Scott Adams's Blog, page 374

Active Listening

A few of you wondered what I meant by active listening in the context of a conversation. Maybe you want to be a good listener without being bored out of your frickin' skull. I'll tell you how.

The worst kind of listener is the topic hijacker. Let's say you enjoy snowboarding and you're listening to a neighbor describe his new gas grille. Don't do this move:

Neighbor: My wife got me a new grille for my birthday.

You: Really? I got a new snowboard. Let me tell you about it...

That's just being a ...

Conversation

Imagine an advanced alien life form that materializes on Earth in the middle of a popular dance club. The alien has a cloak of invisibility and observes the humans dancing. He is here to watch and learn. My question is this: Would the alien ever learn to distinguish good dancers from poor dancers?

Now suppose the alien leaves the club and finds a bar that is open late. He observes a lot of what we call "conversation" happening. The alien's universal interpreter device allows him to understand...

High Ground Maneuver

I'm sure you're all following the iPhone 4 story. If you hold the phone a certain way, it drops calls.

In a press conference on the subject, Steve Jobs said, "We're not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy."

Jobs got a lot of heat about his response. Where was the apology? Where was the part where he acknowledged that the buck stops with him, and that Apple made a big mistake that never should have happened? That's public relations 101, righ...

Coincidence Threshold

You probably saw the story about the woman who won the lottery for the fourth time. Some say the odds of that are 1 out of 18 septillion. I think almost everyone who reads this blog assumes it wasn't luck, and that there was some criminal activity involved. But it made me wonder if humans have some sort of innate and similar view of where coincidence fails as an explanation. Let's test that.

Let's say a mysterious man appears at your door and tells you that you have a special power. If you wr...

Science Nerds Only

Today's blog is for science nerds only. I provide you with three media data points and turn you loose to connect or reject them.

First, the New York Times is reporting that a respected string theorist is saying gravity is an illusion emerging from the mechanics of atoms. Another respected physicist says gravity is an illusion caused by the differences in entropy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/science/13gravity.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1&ref=homepage&src=me

In other recent news, physicists wo...

The Amazingness of Instant

The other day I bought an iPad for the house. Yes, I know, when the iPad was first announced, I predicted that few people would want a crippled laptop. Allow me to say I was obviously and totally wrong.

By far, the iPad's most wonderful feature, compared to laptops, is the fact that it turns on instantly. There's no boot-up sequence. That one advantage makes the iPad an entirely different product from a laptop. Once powered on, the iPad doesn't start begging me to update things nor force me...

Problems

I like problems. Where there are problems there are opportunities. I don't think it can work any other way. No one wishes for problems, but when a bus goes into a ravine, the undertaker gets more business. That's just the way the world is wired.

I credit the problems I had in the corporate world for my cartooning career. Had my path been smoother I wouldn't have tried something new. And I wouldn't have had so much fodder to work with.

Tell me your career-related problems. I will happily tran...

Strip Search

Did you notice on the Dilbert.com home page that there's a new search box above the strip? You can now search the entire Dilbert archive by key word. Once you find the strip you like, you can easily have it put on a mug, t-shirt, mouse pad, or water bottle.

You can also order the strip for your PowerPoint presentation or other business use, all online.

Or you can just read, for example, all of the Ratbert strips at once. Or all of the strips that mention Mission Statements, or sales, or Unix, ...

In Search of Coconut Milk

My assignment was to pick up a few items from the grocery store. You should understand in advance that I'm not the designated shopper in our family. I suffer from a condition called CFS (Can't Find Shit). If you ask me, for example, to open the crisper and take out the bowling ball and the severed human hand, I would come back with, at best, one of those items and a bag of small carrots.

So you can imagine the panic that sets in when I'm handed a shopping list. I hope and I hope and I hope t...

Self-Programming

Two concepts that are exceptionally hard to define are consciousness and free will. Any attempt to define them becomes a murky soup of other words that are themselves hard to define. So I offer you a practical definition for both.

Suppose we define a creature to have consciousness and free will if it demonstrates the ability to use the external world to reprogram its own brain toward specific ends. By this definition, reading a book in order to change one's mood or gain data would be an exam...