On Federer

One difference between the players is illustrated on their faces when they strike the ball. Nadal and Djokovic come to meet the wide ball with open mouths, frowning at it as if they have arrived to dispatch it in anger, wage war on it. Federer's face is entirely uncreased when he swings through the ball, as though, even in the fury of that moment as it unfolds in real time, he's engaged in a soft conversation with it. The beauty of artful Roger TIMOTHY BOYLE The Age online, 15/7/2011

Emulate Those Who Finish Second, Not First

For those who didn't catch this in Lifehacker or Time :

Over time, the most skilled players came to inhabit a second tier of reliable competence. Those who succeeded spectacularly – who took their places in the first tier – were often not the most skilled, but rather were those who got some lucky breaks early on or took big risks that happened to pay off. Emulating these top performers would probably lead to disappointment, since imitators would be unlikely to replicate their good fortune.

Self Belief

Sometimes, before you can have faith in yourself, someone else has to have faith in you.

- Delusional

Procrastination

Code and fix

Code and fix

"Code and fix" development is not so much a deliberate strategy as an artifact of naiveté and schedule pressure on software developers.^[4]Without much of a design in the way, programmersimmediately begin producing code. At some point,testing begins (often late in the development cycle), and the inevitable bugs must then be fixed before the product can be shipped. See also:Continuous integration and Cowboy coding.

Link: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development_process

Independent Security - Deputy Agents

Deputy agents were described by Blatz as devices an individual uses to carry him over a period of insecurity until he is willing to accept the consequences of a genuine decision. They work by freeing him of his insecurity at least temporarily, but they lead to no adequate permanent solution. (Blatz, 1966, p.93).

In the later phase of his theory, he labeled them postponement, reinterpretation, re-direction, and denial. He considered them healthy problem-solving devices if they were used with insight and employed only as a temporary expedient, but they were seriously maladaptive in their extreme and solidified forms.

Postponement of a decision represented good judgement if more information was required, if more time to consider were needed, and if the individual could accept the insecurity resulting from the delay. However, postponement to avoid decision-making could become procrastination fraught with anxiety.

Reinterpretation in its healthy form could be reasoning about alternative solutions but, if no decisive action followed, the reasoning could turn into rationalization ora "fantasy of lies" and obliterate the reality of the situation.

Redirection was attributing the cause of one's insecurity to others or blaming someone else for one's predicament. It was, Blatz suggested, commonly used to avoid the consequences imposed by an unjust authority. Resentment was induced, and this justified the blaming. If carried to its extreme, resentment could become feelings of persecution.

Denial was maintaining that there was no problem to be solved and hence no decisions to be made. Being ill and forgetting were the two most common forms. In their extreme, they become hypochondria and amnesia.

- W.E. Blatz: The Person and His Work by Mary J. Wright
Source: The Security Child, editor Volpe:p.37

Blatz - Security

This discussion is an attempt to strike at the root of social living and to try to bring out its first principle - security .... Security is not safety, because as soon as we desire safety we thereby show that we have not achieved security ... security is something you cannot buy or borrow. It is something you must learn and earn. The secure individual is one who when presented with a problem chooses an alternative and then is willing to accept the consequences, whatever they may be.... The standard of security may be achieved in two ways. The first way is through the mechanism of dependence.... Individuals grow toward the goal of maturity ... being born dependent, we achieve independence.... Independence is the end result of emancipation from all those persons or things upon which we are dependent since birth.... How do we achieve this independence? The mechanism is that of learning.... As you know how to do something, you are increasingly secure ... every individual may be regarded as striving for security in four phases of his social milieu ... a purpose in life ... vocation ... avocation ... social intimacies.
- Blatz 1934a pp.3-4

Source: The Secure Child, Volpe:p.11

Fromm - Loss of Individual Identity

..., the role of the consumer is essentially a passive one. Nothing has value itself, but only as "a good buy" or "a sound investment". We think with increasing abstraction, so that nuclear war becomes representable by graphs and charts (see the "decontextualized discourse" of military planner analyzed by Wersche). The most central ailment of modern society is, alienation - or idolatry, as Fromm prefers to call it: "the fact that man does not experience himself as the active bearer of his own powers and richness, but as an impoverished 'thing', dependent on powers outside himself, unto whom he has projected his living substance" (p.124)
   As a result, we have lost a sense of self, of individual identity.

- Preface by David Ingleby
Source: The Sane Society, Fromm 1991:xxxii

Lyotard - Our role as thinkers

In the situation of postmodernity, "Our role as thinkers is to deepen what language there is, to critique the shallow notion of information, to reveal an irremediable opacity within language itself".

Source: Lyotard and Philosophy of Education, Lyotard, 1993d: 27

An Exceptional Journey is made with Exceptional People

Portmanteau

portmanteau - a new word formed by joining two others and combining their meanings; "`smog' is a blend of `smoke' and `fog'"; "`motel' is a portmanteau word made by combining `motor' and `hotel'"; "`brunch' is a well-known portmanteau"

False dichotomy

Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc

A dichotomy is a set of two mutually exclusive, jointly exhaustive alternatives. Dichotomies are typically expressed with the words "either" and "or", like this: "Either the test is wrong or the program is wrong."

A false dichotomy is a dichotomy that is not jointly exhaustive (there are other alternatives), or that is not mutually exclusive (the alternatives overlap), or that is possibly neither. Note that the example given above is not mutually exclusive, since the test and the program could both be wrong. It's not jointly exhaustive either, since they could both be correct, but it could be a hardware error, a compiler error and so on.

…

I think there is another name for the argument where somebody makes a list and tries to say that your answer "has to be on the list." I think the name of that fallacy would have nothing to do with the length of the list. A FalseDichotomy is an attempt to force a person into choosing one of two seeming opposite extremes, not just one of two arbitrary answers. That is why "If you're not with us, you're against us" is a FalseDichotomy -- because the two alternatives are presented as opposite extremes. But "He lives in either New York or Boston" is not.

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Rational Wiki 

A false dilemma, or false dichotomy, is a logical fallacy which involves presenting two opposing views, options or outcomes in such a way that they seem to be the only possibilities: that is, if one is true, the other must be false, or, more typically, if you do not accept one then the other must be accepted. The reality in most cases is that there are many in-between or other alternative options, not just two mutually exclusive ones.
 
False dichotomies are commonly seen in arguments vis-a-vis religion vs. science, and woo vs. science.

Most people of the world

Most people in the world do not care much at all about science, as long as their TVs work...
- PZ Myers

Sturgeon's law

Sturgeon's revelation, commonly referred to as Sturgeon's law, is an adage commonly cited as "ninety percent of everything is crud" or "ninety percent of everything is crap". It is derived from quotations by Theodore Sturgeon, an American science fiction author: while Sturgeon coined another adage that he termed "Sturgeon's law", it is his "revelation" that is usually referred to by that term.

The phrase was derived from Sturgeon's observation that while science fiction was often derided for its low quality by critics, it could be noted that the majority of examples of works in other fields could equally be seen to be of low quality and that science fiction was thus no different in that regard to other art.