» Wot? No football…

… from emotional intelligence at work

Newsletter 38 : 21 july 2010

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Greetings
Welcome to our newsletter. You’ve received it because either you requested it (extra thanks!) or Kay or Jeremy have met you on our travels.
We offer a change from other newsletters which do demand an awful lot of reading, and hope you will find it diverting.
We aim to publish once every two weeks, but sometimes the flesh is weak even as the spirit is willing.

Unnerving video of the week

In this TED video, Keith Barry does brain magic. Apologies, I love this stuff. And there is something to be said here about how to get a shift from clients. Anyone with ideas how it’s done, do email me (dur 19:53)

Puzzles of the week

1 You are a participant in a race. You overtake the last person. What position are you in?
2 You overtake the second person. What position are you in?
Answers below

Puzzle of last week

From last time: “There is a certain town with one male barber who, every day, shaves every man who doesn’t shave himself, and no one else. Does the barber shave himself?”

Several subscribers have asked us about this. It is actually an example of one of the most intractable problems of mathematics in the twentieth century. First identified by Bertrand Russell, it resulted in a huge shift in set theory (and is explained further here). It is so difficult that one good answer is simply that the barber cannot exist. A superficially good answer, that it is the barber’s wife who shaves him, runs into trouble as you think it through.

Cheerful article of the week

Apparently the human race will be extinct in a hundred years, says eminent Australian scientist Frank Fenner.

Quotations of the week

We shape our tools and then our tools shape us

The medium is the message

Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally

The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete.

The prescient Marshall McLuhan, born 21 July 1911 (died 1980)

Interesting ramble of the week

Stephen Fry off the cuff: “What I wish I’d known when I was 18”. (31:42)

Answers of the week

1 If you overtake the last person, you have to start by being behind the last person…
2 If you overtake the second person, you take his or her place, so you are in second place.

All contributions welcome.

If you have been, thank you for reading.
Kay and Jeremy