via Harvard Business Review.

The problem is that most people, having attained a position of power, are reluctant to leave it and venture into new territory. Often, having racked up accomplishments and seen them celebrated, they are fired up by the possibility that, with a little more time, they could do more. In some cases, they cling to office because their age suggests they will not go on to scale any greater heights. Yale professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld described this phenomenon in his decades-old book, The Hero's Farewell. In it Sonnenfeld noted that while some aging CEOs exited gracefully while they still enjoyed wide acclaim, many hung on too long, reluctant to face their own mortality. There was William Paley, the titan of CBS, who challenged his biographer by asking just why he had to die. And there was Armand Hammer, CEO of Occidental Petroleum, who put in place a long-term incentive plan for himself with a ten-year payout horizon — when he was in his 90s. Few executives or political leaders are as wise as UCLA's legendary basketball coach, John Wooden, who retired after winning his tenth championship — quitting while he was on top.

My wife has a phrase, "leave before the party's over," which contains much wisdom about the importance of leaving positions before our charms have faded, and about the discipline required to do so.

via Discovery News:

...increased life expectancy results in a "postponement of religious involvement," especially for religions that don't tie eternal rewards to time and favor ideas such as personal salvation over predestination.

This may account for an increasing number of churches, synagogues, mosques and temples seeing "greying" religious congregations, researchers say.

Although other factors influence religious participation, age alters how people perceive the costs and benefits of religiosity through time. People may consider the time and effort taken to worship as a cost, while weighing the benefits of gaining a sense of community, greater spirituality and personal confidence in the afterlife.

In places with low life expectancies, the risk of dying is more of a reality, which may account for higher religiosity, the researchers say.

I love this product, I've used it to wrap around most of my belongings (phone, shoes, car, cat) and now everyone thinks I'm well rich because I own loads of silver things. It even got me a wife. If you don't like silver things, then you can scrunch it up and bake it in things and then watch people's faces when they bite down on it with their fillings!

Good times.

via Amazon.

It’s usually in a business’ best interests to commoditize its complements. Microsoft commoditized PC hardware because its software needed a home. Companies that contribute heavily to open-source, such as modern-day IBM, commoditize software because they sell consulting and support services. Google commoditizes applications, platforms, and web technologies because it needs places to put its ads and people to see them. (Google also tries to commoditize anything required to get online: web browsers, DNS, and in some cases, even internet connectivity.) Apple commoditizes apps to make iPhones and iPads more attractive (and exclusive). Nobody “opens” the parts of their business that make them money, maintain barriers to competitive entry, or otherwise provides significant competitive advantages. That’s why Android’s basic infrastructure is “open”, but all of Google’s important applications and services for it aren’t — Google doesn’t care about the platform and doesn’t want it to matter. Google’s effectively asserting that the basic parts of a modern OS — the parts that are open in Android — are all good enough, relatively similar, and no longer competitively meaningful. Nobody’s going to steal marketshare from Google by making a better kernel or windowing API on their competing smartphone platform, regardless of whether they borrowed any of Android’s “open” components or ideas derived from them. But Google’s applications and services are locked down, because those are vulnerable to competition, do provide competitive advantages, and are nowhere near being commoditized.

via Marco.org.

We don’t simply own products; we have relationships with them. Intimate ones at that. We are in a state of courtship with every brand in existence. Each of them wants to be a part of our lives, and each wants love in return. Thinking about our relationships with particular products and brands in the same way that we think about interpersonal relationships yields interesting insights. When we decide to bring a person or product into our lives, we must first evaluate our options. The criteria we use to decide whether we love, hate or are indifferent to another person are the same we use to judge a product or brand.

via Smashing Magazine.

One of the perks of studying undergrad physics at MIT was taking third-semester quantum mechanics from someone who had an honest-to-god Nobel Prize. He (who shall remain nameless) was doing a test prep session with the class one night and at one point got to an expression that looked like this: 3 √α

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2 π

... at which point he stares hard at the board, then looks at us (~50 senior physics majors). Then at the board. Then us. Then back to the board, where he (a little sheepishly) reduces it to

3 √α

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2 π

When we all got done laughing he retaliated with: "Look. Experimentally, we don't know the value of this number [points at alpha] better than within 2 orders of magnitude, and nobody can think of a way to measure it any better. The difference between pi and 3 is 5%. The simpler expression is going to hold true enough for some time between 50 years and forever. So shut up."

via MetaFilter.

The Feynman Algorithm:

1. Write down the problem.
2. Think real hard.
3. Write down the solution.

The Feynman algorithm was facetiously suggested by Murray Gell-Mann, a colleague of Feynman, in a New York Times interview.

via Feynman Algorithm.