You know a store is too big when you need Google Maps to navigate it:
…Some of the big-box stores such as IKEA, Macy’s, Bloomingdales and Home Depot have already been mapped, but not Target. Not Wal-Mart. And not nearly as many malls as you’d like to see, especially in this holiday season.
(Note that in 2018 an article was published that supports what I’m saying here)
What if the placebo effect isn’t a trick?
For a long time, I put homeopathy in the same category as organized religion. I felt both were based primarily on faith with little science to back them up.…
I babbled about philanthropy in an earlier posting called “Wealth now, philanthropy later”, so I was thrilled to see this blog posting on the Harvard Business Review website:
Steve Jobs, World’s Greatest Philanthropist
Try to ignore the hyperbolic title of the article and just absorb the content.
Making the world a better place means making decisions your whole life that either incrementally or substantially make people’s lives better. People…
First world problem.
I record a lot of tennis on TiVo partly because it’s usually inconvenient to watch it live (time zone differences) and if I time-shift it, I can zap the commercials or skim matches I don’t have time to watch all of.
It’s gotten increasingly difficult to not have the outcomes of matches I’ve queued up be spoiled before I’ve gotten a chance to see them.…
It seems like every time I make a phone call to the customer service department of a big company, I get an email, a return phone call, or a postal mail survey asking how my customer experience was. They always say I was randomly chosen but that defies the laws of probability.…
The highlight of the Australian Open this year for me was seeing three very promising players that I’ve never seen before, two of which I’ve never even heard of:
I was on one of these meandering trips around the internet, hopping from link to link and found this great story.
Often when people get into a vigorous debate of ideas, especially with those that disagree with them, it gets derailed by someone complaining about the “tone” of the debate or pleading for “civil discourse”.
As usual, Glenn Greenwald has a brilliant summation of this issue:
…“One other point about this fixation on the “tone” of our politics.
In a country where there are no newspapers or news organizations left that do real journalism and where there are only a small handful of real journalists left, it’s nice to see AP take a principled stand. However, it’s also sad that taking a stand like this is considered newsworthy in the first place!…
I played tennis recently at a “public” court owned by Valley Church in Cupertino, CA. I was browsing their website today and came across a page about the tennis courts:
Valley Church: Sports Ministry
I think the mission statement bears repeating:
…Building bridges with people through sports, introducing them to Jesus Christ, establishing them in their faith, assimilating them into the church and training them to reproduce.