Riggs 2.0

Mark Zuckerburg: the Ted Danson of the Internet

Look....

Who doesn't love a good conspiracy, or fast forwarding to all the good parts everyone's favorite Orwell novel?   

I'm WITH you on this whole "Facebook privacy invasion" thing. 

I can just feel it.  Pretty soon, Mark Zuckerburg is going to actually charter a yacht, get a case of Crystal, fill it with all my ex girlfriends, head over to the south of France, and start uploading real time pics of the trip - while I see "Complements of Riggs" show up in my newsfeed, along with the bill from my credit card company.

I get it.  They know too much about me.

But here's the thing. 

I don't mind this whole privacy thing, and neither should you....that much.   

Take a look at Fred Wilson's post on the topic today and he makes some pretty insightful comments.  Like anything else, the privacy people are so far gone on this one you're starting to sound like the other kind of fear we've been getting shoved down our throats - that someone who can't afford a bus ticket in their own country is going to come to Kansas and kill you in your sleep if we don't stop them at the source.  I agree there needs to be some controls, but let's not get too carried away here.

After all, as Fred alludes to....

You WANT to go where everyone knows your name...:)

(Does this mean that Mark Zuckerburg is the Ted Danson of the Internet?)

Did Anyone Get The License Plate of that Existentialist?

Love this article from the LA Times on the iPod Lecture circuit.

Here's a quote:

"BERKELEY -- Baxter Wood is one of Hubert Dreyfus' most devoted students. During lectures on existentialism, Wood hangs on every word, savoring the moments when the 78-year-old philosophy professor pauses to consider a student's comment or relay how a meaning-of-life question had him up at 2 a.m.  But Wood is not sitting in a lecture hall on the UC Berkeley campus, nor has he met Dreyfus. He is in the cab of his 18-wheel big rig, hauling dog food from Ohio to the West Coast or flat-screen TVs from Los Angeles to points east.The 61-year-old trucker from El Paso eavesdrops on the lectures by downloading them for free from Apple Inc.'s iTunes store, transferring them to his Hewlett-Packard digital media player, then piping them through his cabin's speakers. He hits pause as he approaches cities so he can focus more on traffic than on what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead, then shifts his attention back to the classroom."

I think this is amazing.

(Though I hope they don't put up any of my old stats lectures on iTunes.  The snoring and drooling on my desk may distract the truckers.)

Monkey See, Monkey Do

Given that I am just returning from a week in Los Angeles, is it really any wonder that an article on cognitive dissonance would catch my eye? 

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, (like me until 15 minutes ago), it refers to the rather curious habit that we humans have of rationalizing our irrational behavior.  Why we'll wear something uncomfortable because we think it looks good, why we'll say we want something publicly that we wouldn't touch privately, or why some of us will quote Inconvenient Truth line by line and then put it on repeat in the headrest of our Hummers....

It's all one big "Cognitive Diss" isn't it?

Well thanks to this article from the New York Times, we can now boast that while we humans can be completely self delusional at times...

...at least we share that self delusion with 4 year old monkeys from Yale.

(Ok, bit of a weak post after a 2 month hiatus, but at least I invented a new term.)

"Cognitive Dissing"??? 

That's just gold, Jerry.

And you all know it.