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Hmm, that sounds very interesting, and very close to what I was thinking about this. I wrote a short story which summarizes the concept, it is called "Intelligence grows on trees". Basically, it is the same thing, but the difference is that I consider one's ability to "measure" possible outcomes to be proportional with one's intelligence, rather than one's level of optimism.

In other words, it's not a matter of feeling positive or negative about something, but a matter of being able to predict that event. Some things are "feeling-agnostic" and there is no reason for us to feel bad or good about them; emotions should not be involved.

Optimism or pessimism is a high-level protocol, stacked on top of other things. Reality does not care how you feel about it, so in the end you are a "winner" if you can rationally deal with things, rather than emotionally treat them as good/bad.

You might also be interested in this book, which is very good: The brain - a decoded enigma. And there are a couple of other examples on my site, which illustrate how math can be applied to life (most of the stories are about social relationships).


I've always considered myself an optimist, yet I always try to find potential flaws in all my plans which means (according to the author of the book you mentioned) that I am a pessimist. Could that be true? Or maybe we are dealing with different definitions for 'optimism' and 'pessimism'.

I thought this could have a connection with music; so I made a little experiment, and created an account on last.fm, to see what statistics says about my favourite music. It turns out that Moby's "Why does my heart feel so bad?" (along with other similar songs by Moby) is top rated in my list. Hmmm.. so... am I still an optimist?

Hmm, that sounds very interesting, and very close to what I was thinking about this. I wrote a short story which summarizes the concept, it is called "Intelligence grows on trees". Basically, it is the same thing, but the difference is that I consider one's ability to "measure" possible outcomes to be proportional with one's intelligence, rather than one's level of optimism.

In other words, it's not a matter of feeling positive or negative about something, but a matter of being able to predict that event. Some things are "feeling-agnostic" and there is no reason for us to feel bad or good about them; emotions should not be involved.

Optimism or pessimism is a high-level protocol, stacked on top of other things. Reality does not care how you feel about it, so in the end you are a "winner" if you can rationally deal with things, rather than emotionally treat them as good/bad.

You might also be interested in this book, which is very good: The brain - a decoded enigma. And there are a couple of other examples on my site, which illustrate how math can be applied to life (most of the stories are about social relationships).


I've always considered myself an optimist, yet I always try to find potential flaws in all my plans which means (according to the author of the book you mentioned) that I am a pessimist. Could that be true? Or maybe we are dealing with different definitions for 'optimism' and 'pessimism'.

I thought this could have a connection with music; so I made a little experiment, and created an account on last.fm, to see what statistics says about my favourite music. It turns out that Moby's "Why does my heart feel so bad?" (along with other similar songs by Moby) is top rated in my list. Hmmm.. so... am I still an optimist?

This program was probably built with BHS SDK, the Bank Hacking System; a very advanced kit which can do many other things automagically.

P.S. The optimal approach is to use the 'they' pronoun.

Hm, interesting story, I'll use it as an example when educating my kids, when the time comes. Thank you.

P.S. The optimal approach is to use the 'they' pronoun.

#include <russian.h>

They "requested the footage be removed", thus guaranteeing that that this obscure video would be copied all over the internet and millions of people would get to see it.

I agree with you. I expect an "A straight" kid to be a little bit more intelligent. It didn't take a genius to extrapolate what would happen (in the context of the recent developments).

On the other hand, maybe he 'spilled gas on fire' precisely for that reason, to point out how incorrect it is to try to monitor what people write and make decisions afterwards.

Hmm.. If I were him I would not write it. Not because I am afraid to express my thoughts, but because I realize that some will find them disturbing. According to my definition, an intelligent person is also a person who is able to see themselves in somebody else's shoes; his actions could mean that he is not good at this. But is this the correct conclusion?

I think this would have happened sooner or later... a problem waiting to happen. Does it make a difference that it happened just a couple of weeks after the shootings? Would it be less of a problem had this happened months or years later? I don't think so.

the philippines is a beautiful land, with beautiful people... and a corrupt political establishment, it's a sad commentary on corruption the philippines, the vote buying

Things become crystal clear, especially after the purchase of IBM by a Russian company was officially announced.

Requirements: knowledge of Russian; IT-oriented sense of humour.

I once read about Google's image labeler, and decided to create a similar program, which would offer the same functionality, with additional features that are not available in Google's toy.

The project does not have a name, it is described on my site - advanced image labeling tool. What makes it different is that besides collecting tags for an image, it also gathers other data about the tagger - age, sex, education, etc. My initial idea was to use it for various studies and establish connections between one's social status and the image labels they provide.

Anyway, my point is that harvesting information about images can be fun, and it can have an impact on fields other than image processing or search engines.

• You comply with their request by having a solution at hand; (i.e. they cannot blame you for being incompetent)
• You are so generous that you offer them options: sketch+comments or email;

It will be foolish of them to say they don't like either of the options. You can further extend the concept and provide other choices (pseudo-options) which will be there for the sake of "Look how many choices I offer you", but will certainly be less likely to be chosen by them(like: I can set up a meeting with the rest of the team in X minutes and I will discuss this there).

The cool part about this is that they have to be really careful with their behaviour. If they keep forcing you into lightning fast answers without getting your thoughts straight first - you can always use that against them (ex: when you're engaged in a conversation that targets a field in which you are highly-experienced, and they are not). If they push too far, and "which question would you like me to answer?" does not work, tell them you will provide an uber-detailed answer via email; this will set a historical precedent - from that point on you will always do it the email-way because otherwise the conversation will end in a similar fashion.

As always, if you send it via email, make sure you CC the relevant persons, so that others know how hard working you are, how clear your messages are, etc. As a consequence, the bad guy will not be able to initiate negative discussions about you behind your back.

Make sure you take other factors into account:

• where you stand in the hierarchy and where they are.
• what your objective is (defeat them with a counter attack, or simply protect yourself).
• are you easily getting yourself involved in a conflict?
• do they have a history of generating conflicts out of nothing?

Another idea is that you could return random acknowledge strings, just for the sake of filling the aether with something. For instance:

• yes, the doc is almost done.
• aha, I am waiting for some feedback from Joe.
• it is almost done, the draft email is ready.
• the code is ready, I got a functional version but I found a way to make it nicer, so it will take a bit more. (if they ask for the non-nice version tell them that the code is being worked on "as we speak" and you cannot interrupt the process)
• it is 87% ready, I will call/email/visit you when it is done.

These are just template answers that will make them shut up. Keep your answers consistent, by incrementing the X% ready value if they ask again, and don't say that you wait for feedback from Joe if Joe is in the office and the 'bad guy' may actually walk up to him and ask about the issue. In other words, you can withold the truth, but never lie. Lean towards things they are not competent enough to verify, or things they are physically unable to check (Joe is absent, your code is being debugged right now and you're going to lose everything if you are forced to switch context ASAP, etc)

Also, if you happen to speak Romanian, check out Ji