A Whole New Mind

is the title of an excellent book by Dan Pink. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

At the Yale School of Medicine, students are honing their powers of observation at the Yale Center for British Art, because students who study paintings excel at noticing subtle details about a patient's condition.

The MFA is becoming the new MBA.

Stories are how we remember.

One of the best ways to understand and develop the aptitude of Symphony is to learn how to draw.

The most creative among us see relationships the rest of us never notice.

Everything you create is a representation of something else.

Poets are our original systems thinkers.

More males than females have brains that systematize and more females than males have brains that empathize.

The people who will thrive will be those who can toggle between the two. As we've seen again and again, the Conceptual Age requires androgynous minds.

If you are laughing you cannot think. That is the objective we achieve in meditation.

People have enough to live, but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.

Washroom tap psychology

Have you ever been in a washroom and failed to get any water out of a tap? Of course you have. We all have. It happens to me all the damned time.

The taps I hate the most are those stupid infra-red taps. The ones that are supposed to burst into life when you waggle your hands under them. Waggle to the left, waggle to right, in-out, in-out, doing the hokey-kokey. Your occasional random reward, if you're very lucky, is a short dribble of water.

The infra-redness is a ruse - it's fake - the tap is really part of sophisticated psychology experiment. Out of sight a white-coated clipboard-clutching technician is carefully monitoring your rising frustration. A favourite ploy is withholding water once you've dobbed a large blob of soap into your hands. And then watching as you fruitlessly search for a paper towel to wipe away the soap.

Another favourite is doctoring a clearly-full soap-dispenser into a soap-refuser. And of course, setting the force of the air-blower hand-drier to either barely-enough-to-fog-a-mirror or enough-to-lift-a-twelve-stone-man-clean-off-the-ground but never anything in between.

I miss the old-style taps.