.

From the beginning, she would read to me what I was interested in. I learned to read by listening to her.  Not fairy tales, not silly stories, but from the natural world: she read from Time Life: The World We Live In.

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Time Life Book: The World We Live In

She had been there all along, the all encompassing foundation: at the start, there in the beginning, my World, my life.

She encouraged my passion of Science, to be the best I could be. She loved learning, I did too.

world_we_live_in_bindI quickly surpassed her in understanding the natural world, although she was always better with the people world.  She was my first Teacher: she is my mother: all four feet, eight inches.

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Alice Keirsey, Teacher Idealist

She supported my father in his education, when he got back from World War II. She went back to work, when he took a pay cut to be a university professor. She was a elementary school teacher for over 40 years.  Everybody loves her, her fellow teachers, her students, their parents, her children and her grandchild.  She was my father’s best Advocate.  And she was my Advocate too, for I am her son: the scientist.

Even more than the other Idealists, Teachers have a natural talent for leading students or trainees toward learning, or as Idealists like to think of it, they are capable of calling forth each learner’s potentials. Teachers are able – effortlessly, it seems, and almost endlessly-to dream up fascinating learning activities for their students to engage in. In some Teachers, this ability to fire the imagination can amount to a kind of genius which other types find hard to emulate. But perhaps their greatest strength lies in their belief in their students. Teachers look for the best in their students, and communicate clearly that each one has untold potential, and this confidence can inspire their students to grow and develop more than they ever thought possible. [Please Understand Me II]

How and why does the world work?  That was my question from the beginning.

And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she’ll know

She started me on my intellectual journey.

Birth, Growth, Equilibrium, Decay, Death.  That’s the way the world works, at the eight levels of major complexity.

Yes, Life Itself.  It’s complex, with many Dynamic Relations and Varying Contexts.

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head

— Jefferson Airplane

Now that she is not here all the time.  She is fading from this world, the focus blurring and memory descending.  Time to take care of her, no questions, no answers, just be her foundation.  I can’t explain my science to her which theoretically sound but of no practical use, as her World becomes smaller and smaller.  Just appreciate her for being there in beginning as the foundation, and I hope to be there supporting as a foundation, however flawed, to the end.

Other Teacher Idealists include: Maya AngelouChiune SugiharaZiauddin Yousafzai, Ralph NaderMikhail GorbachevStephen CoveyJane Fonda

Homage to Catalonia

Go Ask Alice

Of a Strange and Distant Time

Strangers in Strange Lands

A gypsy of a strange and distant time
Travelling in panic all direction blind
Aching for the warmth of a burning sun
Freezing in the emptiness of where he’d come from

Left without a hope of coming home.
Gypsy — Moody Blues

He didn’t want to be a gypsy, he wasn’t really a gypsy by nature, but he left without a hope of coming home.

The world and himself made him a gypsy, an exile: a stranger in strange lands.

But he did push for the burning sun.  It technically is called RADIATION.  Order AND Disorder.

Lichtquant — Albert Einstein
A Photon — a light quantum

And every one, except one of his mentors, his older fellow exiles, including Einstein, eventually disagreed with Teller Ede, making him an exile three times: a stranger in strange lands, all his life.

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A Turning Point

David West Keirsey: Self Portrait
David Keirsey self portrait(August 31, 1921 – July 30, 2013)

My father died on July 30th, 2013 and I intend to honor him, if I can, by writing a blog about him and his ideas every year.  First year.  Second Year.

“I regard myself as the last living Gestalt Psychologist”
— David West Keirsey

Gestalt: German word for form or shape

He wrote a short autobiography at the bequest of us, it was titled: Turning Points.  It chronicles some of the turning points of his life.  I want to write “an intellectual history” of him using some of that material plus my fading memory about the ideas we discussed in those many years, since it might be instructive to see how and why his ideas were formed and evolved.  Moreover, I think that his developed “methodology” of qualitative factor analysis and synthesis can contribute to the progress in science.

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It’s a Slow Idea

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Many people have asked why is Keirsey Temperament Theory not known broadly as “it should be.”

For a long time, I couldn’t give a good answer.

The answer is: “It’s a Slow Idea.”

My father outlines “The History of Madness”  in his lectures.  And the Wholistic Theory of Madness is a slow idea, its roots going back to over a century with my father adding the idea of Temperament in the last half century.   Fast Ideas about “madness” have been around since Homo Sapens possessed language.

The roots of the Idea of Keirsey Temperament also go back to ancient times.

In addition, there is the idea of: Slow Ideas <=> Fast Ideas

The root of this idea appeared just recently, thanks to Atul Gawande.

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The New Mills

They had to be discrete. Tongues will wag. For their idea is a slow idea, not well accepted in the world even today.  Their slow idea on the human element, Hu, analogously called latent heat in physics and chemistry, generated a lot of heat by others, full of sound and fury at the time, for these other people vigorously opposed the idea: On Liberty – moral|economic. It wasn’t the fast idea at the time:  the conventional wisdom of Victorian, Anglican, England: the idea of nationalised merchantilismtariffed moral, economic, political, and social trade: locally culture restricted and centralized regulated trade of ideas and things: Oh Britannia.

The New Mills: John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill

Green ideas sleep furiously: latent heat

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A Honest Disagreement about the Future

She is mostly right, and he is dead wrong in this case. However, this case is only about the future of humanity.

Who would have thunk it!  He had been billions and billions right, before.

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However, She is an inconvenient woman.  Damn Dambisa, what’s logic and data got to do with it?

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They say they know better, it’s their belief — er — political assumption [Greek: hypothesis] — er — political ?religion?.

Dead Aid a book by Dambisa Moyo

‘… Bill Gates weighed in with his condemnation. “I think that the book actually did damage the generosity of rich world nations,” he said in a 2013 interview. “I have read it and I think she didn’t know much about aid and what aid is doing.” ‘ [My emphasis]

Sorry Billthink again, haven’t you got that the other way around?

“Don’t just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?” – Paul Halmos

There is a schism…

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Mary’s Little Lambs

Suffer little children

No, Mary’s little lambs were not children.

Mary’s “little lambs” were medical researchers that she herded together: adults who were driven to find a cure for cancer, even as the children were suffering and dying: by the thousands.  It was a dilemma: how to cure childhood leukemia, where the medical doctors could do nothing — they didn’t understand what cancer was.  Experimenting on children with a cocktail of toxic chemicals was heart rendering, such that the original doctor who opened the door to that reasearch method, couldn’t do it.

I cannot make one child suffer and die, to save two others.
— Sidney Farber

Robert Moses said about Mary: that she had it all—intelligence, vision, generosity, charm, kindness.

Neen Hunt added this: “she also had courage, passion, and indefatigable energy, and the heart and will to apply her gifts and talents to reduce suffering from disease for people all over the world.”

“The strength of our nation depends on the health of our people. We must once again place the priority on research. It’s good for trade, good for jobs, and vital for all Americans. Medical research is our hope for our children and for the building of a healthy America.”

Mary was strategic…  For that vision was for the future…

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