randomosity

Hir­ing Women

Sleep Pro­filer

I atten­ded a SRO lec­ture by Alan Taylor last week. He delivered a won­der­ful nar­rat­ive on the life of Joseph Brant couched in the cur­rently con­ten­tious dis­cus­sion over nat­ive land rights in the Grand River basin. Taylor is the author of a vari­ety of books, the most per­tin­ent being The Divided Ground: Indi­ans, Set­tlers, and the North­ern Bor­der­land of the Amer­ican Revolu­tion. Fol­low­ing a con­cise, if rather softly spoken, brief on the vari­ous parties play­ing in the story, he moved to the meat of the mat­ter. The key ele­ment that Taylor seemed to want the audi­ence to appre­ci­ate was that the Six Nations them­selves were by no means homo­gen­eous. Addi­tion­ally, the area into which they moved was by no means dom­in­ated by one party or another and was a pop­u­lated by a col­lec­tion of diverse groups already: pre-existing nat­ives such as the Mis­sissauga, recent set­tlers from either the US or from the Brit­ish Isles and sig­ni­fic­antly, a small, but vocal cadre of Brit­ish mil­it­ary forces. The res­ult is an inter­mixed cul­tur­ally diverse people in this area.
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Enjoy Oner­ous Tasks

Great Hints

I seem to have been post­ing much on the sub­ject of note-taking as of late. It’s the sea­sonal thing.
What I sud­denly real­ized amongst my plaudits for tech­niques and for tools was a gem of a concept that Geof­frey and I have been rumin­at­ing over for the past year or so: Tiddly­Wiki. In case you have missed the Tiddly thing, it is a tiny, entirely self-contained inform­a­tion stor­age mech­an­ism that uses a wiki-style of inter­linked and tagged entries. Unlike the more tra­di­tional wiki’s, it is entirely local. While this poses some backup and access issues, it also means that you don’t need an inter­net con­nec­tion to edit data, it is blaz­ing fast and very secure. Its extremely easy to use and if you think about what is going on, its an amaz­ing concept.
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Bill Turkel pos­ted another great thought piece today on the Import­ance of Infra­struc­ture. This post is, as his oth­ers always are, very eru­dite, well phrased and pro­voke one to think. In this case, his fram­ing ques­tion seems to be whether one can really envir­on­ment­ally engin­eer innov­a­tion. His post sug­gests that let­ting the right people play in the right sand­box, with the right toys can yield aston­ish­ing res­ults. He addresses the nature of how we con­struct per­sonal space in order to bol­ster pro­ductiv­ity, cre­ativ­ity and all those good things.

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Bar Jokes

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