Random thoughts, musings and things I think are interesting…

  • Illuminating the idea of striving without clinging

    I suppose it was inevitable as I made an attempt to get more serious about meditaton this year that I would get exposed to some Buddhist ideas.  I haven’t sought them out (if anything I have tried to find a purly secular meditation approach), but as I said was probably impossible to avoid them entirely.…

  • Maybe school isn't such a great network builder after all

    I made a brief argument in my last post about higher education, that it used to be good at three things: building a social network, access to unique knowledge and provinding certification.  I went on to point out that the first two had already been relplaced with things that do or soon will do a…

  • Could this pop the education bubble?

    I found myself in a interesting discussion about a month ago with another guy about my age and two current college students.  We talked about a wide array of topics but at some point along the way we got on to the subject of their experiences as current college students.  I made mention of the…

  • GoPro video and commentary from this weekend's local IPDA match

    Keeping with the approach I started with the MI Match video, I added in some quick commentary, mostly for me to keep track of what I did well and where I need to improve.  Fun match, great squads and good weather.  Can’ ask for much more!

  • 90 Second Book Review: Self Reliance

    This book doesn’t need an intro, so I’ll make it short: Self Reliance was one of several essays written by American Transcendentalist movement.  Emerson is also sort of a Socrates to Henry David Thoreau’s Plato. You can read it online for free, but the specific version I am reviewing here was put together by the Domino Project.  It…

  • Without moral support the very strength of a state becomes it's inherent danger.

    A few weeks ago I got home from an annual long weekend in southern Kentucky and immediately caught whatever illness that my wife and daughter had been dealing with in while I was camping.  It wasn’t any big deal really, but one night I woke up at around 2 in the morning with a raging…

  • Syntopical podcast listening: why it's so hard to have a real conversation these days

    Despite the cooler fall weather, I’ve still had to mow quite a bit which means podcast listening time.  It’s not all bad though since of late I mostly work from home, which has cut down on my commute related podcast listening time, so about the only time I get to catch up on the 30 or…

  • 90 second book review: Red Queen

    Red Queen, by Matt Ridley, is another book that made it on my “to read” list somehow that I can’t quite remember, and came to be on my “to read” pile by way of Half Price Books. Since I can’t remember how I became aware of it, I also can’t remember what interested me about…

  • 90 second book review: Tribe

    Tribe, by Sebastian Junger, explores the ties that bind small groups together though the lens of men that go to fight and die for their country.  Tribe was an impulse buy for me.  I listened to an interview that Junger did on the Tim Ferriss podcast while mowing, pulled my iPhone from my pocket, did…