complicated

"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated."
- Poul Anderson

-- reminds me of an old hypothesis of mine: only few people can allow themselves declaring problems as 'easy': the ones that have no clue about it at all and therefore can not estimate the difficulties involved, or the experts who know everything related to it.
i feel that for everyone else somewhere on the path from one of these states to the other anderson's quote applies very well. --

seminar

tomorrow will be my first ever seminar talk. weird feeling. i prepared about 12 pages as paper and condensed it to about 20 slides to be held in 30 min. about the rest i have no clue, i even couldn't decide on how to start my presentation. at least i'm not the first so i can see how things are done. but then, the location will be very nice and after my talk i can enjoy this place for 2 more days ;)


Größere Kartenansicht

it's in the system

there is an interesting point in systems theory: don't blame a person for behaving in a certain way - check the system first to see if they could act differently.
i quite like this approach; it kinda discourages blatantly judging someone without ever (mentally) walking in their shoes.

also putting this approach into practice could be interesting: if, for example, some people on your team behave not as expected it's not necessarily just them being terrible. maybe the team's structure doesn't leave them a choice to be different. only drawback: you might have to accept some responsibility and change yourself.

chrome

i really like this browser; however in the last few days it keeps getting stuck on random pages.. anyone knows anything?

decisions, decisions..

... and still more decisions! It's impossible how many things one has to decide during the course of a day or so.. And so many of them are really hard to optimize, so only attempting to make the best choice on some keeps blocking my thoughts for considerable time. So maybe 'any decision is a good decision'?

i guess many of them are not that dramatic - maybe can even be undone with some more hassle. but then, some aren't. strangely enough though, no one ever teaches how to deal with those. most people's strategy seems to be to treat them just as if it wouldn't matter, but are they right to act like this? or are they just shunning their responsibility and the possible consequences of their actions? or are they getting lost in trying to figure out the best choice? or even trying to define 'best'?

abstraction

"A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness."
[Alford Korzybski, 1958]

I came across this quote when writing a seminar thesis on systems theory. Can't help to be intrigued by it, just pondering in how many ways this could be a valid statement. Maybe for models of things, personal world views, experience, all kinds of logical abstractions..

another online wisdom

A person grows more often by means of letting go than by taking something in.

wovon träumst du?

melting chocolate

i'm surprised that it took years for me to commit this stupidity: i absentmindedly placed a chocolate cookie directly next to my notebooks fan...
it WAS an interesting experience (the cookie was actually very tasty) and luckily there was no cloth on the table so the dripping chocolate did not do any harm ;)

sometimes

occasionally i wanted to write something of my pondering about love.. but then, everyone is speaking about it and still no-one can pin it down anyway.. and also, i'm normally rather fed up by the usual articles and headlines on the subject.

but then, on some days, i get this feeling of my heart opening so much as to enclose the whole world, and i can not do otherwise than smiling at it and all the people i meet. And they smile back. Which makes me realise that i love them all, somehow :)