DeepDarkSee

Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man…living in
the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And
the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you
to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special
place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to
live forever, and suffer and burn and scream until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you and he needs money.  - George Carlin

It is estimated that 100 billion people have died since humans began. From “20 Things You Didn’t Know About Death“.

From SEOmoz: “Group intelligence is multiplicative when idiots are involved - combining a half-wit with another half-wit does not result in a full-witted person, it results in a quarter-witted person (1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4). Combining a full-witted individual with a half-wit still only yields a half-wit. The more of these “wrong kinds of people” you have involved in the process, the worse things get.”

Smart people can be “idiots” - talking strategy or design without the background or eye. My favorite is execs that think they are user experience experts.

“Rehab is for quitters…”  (Great show, by the way.  Closes in San Francisco today.)

“I’m not crazy….. I just have issues.”

“Going Bedouin.” What a great name for an extension of “virtual office.”  Other than the two founders in an office in Austin, we’ve been virtual at BiM for the past year and a half.  It’s working great for the development/operations team, but the CEO and the original founder sometimes miss the in-person contact.

I think the big issue growth issue is that communication needs grow non-linearly as the company grows in headcount.  That said, we’ve learned over the past 18 months to make sure to ‘drop in’ the ‘offices’ of others very regularly, and have staff conference calls weekly.  The Dev/Ops team has daily, or multiple times per day, impromptu group phone calls - which we’ve ended up sometimes calling “WC’s”, or “water cooler” time.  We also keep a group IM channel open all the time.

So BiM is a case where Bedouin is working, although it will be a challenge as we grow.

RocketBoom asks, “Why is George Bush so awesome?“

This is hilarious, interesting, and insulting all at the same time.  Leave it to RageBoy.  Check out his latest Amazon book guide “So you’d like to… know if you qualify as New Age++“.  A few section headings below…

• You’re not new age
• You’re spiritual but not religious
• Your goal is to integrate body, mind and spirit
• You think self-esteem is healthy narcissism
• You’ve read everything you can get your hands on by Elaine Pagels
• You’re heavy into quantum physics
• You’ve personally met Jung’s archetyupes
• You forgave and forgot
• You’re in the now now
• Your friends are all white

This links to the speech Courtney Love gave at a Digital Hollywood conference.  She lays out the systempic corruption of the recording industry, and shares some artist perspective on new paradigms for music distribution… while tearing a new orfice for just about everyone from the RIAA, to record companies, to VCs, to dot-commers.  An excellent read!