CompSci Professor John Regehr says we should embrace the WTF. You already know what WTF stands for; Regehr says it is “the dawning recognition of one’s own ignorance.” He makes three classifications of WTF moments — neutral, positive, and negative — and concludes:

Disciplined thinking is required to avoid succumbing to the natural temptation to sweep the WTF-inducing issues under the rug. We must embrace WTF because it is a leading indicator that we don’t understand something crucial.

WTF moments come fast and furious at work. They’re generated by apparently non-sensical client requests, sudden changes in project scope, or unexpected application behavior. Sometimes it comes from learning something new from a client about a product or service you used to take for granted.

Continue reading “My friend the “WTF” moment” »

Jodie van de Wetering writes about being a highly functioning autistic. She describes waking up in the morning trying to reconnect her brain to her body, being overwhelmed with sensory information in shopping malls, and her inability to socialize. Some of it sounds quite alien and scary.

Other bits of it sound very familiar:

Unstructured socialising scares me. Because I can’t read people and am not party to the subtle nonverbal dance neurotypical people engage in every moment without effort, I never really feel a part of the social ebb and flow around me. I feel less like part of the flow than like a rock in a stream, something that the prevailing current slams into, or diverts around and avoids. I put my foot in it a lot less these days than I used to, but socialising is an exhausting and often fearful business.

It’s taken practice to function among strangers. I don’t generally have a problem with crowds as long as there are people I know well around me and I’m not expected to entertain. People I know well I’ve learned how to read, but it’s taken conscious effort.

Continue reading “Introvert” »

I was back in Bristol, Virginia this weekend to visit my parents. Elf and I left the Shouting Sprout behind with grandparents for a few hours so we could go out to lunch and stop by the Gray Fossil Museum. Er. Actual name: “East Tennessee State University and General Shale Brick Natural History Museum and Gray Fossil Site.” It also includes the “Don Sundquist Center for Excellence in Paleontology.” I’ve never understood the urge to turn titles into paragraphs, but what can you do?
Continue reading “Gray Fossil Museum” »

I disabled my weblog around a month and a half ago. My intention was to relaunch with a new design, new CMS, curated archives, portfolio, and renewed focus. Of those I think I got the new design. The portfolio will be online soon.

I did get to take stock, though. Over the last few weeks I noticed the times I thought “I should blog this, but I don’t have a place.” They were numerous. So I guess I still have a weblog in me.

Continue reading “Trial Separation” »

I’ve been reading Made to Stick, a book about communicating your ideas in ways that are both persuasive and memorable. In one chapter, Chip and Dan Heath discuss identity, and what a powerful motivator that is for behavior. People don’t always make decisions based on their own self-interest. Instead, they are more likely to make decisions based on what they think people like them would do.
Continue reading “Who are you, and why does it matter?” »

A few days ago, when the Republicans were busy trying to redefine rape, a friend of mine mentioned that this was brought to you by the party of small government and staying out of people’s business. I pointed out that who you rape is your business.

“That was pretty gross,” said someone else.

“Indeed,” I said, agreeing that the comment could be considered “gross” if you’re particularly delicate, but still feeling that the proposed legislation warranted a little tiny bit of unhumor. Then I brushed ashes from my smoking jacket, fitted another cigarette into my cigarette holder, and raised one Spockish eyebrow. But this posturing was lost on everyone because the conversation was taking place on Facebook and no one could see me.

I’ve been playing with Tumblr the last few days. It fits comfortably between Twitter and a longer-form blog like this one; whether or not that space really needs to be filled is an open question, though.

A lot of the Thudfactor archives are a link and a few sentences — just what Tumblr does best. I’ll probably move a lot of that kind of blogging over there, since those posts seem to have a pretty short half-life. It might be nice to have everything under one roof; but on the other hand posts like that have turned my archives into a mess and it’s hard for me to find the really interesting things I want to keep around. It might be just as well to keep that stuff separate.

A quick note here before I lose the thought. I’m reading Alan Watts’ critique of modern Christian practice Behold the Spirit, modern in this case being 1947. He criticizes Christianity for spending too much time on theology and telling people what to do, shutting out it’s mystical heart in the process. In other words, replicating the forms of practice but losing the meaning.

I think this applies to a lot of things other than Christianity. It seems to be something we do just about everywhere, especially with regards to business and professional literature. We think that by reproducing the motions of a successful person or company we can have success ourselves; but if we don’t understand the why, we’re going to imperfectly produce the how.

The problem is we have lots of people employed consulting and writing about how to do the how, but doing a rather poor job explaining why to do the how.

So we take a little from column A and a little from column B, creating an environment that’s contradictory and self-defeating, and complain that the theory has failed us when we have failed the theory instead.

You know, I have been blogging for so long I have posts on this site where I’m irrationally excited about Howard Dean’s chances in the Democratic primary? That seems like so long ago.

Anyway, at the moment I have lots of different categories. Some of them have well over a hundred posts in them (politics has over 500) and a lot of others have somewhere between three and thirty. I’m not sure the taxonomy is doing anyone any good, least of all me. I don’t even bother using it for navigation any more. And they don’t translate to tags very well, either.

I think I’m going to nuke them all and stop worrying about the categories altogether.

A lot of things I’ve been running into recently have been emphasizing the importance of using the whole brain rather than just a bit of it. We’ve emphasized our rational minds — what most people think of the “left” brain — to the exclusion of more right-brained sorts of activity. Intuition, synthesis, and respecting our gut feelings have been neglected, not just in scientific pursuits but just about everything else.

We’ve tried standardizing work processes, standardizing education, standardizing management. And we’ve encouraged people to neglect play, creativity, and intuition in any number of fields by focusing on best practices and formal methods. So say both Andy Hunt in the previously-mentioned Pragmatic Thinking & Learning and Iain McGilchrist in this lecture on “the divided brain.”