A Startlingly Good Leukemia Trial
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Art and Artifice
There is a difference between artfully re-presenting the truth and artificially misrepresenting the truth.
Discussed on Cranach.
H/T Word Put Well.
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Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born
Disaster Strikes The Welding Industry
Now is not a good time to buy a car. Ignore everything except the first few paragraphs after the “Steve Answers” mark.
A wave comes in
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Safety: Wound Care May Matter More Than Antibiotics
Dark Energy: Was Einstein Right After All? A dumb article. But easy to read if you don’t know anything about “dark energy.” If you have not followed astronomy for any length of time, you might not get how big this gradual revolution is. But basically, astronomers are being forced to admit that they know next to nothing about the universe by some data points that they just can’t explain with theories that they were confident of 20 years ago.
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In case you have not already heard, no furloughs for now.
It all went a lot better than a fire + aceylene has any right too.
What I have been reading
I have known for a long time that nobody really understands water. It pleases some evil part of me that something as common as water has stumped the best minds of men for so long. That confusion may or may not be over. Time will tell. But I still learned a lot I did not know about water’s weirdness from this article.
Speaking of water, it is now being blamed for 30% of Global Warming. Maybe this new bit of info will take some of the blame off the cows.
But my reading has not all centered around high minded things like water. I have also been following dark and mundane things like the rank fear that has been emanating out of Europe. It has gotten so bad that Hungary’s Minister of Finance is responding in full force to blog posts by Edward Hugh. Nothing against Edward Hugh, but when your country’s Minister of Finance fells compelled to address his arguments, you have serious problems. But as this Guardian article reminds us, Europe’s current problems are nothing considering what they are going to face.
Speaking of reading dark things, I have got some books by Gene Wolfe out of the library. I have seen his name splashed around here and there. But I don’t have much use for fiction these days. In spite of this, I was intrigued by the Wikipedia article about him. There was a lot of things that intrigued me. But they are all summed up in the first two lines…
Gene Wolfe (born May 7, 1931) is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He is noted for his dense, allusive prose as well as the strong influence of his Catholic faith, to which he converted after marrying a Catholic.
I don’t think I would have given the “dense, allusive prose” a second thought if had been for the part about being a Catholic. Something about the Catholic faith seems to be good at creating or attracting people who really get metaphor and symbolism. It will be interesting to see if Gene Wolfe falls into the same category or not.
Cat and mouse
One of the managers–one of those types who likes to monologue–was telling me that when the plant manager comes to the daily meeting, everyone is posturing to make themselves look good, by making other people look worse if necessary. He said it becomes a useless meeting where everyone is tearing each other apart, and that he and other managers had tried to explain this to the plant manager.
I had to think of the time for a few months when it seemed like the plant manager had quit coming to the meetings and was no longer interested. The other managers were rarely seen, and the meeting devolved into little more than a handshake on the day’s work, with some friendly (or not so friendly) put-downs thrown in.
This is not the first time I have heard that the plant manager has no business in a meeting about the day to day operations. But I think he can only afford not to be there when someone else is going to take care of the business for him. Somehow it still seems to require the plant manager emphasizing that their are customers who want their orders shipped before people become really eager to solve problems. People may point fingers more when he is around, but they volunteer a lot more, too.
So this is when we say that the plant manager needs to work on his management team. But we say this after a year of multiple general layoffs that included the elimination of two management positions and the firing–sorry, sudden resigning–of another. And even aside from the volatility of these changes, we are speaking of the great gamble: whether you can get someone better than you have now. When ordinary budgetary approvals are going two and three levels up, and you are located far away from attractions for the business elite, it is no small thing to speak of improving the caliber of your management team.
Links for Today
Is the US punishing Georgia for helping Israel?
Should Iceland be punished? Read the comments, the answer is not as clear cut as you might think. On the other hand, you can’t get blood out of a stone, so what does the U.K really hope to accomplish?
And it should be noted that it is not quite accurate to say that Iceland’s president vetoed the measure to pay back the U.KIceland. At least, he did not veto it in the way that Americans think of the word veto.