Teams: What I Learned This Week

• If you let your idea of what others are thinking be the determining factor when you make decisions you are not doing your best work. 

• It is very hard not to find frustrating encountering situations where people inadvertently, accidentally or purposefully withhold information in order to have control and power and make them the center, dismissing collaboration in the process.

• The City of London is not the city named London.

Adaptability: What I Learned This Week

Sometimes plans are guidelines, parameters, a way to know where the edges exist, so you can adapt accordingly.

• From a recent article in Esquire about the turbulent Facebook IPO:

Top Facebook User by City
​1. Bangkok, 8.7 million
​2. Jakarta, 7.4 million
​3. Istanbul, 7 million
​Top U. S. City? No. 12. New York, 3.4 million 
​Uh ... San Francisco? No. 58, with 856,740

• Bill Clinton, during his speech at the DNC, almost doubled the length of what was originally written by effectively ad-libbing as he spoke. Let's put politics and Clinton aside for a moment and let's celebrate the person in charge of the Teleprompter as they had to keep up with the speech as it happened too. 
• Take your typical RPG game, remove the pseudo-realism and instead imbue it with stylized graphics, superb audio and a story line with simpler boundaries and you end up with the award-winning Bastion. This week it became available for the iPad and it is a joy to play.

Nothing is ever just what you think it is. 

Landing: What I Learned This Week

• I didn't think it would affect me much, but watching Curiosity land on Mars, watching the reaction of the engineers was very exciting and inspiring. 

• Earlier this week I was in the passenger seat of a friend's car on our way home from a meeting when we witnessed an erratic driver almost driving off the highway, cutting almost fully into other lanes. It was worse than anything I've ever seen on the road. Was the driver drunk? Nope, he was texting the whole time. 

• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn was a revelation that I devoured in one sitting. You should read it. Don't Google it, don't look at reviews, just read, blindly, and hang on for the ride.

Discombobulated: What I Learned This Week

• If you ever wondered what Limbo would be like, well, it is black and white, with gorgeous sound design and interesting puzzles. You should believe in this Limbo. 
  
• Times Square during the day is not as exciting as Times Square at night. The darkness gives it character. 
  
• ​Sailing is not for me. 
  
• ​In the past few weeks I've seen a few characters in movies and tv shows slam into glass doors for comedic effect. I was beginning to think that this was turning into a writing cliche, in particular since I've never seen it happen in real life. That is until last week, when I saw three people slam into glass sliding doors, and I too almost slammed into one...
  

Location, Location, Location: What I Learned This Week

• Somewhere in New York's midtown Park Avenue's street numbers reboot ​and start over. Which means that on a busy day it is possible to find yourself at the right address but the wrong location. 

The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) is an image of a small region in the constellation Ursa Major, constructed from a series of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers an area 2.5 arcminutes across, about one 24-millionth of the whole sky, which is equivalent in angular size to a 65 mm tennis ball at a distance of 100 metres. The image was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 over ten consecutive days between December 18 and December 28, 1995.  

• While having dinner with friends we began to discuss the Higs Boson discovery and science in general. ​The conversation then moved to astronomy and the Hubble Deep Field. In the image above all those 3000 bright and not so bright objects are other galaxies.