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June 1 - July 1, 2023
I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again. —STEPHEN GRELLET
In the 1974 classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig decries the conversational opener “What’s new?”—arguing that the question, “if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow.” He endorses an alternative as vastly superior: “What’s best?” But the reality is not so simple. Remembering that every “best” song and restaurant among your favorites began humbly as something merely “new” to you is a reminder that there may be yet-unknown bests still out there—and thus that the new is indeed worthy of at least some of our
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When we choose what to eat, who to spend time with, or what city to live in, regret looms large—presented with a set of good options, it is easy to torture ourselves with the consequences of making the wrong choice. These regrets are often about the things we failed to do, the options we never tried. In the memorable words of management theorist Chester Barnard, “To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been.”
Data scientist Jeff Hammerbacher, former manager of the Data group at Facebook, once told Bloomberg Businessweek that “the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
I had reached a juncture in my reading life that is familiar to those who have been there: in the allotted time left to me on earth, should I read more and more new books, or should I cease with that vain consumption—vain because it is endless—and begin to reread those books that had given me the intensest pleasure in my past. —LYDIA DAVIS
In Silicon Valley, for instance, there’s an adage about meetings: “You go to the money, the money doesn’t come to you.” Vendors go to founders, founders go to venture capitalists, venture capitalists go to their limited partners. It’s possible for the individuals to resent the basis of this hierarchy, but not really to contest its verdict. As a result, individual pairwise interactions take place with a minimum of jockeying for status. By and large, any pair of people can tell, without needing to negotiate, who is supposed to show what level of respect to whom. Everyone knows where to meet.
On what to keep, Martha Stewart says to ask yourself a few questions: “How long have I had it? Does it still function? Is it a duplicate of something I already own? When was the last time I wore it or used it?” On how to organize what you keep, she recommends “grouping like things together,” and her fellow experts agree.
Is there any alternative, any middle path between the institutional stagnation of the Peter Principle and the draconian severity of the “up or out” system? The AIMD algorithm can offer just such an approach, since it is explicitly designed to handle the demands of a volatile environment. A computer network must manage its own maximum transmission capacity, plus the transmission rates of its clients, all of which may be fluctuating unpredictably. Likewise, in a business setting, a company has a limited pool of funds to pay for its operations, and each worker or vendor has a limited capacity for
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The body is its own flow control. We can’t be in more than one place at one time. At a crowded party we inevitably participate in less than 5% of the conversation, and cannot read up or catch up on the remainder. Photons that miss the retina aren’t queued for later viewing. In real life, packet loss is almost total.
