What is the difference between tact and politeness?

Francois Truffaut lets Delphine Seyrig tell Jean-Pierre Leaud in a letter in the film Baisers Voles (Stolen Kisses).  Baisers Voles, the original French title of the film comes from a line in Charles Trenet's song "Que reste-t-il de nos amours?", known in English as "I Wish You Love."

"One of my teachers once explained the difference between tact and politeness.  A man opens a bathroom door by mistake and sees a naked lady.  He steps back and says "Excuse me madam."  That's politeness.  The same man finds the same naked lady and says "Excuse me sir."  That's tact.

Amazon carries Stolen Kisses.

Childhood is not just preparation for “real life,” it’s a good portion of life itself.

This is an excerpt from Christina Schwarz's article in the April 2011 issue of The Atlantic --- Leave Those Kids Alone - Childhood is more than merely a springboard to adulthood.

But childhood is not just preparation for “real life,” it’s a good portion of life itself. If the golden years of childhood are from age 3 to 12, they encompass more than twice the time people spend in what is generally regarded as a focal point of life: the college years. As Smith’s memoir demonstrates, childhood—those first, fresh experiences of the world, unclouded by reason and practicality, when you are the center of existence and anything might happen—should be regarded less as a springboard to striving adulthood than as a well of rich individual perception and experience to which you can return for sustenance throughout life, whether you rise in the world or not. Children have a knack for simply living that adults can never regain. If they’re allowed to exercise it a bit, perhaps they’ll have childhoods, like Smith’s, worth remembering. 

It is all absurd when one thinks about death. Everything is interchangeable.

From My Prizes: An Accounting, by Thomas Bernhard.

“There is nothing to praise, nothing to damn, nothing to accuse, but much that is absurd, indeed it is all absurd when one thinks about death. We go through life impressed, unimpressed, we cross the scene, everything is interchangeable, we have been schooled more or less effectively in a state where everything is mere props:  but it is all in error! We understand:  a clueless people, a beautiful country --- there are dead fathers or fathers conscientiously without conscience, straightforwardly despicable in the raw basics of their needs...it all makes for a past history that is philosophically significant and unendurable."

Is Plastic Surgery Worth It?

No, if the reason you're doing it is because you think it will make you more attractive - it won't.  This is according to Marguerite Duras in her book The Lover.   Excerpt below.

"I already know a thing or two.  I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction or costliness of their finery.  I know the problem lies elsewhere.  I don't know where.  I only know it isn't where women think.  I look at the women in the streets of Saigon, and upcountry.  Some of them are very beautiful, very white, they take enormous care of their beauty here, especially upcountry. They don't do anything, just save themselves up, save themselves up for Europe, for lovers, holidays in Italy, the long six-months leaves every three years, when at last they'll be able to talk about what it's like here, this peculiar colonial existence, the marvelous domestic service provided by the houseboys, the vegetation, the dances, the white villas, big enough to get lost in, occupied by officials in distant outposts.  They wait, these women.  They dress just for the sake of dressing. They look at themselves.  In the shade of their villas, they look at themselves for later on, they dream of romance, they already have huge wardrobes full of more dresses than they know what to do with, added to one by one like time, like the long days of waiting.  Some of them go mad.  Some are deserted for a young maid who keeps her mouth shut.  Ditched.  You can hear the word hit them, hear the sound of the blow.  Some kill themselves.

     This self-betrayal of women always struck me as a mistake, an error.

     You didn't have to attract desire.  Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn't exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been.  It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing.  That too I knew before I experienced it."

How many members can a committee have and still be effective?

Cyril Northcote Parkinson argued that beyond about 20 members, groups become structurally unable to come to consensus.  You can read more of Parkinson's insights on work from Parkinson's Law: And Other Studies in Administration

Below is an excerpt from Mark Buchanan's article  in issue 2690 of New Scientist magazine, page 38-39.

"A look around the globe today, courtesy of data collected by the US Central Intelligence Agency, indicates that Parkinson might have been onto something. The highest executive bodies of most countries have between 13 and 20 members. "Cabinets are commonly constituted with memberships close to Parkinson's limit," says Thurner, "but not above it." And that is not all, says Klimek: the size of the executive is also inversely correlated to measures of life expectancy, adult literacy, economic purchasing power and political stability. "The more members there are, the more likely a country is to be less stable politically, and less developed," he says.

Why should this be? To find out, the researchers constructed a simple network model of a committee. They grouped the nodes of the network - the committee members- in tightly knit clusters with a few further links between clusters tying the overall network together, reflecting the clumping tendencies of like-minded people known to exist in human interactions. To start off, each person in the network had one of two opposing opinions, represented as a 0 or a 1. At each time step in the model, each member would adopt the opinion held by the majority of their immediate neighbours.

Such a process can have two outcomes: either the network will reach a consensus, with 0s or 1s throughout, or it will get stuck at an entrenched disagreement between two factions. A striking transition between these two possibilities emerged as the number of participants grew - around Parkinson's magic number of 20. Groups with fewer than 20 members tend to reach agreement, whereas those larger than 20 generally splinter into subgroups that agree within themselves, but become frozen in permanent disagreement with each other. "With larger groups, there's a combinatorial explosion in the number of ways to form factions," says Thurner.

Santo Fortunato, a physicist who works on complex networks at the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy, thinks the result is convincing evidence for Parkinson's conjecture. But he would like to see further testing. "The outcome might well change significantly if you change the shape of the social network, or the way people's opinions influence one another," he says.

So might this kind of work offer a rational way to optimise our decision-making bodies? One curious detail provides an intriguing slant on this question. In the computer simulations, there is a particular number of decision-makers that stands out from the trend as being truly, spectacularly bad, tending with alarmingly high probability to lead to deadlock: eight.

Where this effect comes from is unclear. But once again, Parkinson had anticipated it, noting in 1955 that no nation had a cabinet of eight members. Intriguingly, the same is true today, and other committees charged with making momentous decisions tend to fall either side of the bedevilled number: the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, for example, has nine; the US National Security Council has six.

So perhaps we all subliminally know the kind of things that Parkinson highlighted and the computer simulations have confirmed. As Parkinson noted, we ignore them at our peril. Charles I was the only British monarch who favoured a council of state of eight members. His decision-making was so notoriously bad that he lost his head.

Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Cyril Northcote Parkinson explains in Parkinson's Law: And Other Studies in Administration

Mark Buchanan writes in issue 2690 of New Scientist magazine, page 38-39:

Is there anything more to that "law" than just a cynical slogan? Physicists Peter Klimek, Rudolf Hanel and Stefan Thurner of the Medical University of Vienna in Austria think so. They have recreated mathematically just the kind of bureaucratic dynamics that Parkinson described anecdotally 50 years ago. Their findings put Parkinson's observations on a scientific footing, but also make productive reading for anyone in charge of organising... well, anything.

Parkinson based his ideas not just on his war experience, but also his historical research. Between 1914 and 1928, he noted, the number of administrators in the British Admiralty increased by almost 80 per cent, while the number of sailors they had to administer fell by a third, and the number of ships by two-thirds. Parkinson suggested a reason: in any hierarchical management structure, people in positions of authority need subordinates, and those extra bodies have to be occupied- regardless of how much there actually is to do.

Parkinson was crystallising, with tongue half in cheek, classic work done by the German sociologist Max Weber in the early 20th century. Weber described the attributes of an ideal bureaucracy and possible "degenerating" influences - such as any system of promotion not based wholly on merit. Parkinson's own analysis spawned other, more po-faced and politically charged critiques of public bureaucracies from economists such as William Niskanen, who served on US President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. Niskanen theorised that bureaucracies grow because officials seek to increase the budgets they control and so boost their own salary, power and standing. He and other conservatives used such arguments to push for smaller government - but they could not give any supporting quantitative insight into the growth of bureaucracies.

The new work aims to do just that. "Parkinson's essays weren't quantitative," says Klimek, "but they're so clear that it's easy to cast them into specific mathematical models." From a simple system of equations using quantities such as the promotion and drop-out rates within a hierarchical body, a "phase diagram" can be computed to show what conditions breed ever greater bureaucracy. A high probability of promotion coupled with the hiring of more subordinates - the scenario Parkinson described- is unsurprisingly a recipe for particularly fast growth.

What is Reality? What constitutes the authentic human being?

From Philip K. Dick.  The quotations below came from How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later.


"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

"The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not."