Category: Ambiguity
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Uncanny Valley of Ability
When trying create a 3-d computer-rendered human, we find that as we get increasingly more realistic, it only feels more real up to a point. Suddenly it seems creepy and unreal before finally feeling truly real. Instead of recognizing the rendering as something which is alive, it seems just short of that and so we…
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By Experience Alone
Back in college I took a math class called Discrete Mathematics which taught among other things, that if you have 5 pigeons but only 4 cages, one of those cages must have at least two pigeons in it*. Yes, super exciting. The professor was not the greatest — he ended up having to bump everyone’s…
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Wake Up!
Wake Up! You’re going to be late for work! But I don’t want to wake up, I was having such a good dream. Just let me sleep a little longer. All of us have had this experience and felt this way, especially as children. It’s very unpleasant to wake up from a dream only to…
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The Y2K Fallacy
The end of the world as we know it. This is how the Y2k bug was billed. Famous computer scientists staked their reputation on the gravity of the problem. Mobilize we did, dusting off the old Cobol books and scouring our software for dates shortened to two digits instead of four. Companies spent billions of…
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Neverending Prognostications
Back in the 1990’s, Yahoo concluded that they understood where the market was going — they needed a curated index with a good portal. So they built one. During that time, Yahoo was offered to buy Google for $1M but turned them down because it’s not about search, it’s about portals. No one predicted Google…
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Survivorship Bias
There’s a probably apocryphal story of a man who wrote to a number of wealthy people telling him that if they paid him a dollar he would accurately predict the winner of an upcoming NFL game. If he was wrong, he would refund their money. He got over a hundred takers and he sent half…
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50 Percent Chance of Death by Blackhole
Sometime ago, the Jon Oliver for the Daily Show did an interview with a man who was protesting the creation of a particle accelerator. He argued this new accelerator was going to create a black hole that would destroy our entire planet. This shocking conclusion surprised most, so the interviewer asked the man: “What are the…
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Afraid of the Dark
A few weeks ago, I went down into our basement when no one else was home. It was dark and I had this thought come to mind suddenly: “What if someone was living down here and I didn’t even know it?” Images of someone coming out of the darkness filled my mind and I felt…
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The Terminal Velocity Of Change – Organizational
[This blog builds on the previous one regarding the terminal velocity of change in our own lives] When I start working at a new company, there are many things that jump out as being great and a few things that jump out at as needing improvement. Typically, as I start to understand more of the…
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The Terminal Velocity Of Change – Ourselves
All of us have things we wish were different in our lives, so we start initiating action to change ourselves. We’d of course like the change to be instantaneous and we’d like to change all the things we wish were different at the same time, but alas we encounter limits in our ability to change.…