Category: Uncategorized

I built a tool for giving my team ongoing feedback and launched it last week. What is my team’s reaction so far?

First, check out how it works:

A user can:

• Write in their feedback
• Select who should receive it
• Decide whether the feedback is positive or negative
• Decide if the feedback is small, medium or large

Lots of team members have been using it so far, here is a running log of the most recent feedback:

Seems to be quite helpful for people to share their thanks!… read more “Ongoing Feedback Tool”

“Mob mentality” is a powerful phenomenon sociologists have observed… a single human will seldom heckle another person or riot. However, throngs of sports fans will torch cars, protesters will storm government offices, and gangs will go to war over very small slights. Scientists have actually shown that your brain shuts off your sense of self during these times of collective endeavor.… read more “Permanent Mob Mentality”

Ten years ago or so, the Cloud was supposed to be the next big thing. It actually already was a huge thing with software as a service products hosted on the cloud exploding in popularity (Gmail, BigCommerce, MailChimp, and others).

Now most people take it for granted that their website and the apps they most frequently use are not installed on their computers, but are installed in the cloud somewhere.… read more “The Cloud”

I climbed two 10ds, a 10a and two 5.9s.

Child’s play and the one next to it were the best. I almost sent the arete but gave up too easy once on the rail when all I had to do was reach up.

This blog post inspired my post here.

A fascinating phenomena occurs in both human society and in the natural world: a small percentage of sports franchises / businesses / species end up with a vast majority of the success. Why is this?

First, let’s look at some examples in human society as well as the natural world:

• 1.4% of tree species account for 50% of the trees in the Amazon
• Just two franchises have won almost half of all the championships in NBA history.

… read more “Winner Take All & Accumulative Advantages”

Growing up, I attended a redneck Christian elementary school and high school. I also went to a pretty goofy church. Both places told me lots of “facts” that turned out to not actually be true upon further review:

• That if the Earth was one inch closer to the Sun we would burn up, and if it was one inch farther away we would freeze to death.

… read more “Fake Church Facts”

I have realized that work can provide purpose which is essential to happiness in life. I read a fair bit of Reddit and the people who always complain of being the most depressed are those who are unemployed. I have noticed in myself that when I am on vacation or on weekends are the times I am most susceptible to depression.… read more “Work & Happiness”

Laurel and I saw “Get Out” yesterday. I won’t give away any spoilers but I highly recommend you see it!

From 2006 to 2009, I worked primarily in the SEO and Reputation Management division of Visible Technologies. Another big division of the company did Social Media Analytics. Basically, we were forerunners to the companies talked about in this article – the ones that provided Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon, and others the data and capabilities to swing voters opinions with well placed lies, fake news, and exaggerations that play on their fears.… read more “Fake News & Lies”

Diseases like cancer, heart disease, and dementia are really just symptoms of aging. They almost entirely afflict our elders. Instead of trying to fix one disease when ten other diseases are right behind it to kill one of our elderly, I’d like to face the problem of aging itself head on.

Our society loses a huge amount of wisdom and talent to the ravages of aging – just as has happened for all of human history.… read more “Solving Aging”