Day: May 29, 2009

CIA caught with pants down, by spiral notebook

Organizations breed both bureaucracy and incompetence. I’m tempted to ask Trish to tell me why this is–I’m sure it’s something well known in her field, but it sure seems to be empirical fact: you create an organization and certain institutional pressures necessarily lead to behaviours that are rational at the individual level, but which result in startling incompetence at the… Read more →

Aside

My wife has been known to comment on her preference for the mass market paperback over the hardcover book, on the basis that it’s easier to read without tiring yourself out. As a collector, I do tend to prefer the hardback for books that I want to keep in the collection, but I certainly know what she’s talking about–reading Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle could give a guy tennis elbow. One hesitates to wonder what her reaction would be to the new limited edition of Agatha Christie’s Complete Miss Marple. (I love that it comes with a carrying case.)

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.