Category Archives: Brief Musings

The sentiments of Christmas are so enduring because they so powerfully combine both the nostalgia and idealism intrinsic to human nature. Peace on earth to all humankind – who would openly disparage that? Joy to the world – however you follow that up, or for whatever reason you mention it, it is hardly a declaration […]

The coming of the internet promised easier access to quantities of information on a previously unimaginable scale. Until the first truly ingenious browsing tool was invented by a company with a name alluding to quantities, there was fierce competition for the ability to find that information. There is still competition for the best aggregation of […]

(Armed with nothing more than mid-to-late 20s hubris, here’s the graduation speech that I wish most undergraduates and, heck, all other types of graduates could hear.) Most of you will fail at most of the things you undertake in your life. Some of those failures will be so small you may not even consider them […]

It’s rather sardonically amusing that, even amid the latest uproar around giant tech companies’ violations of user privacy, most people don’t really seem to care all that much about their privacy. Exchanging one’s browsing history and app usage for free access to such great tools such as Gmail, Google Drive, Facebook and the like still […]

A favorite if frustratingly smug exclamation of mine is “Time is a biological construct.” It’s not strictly true, as time is more of a purely physical construct than anything else that enables our limited mentalities to make sense of a world in which we are bound to three dimensions bodily but can dimly grasp the […]

Frankly, I’ve never understood the antipathy toward New Year’s resolutions. They are simple bargains you make with yourself or others toward self-improvement…what’s not to like? Perhaps many take them too seriously, in which case, I refer them to Captain Barbossa and urge: “They’re more like guidelines, anyhow.” So as I begin to assemble my list […]

2017 has been my most professionally challenging year ever. This was due in no small part to the fact I became an official manager at its start, with two direct reports. Although I was de facto managing people’s workflows for at least a year before then, and I have managed far larger teams of individuals, […]

Looking back upon the birth of the Internet, the more hyperbolic of encomia that proclaimed it a powerful tool to end division and promote harmony remain about as woefully erroneous in hindsight as Kurzweil’s continued predictions of the Singularity’s date. The Internet only aids and abets harmony as much as a given user wants to […]

As technology advances, the pace of innovation quickens at an almost exponentially faster pace. At times I ponder whether the excesses of the information age now imply that in the most developed, richest nations, we are experiencing its profligate last stages, before augmented and virtual reality jump the information age to an entirely higher stratosphere. […]

Everyone likes to think they are a contrarian in some way, in an ironic twist reminiscent of the fact most rate themselves as above-average drivers. I am as guilty as anyone of this phenomenon, which is why I am be predisposed to agree with the authors of an intriguing new paper, available here. In brief, […]