Posted December 31, 2019 in Monthly News

Happy New Year!

People have been marking—and often celebrating—the passing of time for all of recorded history. As the most easily observable markers of time, days and seasons, were the first to be recorded. It won’t surprise anyone that people living in places with readily observable seasonal changes were the first to use calendars to track the passing […]

Posted February 28, 2019 in Monthly News

Living in Interesting Times

The expression, “May you live in interesting times,” has been considered an ancient Chinese curse since Robert Kennedy popularized the saying. What makes times interesting? In general, conflict and anxiety. Most of us are familiar with the Biblical warning about wars and rumors of wars, and very few of us have had the luxury of […]

Posted September 30, 2018 in Uncategorized

He Not Busy Being Born

“He not busy being born is busy dying” is a line from Bob Dylan’s song, It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding). The cycle of life from birth to death has, in one way or another, been a major subject of literature in all forms. At some point (and perhaps that should be “points”) in life, […]

Posted July 31, 2017 in Monthly News

Changing Frames

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. ~ Wayne Dyer

In an 1819 letter to his brother and sister, the poet John Keats said the common notion that life is “a vale of tears … from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary […]

Posted October 31, 2016 in Monthly News

The Art of Disruption

Change doesn’t have to be destructive to be productively disruptive. ~ Alva Noë

I share some devout values with Alva Noë, author of Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). One of those values we share is art. I have said there is a reason ART is in the […]

Posted October 31, 2016 in Monthly News

Living in Interesting Times

May you live in interesting times is often said to be an “ancient Chinese curse.” It is, however, neither Chinese nor ancient. Regardless of its origins, it is easy to see why living in interesting times would be considered a curse. What makes “times” interesting? The answer, of course, is change.

If you can […]

Posted September 30, 2016 in Monthly News

Human Evolution

Humans like to think of themselves as the “Crown of Creation.” In 1968, Jefferson Airplane captured the irony of the human tendency to presume that we had achieved the pinnacle of the evolutionary process in the song, “Crown of Creation”:

You are the crown of creation. You are the crown of creation, And you’ve […]

Posted February 29, 2016 in Monthly News

Evolution—Change Happens

Debra’s article this month is about two things: the efficacy of NLP and effective design for web pages, including this newsletter, the SCS home page, and other SCS pages. I didn’t participate in the discussion about the design for the SCS website, so I don’t have any sense of the personality of the person with […]

Posted July 1, 2015 in Monthly News

Metamorphoses

When most people think of metamorphosis, they usually think of caterpillars turning into butterflies or tadpoles into frogs. If you’ve ever read The Metamorphosis,” by Franz Kafka, you may have thought of the hapless Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning to find himself changed into a giant insect. At first he thinks he is […]