The "7 Habits" card that popped up today was about "Mission Statement'.  WTF. This will take some thought. I generally think of "Mission Statements" as the BS that corporations put out to pad out their central "mission", which is to make a profit. But let's give it a shot. Prayer of St. Francis (perhaps his "Mission Statment") Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;  Where there is hatred, let me sow love;  Where there is injury, pardon;  Where there is doubt, faith;  Where there is despair, hope;  Where there is darkness, light;  And where there is sadness, joy.  O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek To be consoled as to console;  To be understood, as to understand;  To be loved, as to love;  For it is in giving that we receive,  It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,  And it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.  Amen. You could think of this as a prayer or a "promise to yourself". I'm not ...

My "Habits" card (a tool to "burn-in" the Seven Habits) recommends that I make a list to thank those who have influenced me - made me "who I am". Not a bad idea. Making such a list in my head, it seems endless. This turns out to be related to two other lines of inquiry - the nature of "Self" - from Buddhist philosophy and the nature of "Self" as a phenomenon in nature - the unique organism of 100 trillion cells I call "me". The voices of people on this list may still speak to me-they are part of who I am. Something amazing that turns up is the LACK of influence from a steady stream of friends and co-workers. Looking back, I should have been a lot more choosy about my High School friends, especially.  I spent a huge amount of time in U just "pissing away the time", zoning out on pot, and chasing skirts. I have left out a few people who had large negative effects - mainly just extreme frustration of "forward...

Love it or hate it, the discussion revolves around this report Bottom line: I accept the IPCC report as a kind of "hub" around which my view of climate issues must turn. It is important to understand what it is saying, along with its limitations. Legions of cherry pickers have descended on this report - many to raise alarm, many to rebut, many to blow smoke over it. It is not difficult for a reasonably intelligent person to read the report itself, especially to examine the baskets of cherries emerging from the forest. Generally speaking, I have found critics of the report to be highly misleading. To call the report "alarmist" is perhaps simply to admit that there is no shortage of worrying facts in the report. For example, the frequently cited concern of the "alarmists" - namely sea-level rise - is completely well documented. To me, the "let them drown" response at COP26 forms the basis of my assumption that the politicians of the world will not...

  Everyone agrees the Polar Bears are doing OK More or Less Armed with our new tools and a big bag of facts, we can read Shellenburger's well-written and entertaining "take" on Climate Change. His opening chapter provides an excellent account of the current state of climate panic.  Then he gets down to his case, which is like Lomborg's warning about how our attempts to "fix" climate change may actually harm the people we are trying to help. Much of his writing is based on his experience in the Congo. He makes the totally valid point that extremely poor people in the Congo rely on wood for fuel: Ninety-eight percent of people in eastern Congo rely on wood and charcoal as their primary energy for cooking. In the Congo as a whole, nine out of ten of its nearly ninety-two million people do, while just one out of five has any access to electricity.44, 45 The entire country relies on just 1,500 megawatts of electricity, which is about as much as a city of one mill...

Science shows us that fears of a climate apocalypse are unfounded. Global warming is real, but it is not the end of the world. It is a manageable problem. Yet, we now live in a world where almost half the population believes climate change will extinguish humanity. This has profoundly altered the political reality. It makes us double down on poor climate policies. It makes us increasingly ignore all other challenges, from pandemics and food shortages to political strife and conflicts, or subsume them under the banner of climate change. Lomborg, Bjorn. False Alarm (p. 13). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. Global temperature and GDP are both rising, and each affects the other. Our efforts to rein in temperatures will cost resources and lead to slower GDP growth. Rising GDP typically means more greenhouse gas emissions, which will speed up rises in temperature. In order to understand what the future holds, we need to get a grasp on exactly what these two variables mean, how they interact, and...

 In 2021 we are blessed with a rich vocabulary to describe the world. This has grown over the last few five decades, from describing the format of punch cards to recognizing faces. It would take a book to describe this language or a year to teach a course in it, but here I'd like to introduce a few ideas that are directly applicable to how we talk about our experience of the world. About in the middle of this transition, we started talking about stuff in the real world rather than data formats in some kind of computer storage. The idea was for our designs to mirror the real world as much as possible, rather than just pushing bits and bytes around. The first wave was called "Object-oriented programming". Our electronic "OBJECTS" were supposed to represent objects in the world. For example, a program dealing with e-mail would have an "object" in memory representing that object. Sounds simple unless you experienced the world before. Objects have attribute...

  This one is short but involves homework. Take Hans Rosling's quiz to see how you stack up against the chimps who answer randomly. Chimp's score is 33%. Really. Do it. In the meantime, here's a toy for you from  gapminder . 

With BC in a state of emergency caused by record flooding and me sitting in the middle of it, I think it is at last time to roll up my sleeves and address the emergencies that confront all of us. Several times in my career I have found it useful to "collapse" a problem that looks like a time series (where you need data points over time and you want to predict what happens in the future) into a picture of what is going on now . The current situation contains the past and tells us what we need to know (all we can know) about the future. Throughout my essays on this subject, I hope you will actually consult my sources. What I tell you is built on what I learned from much smarter people who are, thanks to the miracle of the internet, available at your fingertips. This is important stuff. Far more important than all the stuff you forgot from High School. And my sources are far more entertaining than your High School teachers.  I will start with a great book, recommended by Bill ...

Gregory Wrightstone is the executive director of the C02 Coalition, whose goal is stated on their web page: The CO2 Coalition was established in 2015 as a non-partisan educational foundation ... for the purpose of educating thought leaders, policymakers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy. The Coalition seeks to engage in an informed and dispassionate discussion of climate change, humans’ role in the climate system, the limitations of climate models, and the consequences of mandated reductions in CO2 emissions. Major donors to this "coalition" include the "usual suspects" such as the Koch Brothers and the Mercers who have funded such "non-partisan" projects as Fox News.  It is no coincidence that Wrightstone is a frequent "talking head" on Fox. The common thread of these projects is to present "alternative facts" in a format that superficially resembles the way that actual...

My routine involves checking in [wih a friend] Yesterday an unfolding "drama" in life was on my mind I wrote: [Personal note omitted] Without inflicting the whole chapter and verse, I am thinking: The  "self" is a construction of the mind,  quite arbitrary in its details and the way it is experienced in the world; Mindfulness (and Buddhism) teach us to "quiet" the self - harness the ox in Buddhist stories. Too much emphasis on self, me and mine leads to trouble; For many, the "self" is fragile and sensitive to attack. Under attack, the self changes - tries to re-define itself in many ways, such as thinking "I don't care what you think". The "self" becomes stronger. Defensive thoughts dominate. To openly criticize a loved one is to criticize her self (self-image). You are worthless, stupid, boring ... This is tremendously destructive - in the end, it is no longer possible for her to re-define herself as immune from the outs...