[The strip starts out showing Calvin selling lemonade at a stand made of an upside-down cardboard box with a sign advertising "Lemonade: $15.00 glass". His friend / nemesis Susie shows up and they start a dialogue.]

Susie: 15 bucks a glass?!

Calvin: That's right! want some?

Susie: How do you justify charging 15 dollars?!

Calvin: Supply and demand.

Susie: Where's the demand?! I don't see any demand!

Calvin: There's lots of demand!

Susie: Yeah?

Calvin: Sure! as the sole stockholder in this enterprise, I DEMAND monstrous profit on my investment! And as president and CEO of the company, I demand an exorbitant annual salary! And as my own employee, I demand a high hourly wage and all sorts of company benefits! and then there's overhead and actual production costs!

Susie: But it looks like you just threw a lemon in some sludge water!

Calvin: Well, I have to cut expenses somewhere if I want to stay competitive.

Susie: What if I got sick from that?

Calvin: "Caveat Emptor" is the motto we stand behind! I'd have to charge more if we followed health and environmental regulations

Susie: You're out of your mind. I'm going home to drink something else

Calvin: Sure! Put me out of a job! It's you anti-business types who ruin the economy!

[Calvin frowns and then walks over to his mother to state a new demand.]

Calvin: I need to be subsidized.

Calvin and Hobbes remains one of my favorite comic strips of all time, even though cartoonist Bill Watterson discontinued the strip in 1995. I read all the strips during its 10 year run, but have forgotten most of them. I rediscovered this particularly prescient commentary - from February 16, 1992 - that captures the essence of our present-day economic problems in a post by Skip Walters on Hassle Maps and the Theory of Constraints that I read yesterday.

I'm amazed at how cleverly this cartoon characterizes the unenlightened self-interest mindset of entitlement, extraction, exploitation and economic externalities ... and how, to riff on another classic cartoon, we have met the corporations and they is us.

Charlie Haden is a legend in jazz music. He started as a singer on his family's country radio show when he was just 2 years old. After losing his voice to polio as a teenager, he found a new voice by picking up the bass. That decision launched a career that spans jazz, country and gospel music.

This week, Charlie Haden was inducted into the National Endowment for the Arts 2012 class of Jazz Masters. He couldn't attend the ceremony at Lincoln Center in New York, so his daughter went and gave the acceptance speech instead. But, speaking with NPR's Rachel Martin, Haden read an excerpt:

"I learned at a very young age that music teaches you about life. When you're in the midst of improvisation, there is no yesterday and no tomorrow — there is just the moment that you are in. In that beautiful moment, you experience your true insignificance to the rest of the universe. It is then, and only then, that you can experience your true significance."

The whole interview is inspiring on many dimensions, as befits a closing segment on Weekend Edition Sunday.

August 26, 2011  

Thanks, Steve.

Posting designs like this one makes me paranoid, because I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not original. I enjoyed the process regardless, but please let me know if somebody else beat me to the idea!

Many layers of meaning in this simple and elegant design by Jonathan Mak that so compellingly captures the imprint of Steve Jobs on Apple (and the world).

Among the interesting dimensions of synchronicity is the unfolding debate about digital rights, invention and attribution in the comments on jmak's Tumbler post, which appears to have been sparked by this image - and similar ones - appearing elsewhere.

Treating the patient as an individual — and not as a statistic or algorithm to be solved — is vitally important, says Groopman, because the best and safest care might not always be standardized.

"If you step back, you can have different groups of experts coming out with different best practices," he says. "And what that tells you is that there is no right answer when you move into this gray zone of medicine."

From an analysis of 100 best practices put together by committees in internal medicine, Groopman and Hartzband discovered that 14 percent were contradicted within a year. Within two years, a quarter of the best practices were contradicted, and by five years, almost half of the rules were overturned.

This is not to say that guidelines aren't useful, says Hartzband. She emphasizes that she and Groopman are not "anti-guidelines."

"Guidelines have an enormous amount of very useful information, and I think they can be extremely helpful," she says. "But they shouldn't be applied in a blanket way without thinking about the individual patient."

In an age of algorithmic ascendancy and quantified selves, it's a breath of fresh air to see some medical experts - Doctors Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband, co-authors of Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You - emphasizing the importance of attending to qualitative differences among individuals.

The abstractions and exclusions of details that enable the effective application of statistical analysis do not always lead to the effective diagnosis and treatment of illness.

It's interesting to note how many of the problems that contributed to Howard Beale's madness in 1976 are still - or again - prominent in today's world ... providing plenty of fodder for future innovation.

I started and finished a post in my main blog on irritation-based innovation with a reference to the 1976 film, Network, directed by the late Sidney Lumet. I didn't want to include a lengthy quote from the movie in that post, but having watched this clip for the first time in many years - and transcribed part of the infamous I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore speech by Howard Beale (played by the late Peter Finch) - I wanted to share it here, as I found it interesting how many of the problems he speaks of in 1976 are still - or again - with us today:

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. A
dollar buys a nickel's worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, punks are running wild in the street, and nobody anywhere seems to know what to do about it, and there's no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe, our food is unfit to eat. We sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells that today we had 15 homicides and 53 violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad, worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, my TV, my steel-belted radials. I won't say anything, just leave us alone."

Well I'm not gonna to leave you alone. I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to protest, I don't want you to riot, I don't want you to write to your congressman, I wouldn't know what to tell you to write.

I don't know what to do about the depression, and the inflation, and the Russians, and the crime in the street. All I know is that you've got to get mad. I'm a human being, godammit! My life has value!

So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now, and go to the window, open it, and stick our head out, and yell "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

I want you to get up right now. Get up, go to your windows, and yell, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore."

Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the oil crisis. But first, get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out and yell, and say it: "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore."

“Somewhere here I want to bring in a learning which has been most rewarding, because it makes me feel so deeply akin to others. I can word it this way. What is most personal is most general. There have been times when in talking with students or staff, or in my writing, I have expressed myself in ways so personal that I have felt I was expressing an attitude which it was probable no one else could understand, because it was so uniquely my own…. In these instances I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. This has helped me to understand artists and poets as people who have dared to express the unique in themselves.”

- Carl Rogers, On Becoming A Person, p. 26

This inspiring passage exquisitely captures my experience - and, apparently, the experience of others - with courage, connection, vulnerability and authenticity in sharing trials and tribulations both online and offline.

I went searching for the quote today after browsing through the new Pew Internet study on Peer-to-Peer Healthcare, especially the experiences survey respondents reported in a section about We can say things to each other we can't say to others.

I hope that social media will enable more of us to say more things to more others, so that we can realize the goal behind Rare Disease Day: "Alone we are rare. Together we are strong."

8.11 How would you describe your sense of belonging to your local community? Would you say it is? Very strong Somewhat strong Somewhat weak Very weak Don't know

8.12 How often do you feel uncomfortable or out of place because of your ethnicity, culture, race, skin colour, language, accent, or religion? Is it... All of the time Most of the time Some of the time Rarely Never

8.13 Discrimination may happen when people are treated unfairly because they are being seen as different from others. In the past five years, how often do you feel that you have experienced such discrimination or been treated unfairly by others because of your ethnicity, culture, race, skin colour, language, accent or religion? All of the time Most of the time Some of the time Rarely Never

8.14 In the past five years, how often do you feel that you have experienced discrimination or unfair treatment because of your gender? All of the time Most of the time Some of the time Rarely Never

8.15 How often are you required to do things that make you feel uncomfortable because they are inconsistent with your values or beliefs? All of the time Most of the time Some of the time Rarely Never

I'm fascinated with the Seattle Area Happiness Initiative (SAHI), co-sponsored by Sustainable Seattle and Take Back Your Time. I'm intrigued by the SAHI happiness survey on several dimensions. I found that simply taking the survey offered me a welcome opportunity for reflection, and a curious mixture of appreciation and self-acceptance combined with a gently enhanced awareness of potential areas for personal change.

Having recently written a long[er] blog post about fitting in vs. belonging, and the costs and benefits of conformity (inspired by ideas I read in Brene Brown's book, The Gifts of Imperfection), I found the SAHI questions regarding these topics - included above (with bold font emphasis inserted by me) - to be particularly interesting and relevant. Perhaps the survey will help others recognize the difference between fitting in - which Brown defines as "becoming who you need to be to be accepted" - and belonging - which Brown writes "doesn't require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are".

I'm not an expert on the science - or art - of happiness, but I strongly suspect that belonging is more likely to lead toward happiness, while fitting in is more likely to lead away from it.

I believe that the arts are like an external immune system. I believe that they have a biological function.

The fastest way I can explain it is that there is this brilliant neuroscientist named V. S. Ramachandran, who wrote a book called Phantoms in the Brain. He was very interested in people with phantom-limb pain, and he had one patient who had lost his hand from the wrist down, but the guy’s sensation was not only that the hand was still there, but that it was in a painful fist that kept clenching. Ramachandran built a box, with a mirror and two holes in one side. When the guy put his arms in, he saw the one hand reflected. When he opened the hand, he saw it open and it was like the missing hand was unclenching. It fixed his phantom-limb sensation. That’s what I think images do; that’s what the arts do. In the course of human life we have a million phantom-limb pains—losing a parent when you’re little, being in a war, even something as dumb as having a mean teacher—and seeing it somehow reflected, whether it’s in our own work or listening to a song, is a way to deal with it.

The Greeks knew about it. They called it catharsis, right? And without it we’re fucked. I think this is the thing that keeps our mental health or emotional health in balance, and we’re born with an impulse toward it.

I've been thinking a lot lately about clenched fists and open hands, attachment and letting go, catching and releasing. I find the image in this example particularly poignant, and the broader depiction of the arts as an immune system illuminating.

The latest in a series of provocative and inspiring debates, in which the opponents acknowledge agreement on several issues, and engage the issues on which they disagree using mostly rational argument and mostly non-violent communication (with the notable exceptions of Mr. Gates' unnecessarily pejorative references to "hokey policy discussions" and a "silly throwaway phrase").

The two men agree on the importance of trade, and of the challenges posed by man-made climate change and African poverty. They disagree on the urgency of these challenges - whether a rush toward "solutions" is more or less likely to yield net positive or net negative results (e.g., Al Gore's Ethanol Epiphany written about elsewhere in today's issue) - and the best way to address these challenges - top-down or bottom-up.

This top-down vs. bottom-up disagreement also applies beyond Africa and climate change, to innovation and corporations. Mr. Ridley champions bottom-up crowdsourcing over top-down governance by "elites" in humanitarian aid, software design and education, suggesting that "the most far-reaching innovations over the past several decades have come from driven, visionary outsiders like Mr. Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin rather than from corporate research and development departments". Mr. Gates emphasizes the importance of execution (over ideas) and warns that "It is a dangerous and widespread problem to underestimate the ongoing innovation that takes place within mature corporations".

I highly recommend reading both articles ... and have added Ripley's book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves to my reading list. [Update: upon further investigation, this New Scientist review of The Rational Optimist gives me pause.]

Starbucks CEO says building ‘fourth place’ online

Third place coffeehouses as economic development

I've been reading - and blogging about - the Starbucks Digital Network, and its implications for engagement, enlightment and third places. The first photo above, which I encountered in a Reuters blog post about recent announcements regarding a "fourth place", really highlighted the deviation from the "third place" that Howard Schultz has so long promoted.

The photo suggests that the "fourth place" will be a place where people can go to be alone together and enjoy joint solitude, disengaging from the people physically around them to engage more fully in the digital content provided via the Starbucks Digital Network. This, in my view, is very different from the idea of a "third place", where people go to physically engage more fully with the people around them, as depicted in the second photo, from Cooltown Studios.

I thought juxtaposing these two photos may help to highlight the differences. I can't help thinking about Timothy Leary's famous mantra from the 60s, turn on, tune in, drop out.