Meetings Along the Edge » Stories

The last words of Ansel Adams

admin — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:40:02 +0000

As Chris Rainer recalls, these were the last words of Ansel Adams, 82: “Where did all the time go? I’ve just begun”.

Conversations from the Edge: Vanishing Cultures and the Ethnosphere Project at Stanford.

Back from Varanasi

admin — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:05:27 +0000

A boat filled with flowers and a candle, at night, lit in the Ganges for the people I love.
The meeting with a interaction designer, escaped from US because he didn’t want to leave in his resume.
Ganesha, the Hindu God, who may remove obstacles, but who may also pose obstacles.

About Vanda Scaravelli

admin — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 15:33:20 +0000

The most wonderful thing about being with her was her lightness of being, her self-contained contentment. Vanda invariably found a way to go with events so that resistance was never created.

http://www.estheryoga.com/vanda.html

We eat words

admin — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:12:30 +0000

One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he suddenly interrupted the lesson in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. “Nice biscuit, don’t you think”, said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog’s head and the words “Dog Cookies”. The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to throw up, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. “You see, ladies and gentlemen”, Korzybski remarked, “I have just demonstrated that people don’t just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter.” Apparently his prank aimed to illustrate how some human suffering originates from the confusion or conflation of linguistic representations of reality and reality itself. (Source: R. Diekstra, Haarlemmer Dagblad, 1993, cited by L. Derks & J. Hollander, Essenties van NLP (Utrecht: Servire, 1996), p. 58).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski

Barrier jumping

admin — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 14:10:58 +0000

Rich Silverstein of the celebrated advertising firm of Goodby & Silverstein may take the cake for the most audacious effort to win over a potential client when he pitched Isuzu Motors. Silverstein printed up flyers and had them placed in the windshields of Isuzus all over San Francisco, offering to pay fifty dollars to anyone who parked his of her car within a two-block radius of the advertising office at the foot of Telegraph Hill. Who could resist? The visiting Isuzu executives were amazed to enter a neighborhood that looked like a giant Isuzu dealership, and Silverstein got the account.

Cited in ‘The Art of Innovation’, Tom Kelley

Lessons from a special teacher

admin — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 13:59:27 +0000

This is a nice story about mathetics from a book I’m currently reading:

“Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philarmonic, has a unique strategy for getting the best out of his students. On the first day of class, he tells his first year students that they all get an A. There’s one condition. Their first assignment is to write a letter to him – dated on the last day of class – explaining why they deserved the grade.”

Kelley, Tom. The Art of Innovation. New York : Doubleday, 2001, p. 88

Playgrounds and water resources

admin — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 13:57:44 +0000

This is a nice project: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4461265.stm