links
Interesting article on the history and culture of Autodesk.
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/6662.htm…
Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times is much impressed by the books Obama has read, or says he has read. I am almost in despair when I read the same list. Obama … appears to have read almost nothing on military history or strategy… There no books on science, technology, or economics in the list.
UPDATE: Obama’s reading list, with links. Dude. Wow. It is thin. (Via Instapundit)
UPDATE II: Henry Kissinger somewhere said that once you get into high office you consume intellectual capital. You cannot add to it. You don’t have time. You’d better have a good stock of intellectual firewood, because you are going to burn it all. Obama’s got a pretty much empty woodshed. God help us, he better have good advisors and a good gut, and the luck of the Irish (I’ll lend him mine) and a rabbit’s foot. I don’t think you can just be “smart” in general, you have to actually know things. The very people who berated Bush for being an intellectual lightweight have bought this Obama guy like he is a bright, shiny, new Red Wagon. But there is no reason to think that Bush was less knowledgeable than this guy, other than the smoothness of Obama’s delivery. And Bush was a bitter disappointment to many of his supporters (my hand is raised) and a figure of hatred and ridicule to lots of other people. Stay tuned. We just handed the car keys to some guy from out of town with a nice smile and a glossy shoe shine. Hope it all works out…
The first time the US defaulted on its debt.
Curbing info-pron. I’m giving this some very serious thought – I’m becoming more and more convinced that I’m wasting a large chunk of my life with “information” that, while not celebrity gossip, is useless (is it making me a better or more effective person to know that Caroline Kennedy nominated herself for Senator, then withdrew because of general uselessness combined with tax cheating ? No. That’s time I could spend reading business books, or writing ad copy, or programming, or reading Shakespeare, or going on dates, or lifting, or making bowls, or playing with godkids, or assasinating government officials, or praying the rosary, or writing a book.
January 24th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
“Ultra Short-range Teleportation” is not super-useless. Timothy Zahn once wrote a story in which a champion boxer turned out to have the ability to teleport one inch away from his opponent’s punch.
January 25th, 2009 at 12:24 am
Info-pron: Uh oh. I hope you don’t curb your intake. I use you as a filter to just get the really good stuff (with extra snark on the side, of course).