Change is pain

Here's an interesting piece about the Neuroscience of Leadership. It is particularly interesting because it does away with a lot of received wisdom in management literature. The salient points are:

• Change is pain
• Behaviourism doesn't work
• Humanism is overrated
• Focus is power
• Expectation shapes reality
• Attention density shapes identity

I am not sure that the authors' statement that the brain is a quantum environment really holds, though - an electron is certainly not an atom-sized entity. Nor do quantum effects usually apply in the "chemical" world.

Quantum astronomy kills the cat!

Fascinating story, that! The naïve reader might even be forgiven for being reminded of the tree of knowledge and other biblical metaphores ...

Wise evolution

Here is an intuitively convincing essay which is meant to demonstrate the possibility of evolutionary systems despite of their counter-intuitivity. I like the style and the ambition (via /.).

From egghood to personhood

Somewhere on that journey, consciousness happens, according to Paul Broks' excellent review of Seeing Red. This is the best book review (in the format of a standalone essay) that I've read in a long time, and it's even got a cliffhanger! Have a go at it, and then I am sure you'll be in for its object, too (via virtual philosopher).

Btw, when did you order your first book online? My first traceable Amazon order happened on 11 August 1998: Paul Krugman's Accidental Theorist and Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma.

Global warming

What with the raging debate about man made global warming and all its derivative industry pro & con, I am still trying to get my head around it, although I must admit that I am growing increasingly weary about the blatantly partisan direction that the debate is taking. Channel 4's The Great Global Warming Swindle takes a refreshingly contrarian position: it not just questions the economics of counter measures (it barely does, in fact), but it goes so far as to question the received wisdom that global warming is scientifically proven (yes, yes ...) to be man made. It offers alternative explanations for unquestioned climatic variability (unsurprisingly, the sun), plus a set of more or less obvious conspiracy theories. Well worth watching for every open minded contrarian.

The Poincaré Conjecture

I like reading about mathematics. Take this article about the proof of the Poincaré conjecture for example. You get an eerie impression of the spectacular inadequacy of common language to describe mathematical concepts, which are often hermetically clad in visual representations. While those representations may be describable, the description in turn would loose its conceptual representativeness of the idea that is represented in the graph. But that's merely a conjecture of mine - you may call it the Dreyer Conjecture.

It is consoling no end however that despite of the apparent superiority of mathematical language, mathematicians themselves are not aloof from the fickle deficiencies of human nature even in the conduct of their business. Which is probably just another piece of anecdotal evidence supporting my conjecture.