I'm sure there are essays and writeups about this that I don't have off the top of my head. I do have a lot of examples.
In journalism, this insight becomes quite obvious after you've been on a beat for a few years and see how things really work, that is, how things are mostly mundane, and corruption or injustice isn't obvious because if they were, they would've been snuffed out (or obfuscated). So the devil is always in the details.
One of my favorite Pulitzer-winning stories is an investigation from the Sun-Sentinel (Florida) newspaper that majorly busted cops for speeding. Ostensibly, the big picture idea here is "who polices the police?"...but that by definition is an incredibly tricky thing to identify. After all, it's the police who create and record the data related to law breaking. So how did the Sun-Sentinel do it?
But the Sun-Sentinel reporters weren't content with the status quo -- i.e. shrugging and thinking oh everyone knows that cops speed all the time. They wanted to prove it. And their method was quite ingenious and so mathematically airtight that cops were being disciplined even before the story came out: http://www.ire.org/blog/ire-news/2013/04/15/how-sun-sentinel...
If you go through the Pulitzer winning entries, many of them include the cover letters for the award submission. Those letters will often describe how a small detail or curiosity grew into a big investigation.
The tech scene is full of examples. Is there a single successful unicorn that, whatever their lofty motto is today, didn't start with fulfilling a very basic need? Facebook's mission today is to connect the world, but its early prototype was a faster way to lookup co-eds. Likewise, Google's mission to organize the world's information began with the implementation of the almost too-obvious (but genius) PageRank/Backrub algorithm.
Agree. Accountability is the key here (this is not about authority). If things do not pan out as expected, the PM must be answerable, and to be in that position, [s]he must have the ability to make the final call in most situations.
> This year saw the publication of the fourth and final volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters, The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1966-1989, representing his correspondence from the age of 60 to his death at the age of 83.
History has many examples of beautiful revelations from letters written by famous people. I have to wonder what is a modern equivalent of this phenomenon. People seldom write letters these days, leave alone keep a copy for posterity. Emails are private, and are unlikely to be opened up for the general public after the owner is gone. The closest something else gets to this is bloging. However, the author is cognizant of the fact that she is writing for public, while a letter is intended to be read by the recipient alone, thereby influencing the tone accordingly. Is there a way for the future generations to ever learn from the personal message exchanges of today's greats?
My personal reaction when I first read about the revelations of the scope of private email and chat, "every keystroke, know what you are thinking before you do" collection by spy agencies was: wow. This shitstorm is like Mount Vesuvius and the world's mails are Pompeii.
As everyone knows, Pompeii was a thriving Roman city that was instantly buried under volcanic ash by Mt. Vesuvius, in a very dramatic natural disaster. But it is also a fertile and excellent historical snapshot of people's lives at that time - historians got to see people frozen in time doing their daily activities. Juvenile graffiti in classrooms and on the city walls. Everything. It is sooooo useful historically, despite being a fatal natural disaster.
Likewise I thought that the public revelations of how much state agencies collected from unsuspecting email users was like a natural disaster, that removed people's trust.
But I also thought that it would be sooooo cool if in 2000 years historians got that record. (I think it would be cool for various reasons that I don't want to get into.)
While perhaps it is good if these collections stop, I hope that future generations will have complete access to that data store (for example, that it is not deleted or made inaccessible, like the Library of Alexandria.)
On the much shorter term, one or two decades, though, you are right - it is very unlikely for, say, Google to release the archived emails of someone who died 20 or 30 years ago... And of course it is literally state agencies' job to say they don't even have it. (And they should act like that in every way, it literally shouldn't make any difference to anyone whether they write privately or speak in person, etc. Nobody wants to live in a surveillance state.)
Still, Google does have that information and I am sure their EULA says they can do whatever they want with it (they're still doing the don't be evil thing, right?) so it's just a question of whether they would/should do things like release some part of famous dead people's emails (perhaps to historians, who can be sensitive to their legacies.)
I grew up in Columbus, OH. It is just as moody in Seattle. Rain, overcast.
I only lived there for a year, and I got suckered in: the very first time I visited was in the summer. I had never been so far north before. There were friends I met up there who took me to the ferry to Bainbridge. It was beautiful. That day, the sky was clear. From sea-level, I could see the summit of Mt. Rainier looming over, floating above the horizon.
I had been living in Atlanta for five years (another city I missed). I traveled across country in a car to move to Seattle. When I got there, it was dark and dreary -- but not that much different from where I grew up. I found an apartment in the Capitol Hills neighborhood and walked everywhere -- something you couldn't really do in Atlanta unless you were living in Midtown. It was awesome. Although the weather is cooler, the humidity is so high and the temperature variability so low, that it doesn't feel cold. (Unlike the high desert of northern Arizona where you get much bigger extremes in temperature within a single day). There are all these hidden pedestrian pathways in between buildings, both in downtown and in Capitol Hill. There is a obstacle course built just for mountain bikes at a park underneath a highway.
And the people! I didn't realize how much I didn't fit into Atlanta until I showed up in Atlanta. First, there were a lot more Asians. Second, the subtle, subconscious racism that I blew off in Atlanta just wasn't present. But mostly, people wore a lot of the kinds of clothes I wear: outdoor gear, ready to go hiking somewhere.
Seattle has a lot of micro-cultures. The vibe in Capitol Hill is different from Queen Anne, Fremont, downtown -- at least, those are the places I visited the most. It shares a lot with San Francisco, but people feel a lot more welcoming. The food is as awesome as the places I've explored in Atlanta and San Francisco, as is the micro-brews.
I have talked to folks who say that Seattle people are standoffish, but that's never been my experience. Maybe it is because I was moving from Atlanta, or maybe because I moved to a city where I already knew people.
I find it much more helpful to think in terms of why and what we will test rather than how much will we test. This approach resolves a few of the frequently debated issues around testing, such as:
1. Should I test first, or test later?
2. What is the right amount of code coverage?
3. Should I write more unit tests or integration tests?
4. Should I use mocks or not?
and so on...
The above questions can have an arbitrary answer that makes sense in a certain context but may not yield the best cost / benefit ratio in other contexts. Hence, the guiding star needs to be: why are we writing a test.
If this is really important to you, I'd suggest starting first thing in the morning to make meditation easier. Aside from the basic difficulty of turning any task into a habit, meditation itself will be more difficult should you start say, mid day. When the mind is already wide awake, the inner chatter can be overwhelming, whereas in the morning it's much more peaceful. Making a task more difficult will compound the difficulty of forming a habit of that task. Hope that helps!
can you start with just 10 minutes every morning? try to use a timer that has a subtle sound, not too jarring. I made for myself a few silent mp3s of 2, 5, 10 and 20 minutes in length (easy enough in Audacity), put those in a playlist with a subtle sound (a bell, some ambient track, mantra singing or whatever you like), just on my phone it's not a hi-fi thing that's important here. so if I feel like doing more than 10 minutes I can easily queue the 2 or the 5 in front of it, you get the idea.
what also helped me was joining a meditation group for a weekly session, if you like, check wkup.org see if there's one near you, they're good people :)
like most things, the amount of benefit (clarity, focus etc) you get stepping up from about once a week to 2 or 3 times, is pretty huge. maybe that helps with motivating?
last thing, I like to tell myself, the time you spend is basically free. as in you easily get it back in ways of rest, focus, ease for the rest of the day.
Perhaps you should start with something less subtle? Like "transcendental meditation", that will have the effect of "making it" and motivate you to dig further?
It is plausible that the plant imagery in these texts is unrecognisable because these have changed beyond recognition. Take a look at this[1] to see how the fruits we know today looked very different in the past.
Thank you for the insight in your last paragraph. Do you have references that will help me explore this even more?