Price vs. Value

"Never look a gift horse in the mouth."

Saint Jerome, On the Epistle to the Ephesianschurch father & saint (374 AD - 419 AD)


Ah, tis the season of giving and receiving. With Christmas past, and the and the orgy of food and drink in its trough of disillusionment, I thought I'd take stock of gifts given, received, or just wished for...

Why do people give greeting cards? Do you really need someone else to come up with a pithy statement of sentiment or humor to convey your feelings for someone? And is it really worth $2.99 plus tax? I think the greeting card industry is a self perpetuating fraud on the American psyche. Have you noticed the growth of "Card Giving" events over the last few decades? Grandparent's Day (9/10) , National Bosses Day (10/16), Friendship Day (8/7), Administrative Professionals Day(4/26), National Mentoring Month!?

And while we are looking at gift horses, I don't really get the whole stocking-stuffer stuff. There are a thousand presents under the tree, and yet the opening can't commence until we dispose of the stockings. At my house, it seems that the stocking stuffers are getting more in quantity and expense each year. The presents under the tree are not enough; Santa has to spend 50 bones filling each of the stockings hung with care.

"The great art of giving consists in this: the gift should cost very little and yet be greatly coveted, so that it may be the more highly appreciated."

Baltasar Gracian

My top three picks for gifts that packed a punch were a remote control boat that Santa gave my daughter, A copy of Food Plan Soup (which I gave myself) , and 4 bottles of Lambic Beer (props to willy78746). Food Plane Soup was recently published by a ex-coworker and tells of his wanderings following being laid-off from our last dot-bomb.

No - I did not get 5 shares of GOOG. But if I had $2100 to invest in GOOG, Id sell it short. Mark my words boys and girls, GOOG will be cheaper for Christmas 2006 than it is now.

No one gave me a trust fund either :-( I think I'll make getting one my New Year's resolution.

Size vs. Fight

"What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight - it's the size of the fight in the dog."

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 - 1969), speech to the Republican National Committee, January 31, 1958

[Click Image for Larger Picture]

Or, perhaps Dwight should have discussed the size of the fight in the cat. The Cat-in-the-Hat in particular. In 1997, the Cat-in-the-Hat Balloon reeked havoc on the Macy's Thanksgiving
Day Parade when he crashed into a lamp post, seriously injuring a spectator. The C-I-T-H has been, apparently, been put out to pasture at Universal Studios, but may still be a menace (as seen here with an unsuspecting tourist).

Compare the fight in that darn cat with the fight in the dog - in this case, Snoopy, and we can begin to understand where Gen E. was coming from. Yea, Snoopy took out the red baron... but what has he done lately?

And what happen to the USSR? That spot on Gorbachev's head - emperor of the largest, most powerful empire in the world, turned out to be red from embarrassment. The empire wilted away in the face of the US of A: our lethal armada and our tenacious intimidation!

And speaking of pussies: Did Kodak wave the white flag or what? The leader in film and photography - now a shell of it's former self resorting to buying cool startups (www.ofoto) to have any chance of surviving in the digital world.

Now, let's look at the "Pit Bull" quadrant: Small dog - Big fight. Here we see that big things do come in small packages. Fire Ants, HIV, and Ross Perot.

-> ->

(Increasing Lethality as "Fight" moves left to right)

Lastly, look at the little-fish-in-small-pond quadrant: Iraqi Information Minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf is know for breathless quotes like "We have them surrounded in their tanks". Priceless!

Author's Comment: Props to Squiechnoorb, proporietor of One Funny Thing, for his suggestion of this topic.

Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find

They're blind to own failings, others' skills
- Erica Goode, New York Times

There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear that he might be one of them.

Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.

On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.

"I began to think that there were probably lots of things that I was bad at, and I didn't know it," Dunning said.

One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.

The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

"Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it," wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dunning.

This deficiency in "self-monitoring skills," the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market -- and repeatedly lose out -- and of the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.

In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to "grossly overestimate" how well they had performed.

In all three tests, subjects' ratings of their ability were positively linked to their actual scores. But the lowest-ranked participants showed much greater distortions in their self-estimates.

Asked to evaluate their performance on the test of logical reasoning, for example, subjects who scored only in the 12th percentile guessed that they had scored in the 62nd percentile, and deemed their overall skill at logical reasoning to be at the 68th percentile.

Similarly, subjects who scored at the 10th percentile on the grammar test ranked themselves at the 67th percentile in the ability to "identify grammatically correct standard English," and estimated their test scores to be at the 61st percentile.

On the humor test, in which participants were asked to rate jokes according to their funniness (subjects' ratings were matched against those of an "expert" panel of professional comedians), low-scoring subjects were also more apt to have an inflated perception of their skill. But because humor is idiosyncratically defined, the researchers said, the results were less conclusive.

Unlike unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study, Kruger and Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their competence. The researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the absence of information about how others were doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were -- a phenomenon psychologists term the "false consensus effect."

When high-scoring subjects were asked to "grade" the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others; some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities.

"Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in others," the researchers concluded.

Credibility vs. Hair

Studies have shown that there is a correlation between success and height. It turns out that we humans are predisposed to under-appreciate the vertically challenged among us. Read all about it in "Don't Want No Short Man: The Study of Height, Power, and Male Selection".

But does this correlation extend to another factor that contributes to height - Hair height? You be the judge...


The results of our study are confounding. While there does seem to be a correlation, it is not at all the one we expected. It turns out that make-believe people tend to have higher credibility than real people, regardless of hair height. This finding requires more study....

Lucky vs. Good Revisited

The NY Times today published the sad story of Lottery Winner Mack Metcalf and his estranged wife Virginia Merida. Back in 2000, they won a $34M lottery. More recently, Mack died of alcohol and Virginia died of drugs. Clearly, winning the lottery is a "Lucky" event. But being the daughter of drug dealers is even more unlucky. And having an alcohol addiction is most definitely not "Good".

"Any problems people have, money magnifies it so much", said one of Virginia's brothers. This makes me wonder if perhaps Lucky vs. Good is really just a cover for the Nature vs. Nurture debate?

Good = Nature. You are either born with the ability to be good or you are not.
Luck = Nurture. You either had the good fortune of parents who saved for your college education (definitely Lucky for you), or your folks didn't bother reading to you at night (so sorry).

The old adage is "the better you are, the luckier you get". It seems that we might need a disclaimer on Lottery ticket purchases: Warning, unless you are good, you should not play the lottery - It will bring you nothing but bad luck.

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Chaos vs. Complexity

I spent some time with my brother recently and the discussion turned to 2x2’s. Specifically, we talked about Chaos vs. Complexity. Without a doubt, complexity drives chaos. The more complex your home life or work or project is, the more likely that it will spin into chaos.

My brother lives on the frontier of chaos and complexity. He is an architect in NYC and spends several days a week on the road. My sister-in-law manages the home and 3 kids, plus she performs and teaches violin around the tri-state region. His life is complex – managing multiple large architecture projects, and his life is chaotic. And his place on the 2x2 is very different than mine – far less complex and chaotic.

It turns out that chaos has some serious heritage. Not only does it make an extreme case of confusion or unpredictability, but it also has a deep base in mythology. In Greek mythology, Chaos or Khaos is the primeval state of existence from which the first gods appeared.

Chaos Theory is a mathematical concept best represented by the butterfly effect: The idea is that small variations in the initial conditions of a dynamical system produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system. Aka: Can a butterfly flapping it’s wings in the Amazon cause Hurricane Katrina? (See Ray Bradbury's 1952 story "A Sound of Thunder")

Butterfly effect. (2005, November 29). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 05:33, December 3, 2005 from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Butterfly_effect&oldid=29610359.

But sometimes there are incredible anomalies to this 2x2. Great tasks like the Apollo program or building a skyscraper or running a trauma center or my friend Brian who has 8 kids – they seem to have the ability to manage major complexity without the accompanying chaos. What strategies have they employed that the rest of us don’t know about?

One of the guru’s of personal success, Stephen Covey, has spent his life studying this question. He translates Chaos vs. Complexity into his famous 2x2: Urgent vs. Import. By categorizing tasks and tackling them based on their importance first and urgency second, chaos can be reduced – especially in complex environments. There is much to learn from Covey's 7 habits - especially as they apply to managing Chaos.