caliarch.net

Recently for my principals program we all took the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, which divides people into 16 different personality types based on four dichotomies (extroversion / introversion; sensing / intuitive; thinking / feeling; judging / perceiving; ie, some possible personality types include INTJ, ESFP, etc). [Sidenote: That link is to a free, abridged, but reliable version of the test; if you want to pay $30 for the full version plus a bit of analysis, look here. You can also take a type test for programmers here, though why programmers need their own special kind of instrument, I have no idea.] The purpose was twofold — a) to understand why meetings are hard sometimes, & b) to understand the ramifications for each of our individual leadership styles.

Being an amateur psychologist, I love this kind of stuff. Was it enough for me to just take the test & read the results? Noooooo! No, I had to read the full results for all sixteen personality types, plus the entire Wikipedia page on the instrument itself. Then I had to retake the test several times to see if I got the same results.

And I learned a lot of interesting things. For one, for all that the validity of the test (& Carl Jung’s work on personality types in general) has been questioned at least as much as it’s been championed, its reliability is supposedly pretty darn good. (Amateur psychologist / mathematician translation: From a scientific point of view, the test is definitely testing something about people that seems fairly immutable. Whether that something is really personality type, Myers’ & Briggs’ work on personality is correct, or any of it is of any practical use to anyone is not entirely clear.) (more…)

…stange, that…

I keep losing this, so it’s going here:

Ingredients:

2 salmon filets (4 - 8 oz each)

1/2 tsp yummy oil

1 tbs yummy seasonings

1/8 cup yummy white wine

1/2 tbsp butter

Directions: 

Heat skillet over medium-high heat.  Brush both sides of salmon with oil.  Cook salmon uncovered for 3-4 minutes, until browned.  Be careful of sticking.

Turn salmon over & sprinkle with seasoning.  Cover & reduce to medium heat.  Cook for 2 minutes, then add wine & butter to pan.  Cook uncovered for 1-2 more minutes, until fish is opaque & sauce is reduced.  Drizzle pan sauce over fish & serve.

“Runners must drink, drink, drink and drink–before, during, after runs, and throughout the day.”

Hehehehehe.

Why does this make me a little bit drippy eyed?  Don’t know.

…Please immediately cease and desist referring to a foot-long sandwich as a “yum rocket.” That is just WRONG.

This is the fourth book my Haruki Murakami that I’ve read. It’s actually fairly different from his other books that I’ve read, which are all pretty well steeped in magical realism / existentialism. Wonderland, on the other hand, tastes more like modern fantasy mixed with traces of cyberpunk. The book alternates chapters between two different worlds (“Hardboiled Wonderland” and “The End of the World”). One is 1980s Tokyo, where an unnamed data specialist known as a Calcutec soon finds himself in the middle of a fantastical data war that centers around the work of a slightly unhinged Professor, one of the Calcutec’s clients. The other is a mysterious, fantastical, and somewhat disquieting world surrounded by a high wall that is home to a herd of strange unicorns and the newly arrived narrator, who spends his days reading “old dreams” out of the skulls of dead unicorns. Some of it got a little too cyberpunk for me to follow, but the premise was pretty interesting, and I love Murakami’s gorgeous metaphorical / symbolic writing (which he always manages to pull off with out getting allegorical). Overall pretty darn cool.