The ease with which people can possess astonishingly contradictory qualities is one of the mysteries of human nature

Be a Jerk: The Worst Business Lesson From the Steve Jobs Biography by Tom McNichol.

The ease with which people can possess astonishingly contradictory qualities is one of the mysteries of human nature; indeed, it's one of the things that separates humans from, say, an Apple computer. Every one of the components that makes up an iPad is essential to the work it produces. Remove one part and the machine no longer performs its job, and not even the Genius Bar can fix it. But humans are full of qualities that are in no way integral to their functioning in the world. Some aspects of personality have little or no bearing on whether a person performs well, and not a few people succeed in spite of their darker qualities. You can be a genius and an asshole, but the two aren't necessarily causally linked.

You turn the page, and forget what you know

Michael Crichton in Why Speculate.

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.

But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

Global data grows approximately 40 percent every year

Interesting estimate, though unsourced. From Data Journalism: Facts Are Sacred by Pablo Mancini

It is estimated that the volume of global data grows approximately 40 percent every year.

Social Justice

Heh. Thomas Sowell in Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene.

What do you call it when someone steals someone else's money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else's money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else's money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice.

A festival of British modernist architectural incompetence and brutalism

A Case in Point by Theodore Dalrymple. The concentration of ugly modern architecture in the UK is so startling, cheek-by-jowel as it so often is with the sublime from older times when it took too long to build something ugly so they built beautiful things instead.

Having arrived in the city a couple of hours early, I had time to look around a little — as I have done before. Peterborough is essentially a sublime cathedral surrounded by a festival of British modernist architectural incompetence and brutalism, sponsored by a council planning committee that was both without taste and — let us at least hope, for it is the only charitable interpretation of what the committee has wrought — corrupt.

Bending to a common purpose is more important than arising from a common place

From How Do You Prove You’re an Indian? by David Teuer.

Bending to a common purpose is more important than arising from a common place.

Perhaps it is that your people are those with whom you work.

Establishments die when they refuse to make changes; insurgencies die when they fail to discover that protest and governing are not the same things.

From The Tea Party train wreck that never happened by Noemie Emery.

Establishments die when they refuse to make changes; insurgencies die when they fail to discover that protest and governing are not the same things.

Apropos a recent discussion, perhaps a version related to languages and how they change would be

Languages die when they fail to change at all; linguistic variants die when they fail to make a difference.

Academic inequality is socially acceptable

The Inequality Map by David Brooks. The many forms of pluralism in the USA. Heh.

I will provide you with a guide to the American inequality map to help you avoid embarrassment.

Academic inequality is socially acceptable. It is perfectly fine to demonstrate that you are in the academic top 1 percent by wearing a Princeton, Harvard or Stanford sweatshirt.

Ancestor inequality is not socially acceptable. It is not permissible to go around bragging that your family came over on the Mayflower and that you are descended from generations of Throgmorton-Winthrops who bequeathed a legacy of good breeding and fine manners.

Fitness inequality is acceptable. It is perfectly fine to wear tight workout sweats to show the world that pilates have given you buns of steel. These sorts of displays are welcomed as evidence of your commendable self-discipline and reproductive merit.

And that evening his father came back to life

Act Three: The midlife monologue of John Lithgow book review by Victoria Ordin.

Drama begins with Lithgow’s recollection of the summer of 2002, when he moved back east for a month to care for his hitherto youthful, healthy, and genial 86-year-old father after a risky and painful operation. The surgery claimed his father’s spirit, and the loving son’s attempts to restore his father’s will to live seemed to have failed. One evening, however, it occurred to Lithgow to read aloud to his father, as his father had read to him and his siblings during “story hour [which had] all the gravity of a sacred rite.” So he picked a family favorite—P. G. Wodehouse’s “Uncle Fred Flits By”—and that evening his father came back to life. Lithgow calls the succeeding 18 months before his father’s death one of the most significant periods of his life.

He dedicated the book to a real car

Kate Grimond in The tale of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, reviews the history and context of Ian Fleming (of James Bond fame) writing the children's story, Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang.

There is more of the Bond oeuvre rooted in reality than is generally realised. And so it was with Chitty. He dedicated the book to a real car: ‘To the memory of the original Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, built in 1920 by Count Zborowksi on his estate near Canterbury.’