Monthly Archives: August 2010

links for 2010-08-05

  • The Dangerous Art of the Right Question
    Insight questions can only be asked after you develop situation awareness. They are necessarily local and unique to the situation. When you are faced with a difficult situation, you will start as a prisoner of the unanswerable/too expensive formulaic questions, and your first job is to break out. The reason the weird “right questions” work is that they expose cracks in your default, formulaic mental model. By attacking those cracks, you force the useless default mental model to collapse, creating room for a new one.
    (tags: analysis communication insight problem-solving must-read)
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Prop 8 Overturned by Federal Court

According to MSNBC news services:

SAN FRANCISCO — In a major victory for gay rights advocates, a federal judge on Wednesday struck down a California ban on same-sex marriage.

Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that the voter-approved ban, known as Proposition 8, violates due process and equal-protection rights under the U.S. Constitution.

…

“Moral disapproval alone is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and lesbians. The evidence shows conclusively that Proposition 8 enacts, without reason, a private moral view that same-sex couples are inferior to opposite-sex couples,” Walker wrote.

The judge added in the conclusion of the 136-page opinion: “Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license.”

His ruling came in response to a lawsuit brought by two same-sex couples and the city of San Francisco seeking to invalidate the law as an unlawful infringement on the civil rights of gay men and lesbians. The landmark case is expected to be appealed and could eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

This is really great news – baby steps, but definitely steps. One day our marriage might actually be recognized in our own country and home state.

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Barkley McBarkerson

Barkley McBarkersom
Spike has turned up the volume on telling the neighbors to stay away from his yard lately. He’s making my “he’s so low maintenance” claims out to be false, the little goofball. I know he’s going to turn eight this month, but he’s too young to turn into a grouchy old man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn.

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Big City Farms

Big City Farms

Our very yummy half share of produce from Big City Farms

Big City Farms is a Community Supported Agriculture farm on 8 city lots in downtown Indianapolis. We bought into a half-share this year, and get to swing by and pick up a box of veggies every week. Organic, local food with less that 1 travel mile. Delicious!

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Uncluttering projects

I haven’t stalled out on the de-cluttering and organizing projects, I just don’t have photos to put up quite yet – I’m still working on the great furniture shuffle. I purchased a new desk and new china cabinet at Ikea last week, and have put them both together. I unloaded and removed the old shelving unit, which is residing on the porch until I can transport it to it’s final resting place. I just have to install the lights into the china cabinet and we’ll be set to load it up with china and glasses that go there, along with table cloths. And I need to clean out the pantry and find room for tools, which will unearth an avalanche of discard-able items. It’s all proceeding nicely and we’re getting to the place where I start working on smaller items again.

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links for 2010-08-03

  • Disputed chemical bisphenol-A found in paper receipts
    The headline is misleading – there's nothing in dispute about BPA. It's toxic and unsafe. Since I first read about this, I started paying attention to where my receipts go. The ones that get dumped in my food bag at a fast food place are the most alarming, but the others that get handed to me at checkout end up in my bag, in my pockets – places I touch them and then later eat. I've started to be super careful about how I handle them, but the fact that they've been rolling around in my camera bag that I've never washed out — yeah. Alarming.
    (tags: bpa bisphenol-a environment health receipts)
Continue Readinglinks for 2010-08-03