How to be alone

Some laws

Goodhart’s Law:

the essence of the law is that once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play such a role.

Arthur C. Clarke three “laws” of prediction:

• When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
• The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Three Laws of robotics

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

The story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi

Mr. Yamaguchi was on the last day of a business trip. Just as he was about to leave he realized that he’d forgotten something a rushed back to work. The date was August 6, 1945 at 8:15 in the city of Hiroshima.

Mr. Yamaguchi survived the dropping of the atomic bomb by the US with burns, temporary blindness and temporary loss of hearing. Two day he finally was able to get home where he received treated for his injuries. The next day he went into work (!). The date was August 9 in the city of Nagasaki.

Mr, Yamaguchi is the only person to hold double survivor status recognized by the Japanese government. He finally died of stomach cancer in January 2010. Later in life he became an outspoken advocate of nuclear war.

Read the a more complete story on Wikipedia

Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy

The Pixar story

Interesting read. I can’t believe how many people missed the boat on Pixar. It could almost be made in to an animated movie…

The power of words

Excellent (very long) article with author Alan Moore. Here are a couple of quotes about words that stood out to me:

Magic and language are practically the same thing, they would at least have been regarded as such in our distant past. I think it is wisest and safest to treat them as if they are the same thing. This stuff that you are dealing with – words, language, writing – this is dangerous, it is magical, treat it as if it was radioactive.

If you want to expand people’s consciousness, give them better language, wider language, new words. Learn to love words, learn to delight over a new word that you’ve found.

Pros, Elected Ones and the New Boys: Teaching

This is one of my favorite scenes from WKRP. I can see someone doing something like this for a Table Topic in Toastmasters

Without futher ado: A proper way to make an introduction

One of our more advanced toastmasters mentioned last week gave us a demonstration of how to make a proper introduction. Although I got the gist of it, I wanted to learn more. Here is what I found from the Traffic Toastmaster site:

The T-I-S Formula for Introductions
Like a well-prepared speech, an introduction should be natural, smooth and free of grammatical errors and oral stammers. An ideal method is the T-I-S formula taught by Dale Carnegie in his public speak classes: T-I-S stands for Topic, Importance, and Speaker. When making an introduction, remember to maintain eye contact with the audience, not the speaker.

• Topic. This is the title and purpose of the speech.
• Importance. This explains the relavance of the speech to the audience. It can specify what the audience will gain or learn from listening.
• Speaker. This tells the audience why the speaker is qualified to speak on the topic, but includes only qualifications pertinent to the topic and the audience.

To see how this works, let’s pretend we are going to introduce John Doe who will speak on automotive safety to a group of driver education students. Using the T-I-S method, an introduction might sound something like this:
“Good evening and welcome to tonight’s symposium, titled ‘Arrive Alive.’ We all need to know how to operate a motor vehicle safely, because statistically out of the 40 people here tonight, 10 of us will be involved in as serious accident during our life. By reducing the number of accidents we not only save lives, but we lower the cost of insurance premiums.

“Our speaker is the former director of the National Transportation Council. He designed and patented the first three-point safety belt and was instrumental in developing the airbag, now a mandatory requirement for all passenger cars. He has been a licensed driver since age 11 and has never been involved in an accident. Please help me welcome John Doe!”

Great suggestion and well worth remembering,

Anatomy of a Homurous speech

This is a video of a John Zimmer, a toastmaster in Europe, on his site he’s broken down the contents of his speech and his thought process behind why he did certain things. His commentary is just fascinating as his speech.

Presentation advice from Edward R. Tuft

Edward R. Tufte is a informational graphics guru and does near infinate amounts of public speaking. Here is a run down of some of hi tips for speaking:

Show up early
Something good is bound to happen—if there’s no need to fix a mechanical problem or resolve a room conflict, you can always mingle with the audience.

How to start

• Clearly tell the audience: What the problem is, who cares, and what your solution is.
• Write out your own introduction.

Read the rest of this entry »