psychic

My correspondences are so few I can mostly predict who is calling or sending a text. The fact is there is no pleasure in the whole business because no one calls to chat - as my friend the other day was hypocritically complaining, why can't I just call? Well, he had business and so that's the phone for you: it's business, a device for calculating meeting times and venues.

And who can blame me for my aversion to it. It's an annoyance and only rings when you are in the middle of something, not when you are bored or on the bus or train, but when you are reading, watching television or bathing.

That's why I say: send me an email - it's still horrendous but at least you can take your time with it. And maybe some day, people will actually have something interesting to talk about.

benjamin button

Pen a review while it's fresh.

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" shows that aging backwards may be even more perilous than walking backwards, especially on the busy boulevard called life. The latter is certainly easier to accomplish without magic. And magic is the primary component in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the beautifully designed, if slow-like-honey, film.

Call it the magic of life, love, exploration, participation, witnessing, being, feeling. It's all covered in the film, an enchanting escape of an epic that ultimately lands like "Forrest Gump" without the adrenaline. Certainly Benjamin Button enjoys some Gump-ish qualities, even if they are entirely different characters with entirely different destinies.

When Ben experiences first love as an old man, he looks out of place, and that's where he will stay, forever an outsider, though the loyal friendships and solid acquaintances he makes along the way bring him comfort, and sometimes sadness.

Then there's the girl. For a brief time, they are around the same age and they connect as lovers and best friends, knowing they will eventually become split by his unusual fate.

By life's end, Ben has seen much, from an entirely unique perspective. Will we be happier if we could start at 80 and regress to 18?

Throughout its nearly three hours, though, it rarely revs up and gets our hearts racing, preferring a gentle pace and supreme poignancy, though there are exceptions, such as a WWII encounter on dark seas.

Mostly, it's an elaborate and elegantly rendered gift card of higher value, welcome as a curiosity, as its title implies, if short on needed dynamism.

caliope

Why do I read so slowly?

I feel full of energy but I can't sit still anymore. I played the guitar a bit.

It seems that everyday I am reminded that the true genesis of literary art begins and ends with poetry and that the novel is like a pop song.

Read Baudrillard- I have the volume somewhere - not a very good one. Read Rimbaud - do I have that? I know i have another Nassim Taleb in the car. But I'm sort of struggling through The Savage Detectives i.e. I can't read it in one sitting, I can't read anything in one sitting, not even a book that eschews literary language.

the black swan

"I care about the premises more than the theories, and I want to minimize reliance on the theories, stay light on my feet and reduce my surprises. I want to be broadly right rather than precisely wrong.

Elegance in the theories is often indicative of Platonicity and weakness - it invites you to seek elegance for elegance's sake. A theory is like medicine (or government): often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving, and on occasion lethal. So it needs to be used with care, moderation and close adult supervision."

- The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Have been wanting to do a review for a long time. And since the recent system dynamics workshop just set me thinking, what better time to fight procrastination.

The bulk of the book examines why we are so blind to Black Swans (the black swan deals with the "impact of the highly improbable" and argues that these events, dubbed Black Swans, are far more common then we think, in part because of the perverse influence of modern statistics which assumes all kinds of things are normally distributed except for the minor detail that they aren't).

Not surprisingly, we tend to look for things that reaffirm our beliefs as opposed to contradict them; we're good at constructing stories to explain things after the fact; we tend to ignore the silent evidence "of cemeteries" and focus disproportionately on the winners (think survivorship bias); assume the real world abides by clear and understandable rules; and we generally overestimate what we know and underestimate what we don't.

Though the book is kind of a bummer in that he doesn't have much of a prescription for how to survive and thrive in Extremistan (as my girl rightly pointed out but this would really contradict the existence of his book), it is a great and thought-provoking read, rife with parentheticals and asides like the following that also make it entertaining.

One of my favourite lines on innovation:

"If you think that the inventions we see around us came from someone sitting in a cubicle and concocting them according to a timetable, think again: almost everything of the moment is the product of serendipity."

Well, i would like to think that serendipity happens to almost everything in life and that life is not a timetable.

gros acheteurs

There is a different country that our news editors and writers are of two minds, two hearts about.

How else do you explain the lack of judgement in that infamous article on an expensive culinary trip?

If we fault the gilded tastes of our senior civil servants, surely we must fault those who deem it newsworthy.

Perhaps it is irresistible patronage to an age of excess. The articles lack urgency, the world it depicts is flat, replaceable and non-threatening.

It does not carry the voices of people who live, merely the bored commentary of indifferent demi-gods for whom happiness is a different dress, a new dish or toy.

prejudice

A study on prejudice suggests that we are more prejudiced than we thought - brilliant! I didn't think you need a study to find that out.

Today, I was accosted by a not-so-close friend to give it a go in insurance - impossible really, but I guess it won't hurt me to see if there are other avenues but I can't sell things, mainly because I can't quite affect to care.

The conversation, at least from my point of view seems to be a series of misunderstandings - that I'm half-desperate for new work; I'm looking for something to pass the time. Yet, I think my friend seems to channel my predicament through his particular world view and need of money.

If we so readily misconstrue the circumstances of others and brush it in familiar strokes, what hope can we have of objectivity?