Old Masters and Young Geniuses:

According to professor David W. Galenson there's hope for us old guys who still want to make a contribution to society. I was listening to Dr. Galenson's lecture at an event where an organization called Civic Ventures was awarding The Purpose Prise to a group of baby-boomers who, unlike me, were taking on society's biggest challenges. It was inspiring. One of Galenson's insights that I thought was particularly interesting was this idea of two fundamentally different approaches to innovation; one the deductive "flash of brilliance" sort and the other the painstaking, gradual, cumulative, inductive sort that comes with the wisdom of a lifetime experience. He speaks of those of us in the later category feeling "stupid" in their youth at not being easily able to learn by the deductive method. This was my experience exactly and its somehow very encouraging to learn that I'm not alone.

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DouglasRoss.com

Network Solutions is having a sale on URL's. Mine (http://www.douglasross.com) doesn't do anything at the moment (I'm saving it for a rainy day) but it was coming up on ten years and I needed to renew it to protect my name. So I decided to take them up on their pay-in-advance 20 year package sale for $279.00 or $13.95 per year (about half of the regular annual fee...probably not that good a deal in hindsight.) But the kicker was, after I hit the pay button it dawned on me that I'll be over 83 years old when this thing expires. How creepy is that? If I make it I'll take it as a good sign and re-up for another 20 years. And by then maybe I'll have done something with it.

The Evolving Internet: A look ahead to 2025 by Cisco and the Monitor Group's Global Business Network

My employer (Cisco) published its most recent forward looking study of the Internet today. It's called " The Evolving Internet: A look ahead to 2025 by Cisco and the Monitor Group's Global Business Network " and although I haven't studied it in detail yet, I scanned it this morning and I liked what I saw. Those who know me will not be surprised that I particularly liked the three dimensional evaluation criteria that they used to frame their analysis. Lately nearly everything I do ends up finding its way into some sort of analytical cube like this. I've been wondering whether there is something wrong with me that I can't seem to frame things simply in two dimensions. Glad to have company.

Mindless Eating

I listened to a lecture today by Brian Wansink, Ph.D., author of Mindless Eating, a book about better eating habits that lead to weight loss and better health. It's amazing how simple things we get use to are really bad eating habits. Here's an example. Take two normal table glasses. One is tall and thin like a water glass, the other short and wide like a cocktail glass. Wansink's research shows that most people (even professional bar tenders) will fill the short glass with 38% more liquid than the tall glass. Why, because we're conditioned to be a better judge of the volume we want by height than by width. Same thing with the size of the plate we use to eat with. If we use a smaller plate we'll eat significantly less because using a larger plate we tend to fill it up and eat more unconsiously even though we'd feel perfectly fine with the volume of a smaller plate. I'm going to give his " Mindless Method " a try and see if I can shed this stomach o...

Douglas L. Ross - My Personal Reflections

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