The Blog of Glenn McLaurin

I want to preface this post by explaining that I know very, very little about art. I have friends who are artistic, I have traveled to Italy and enjoyed the paintings and sculptures in the museums (particularly Luca Signorelli’s Last Judgment in Orvieto), and I generally like looking at works which I know I could never afford. My actual understanding of the creative process is quite limited, however, but I believe that this lack of knowledge may actually contribute to the respect I feel towards people who are so dedicated to producing art.

Last spring, on vacation, my parents and I found an art gallery in Port Lucaya, Grand Bahama, owned by an artist named Leo Brown. The man has quite an interesting back story – a native of the Bahamas, he was discovered by a wealthy couple when he was only a teenager, and they were so impressed with his skill and love of painting that they sent him to art school in the United States for free. Since then, he has returned to the islands and made a living through his paintings.

He displays much of his work (past and present) on a MySpace account, but productions (originals and prints) are also for sale on his on-line gallery. Leo Brown is, if nothing else, a paragon of the results of kind-hearted charity, and I simply cannot recommend enough for everyone to check out his work.

Though this has probably garnered a good bit of attention in the blogging community over the weekend, I still found the charting of Favorite Books on Facebook v. SAT Scores interesting. I am disappointed that a composite Verbal/ Math score was used – though the plotting hardly qualifies as a scientific inquiry, I would have liked to see the Favorite Books compared strictly to Verbal scores or a Verbal/ Writing composite. I am an avid reader who generally dislikes math, and my own SAT score reflects these tendencies; I imagine that particular books would have placed higher or lower if they were only ranked according to a verbal score. With that said, however, I have enjoyed books across the chart and fully recognize the mantra drilled into the skull of every AP Statistics student and reiterated on the site: correlation does not equal causation.

Anyone surprised, though, at the placement of some books? 100 Years of Solitude, Atlas Shrugged, and Lolita seem appropriate near the top… but is The Book of Mormon really one of the most popular books amongst college students? Where might one expect other, less popular books to land?

I spent the bulk of the weekend reading, catching up on sleep, and stuffing my face. Tomorrow I will be up at the university; the tour is more of an excuse to skip school and see friends than it is to learn about historic landmarks. I am attending a Community Preparedness and Disaster Management course though, which my tour guide is taking as part of his Health Policy major – I am not sure what to expect, though the class will probably be less than I imagine. Perhaps having a father who is a firefighter has spoiled me… anytime he says “disaster management training,” he leads a team through USAR drills involving thermal cameras, night vision, and burning buildings, and I doubt that there will be any cutting through rebar and concrete at tomorrow’s lecture.

I have been a long time fan of Tucker Max, and though I respect his wholly independent, devil-may-care approach to mainstream media, I have never been able to completely relate to him.  After all, he introduces his book by saying, “I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead.”

It’s sophomoric, it’s humorous, and it saw the top of the New York Times Bestseller List, but it’s not me.

Ryan Holiday, on the other hand, is an up-and-coming twenty-something who refused to take ‘no’ for an answer when soliciting Tucker Max for a job, and has since become a unique voice in the blogging world, publishing his “meditations on Hollywood, strategy and self-improvement.”

He’s not concerned about hooking up with women, not worried about how drunk he can get — instead, he is focused on becoming as successful as possible, reading and learning all that he can, and taking advantage of his present youth to one day try and dominate the industry.  He’s not Timothy Ferriss, but few people are at that level.

Anyways, a quote Holiday offered which I rather liked:

“The art of using moderate abilities to advantage wins praise, and often acquires more reputation than real brilliancy.” de la Rochefoucauld

When I have time, I will produce a post with more substance than my raving about various authors.  In the meanwhile, what does the quote mean to you?

I should be doing any number of activities:

• My English essay on Wide Sargasso Sea vs. Jane Eyre
• Reading for AP World History
• AP Practice packet for AP World History
• Reading and vocabulary for AP Human Geography
• Too much work to list for AP European History
• Journals for my internship

Instead, I’m riding an endorphin buzz post-gym visit and browsing my RSS Feed Reader.  Do you have one yet?  If not, get one, and subscribe to Marginal Revolution, 4HWW, The Undercover Economist, and Slate.  It’s worth it, I swear.

With that in mind, I am even more convinced that in the next three years the field of knowledge management will expand at an exponential rate.  Never heard of it?  That’s fine, but not educating yourself on its basic theories is only harmful…  I recently watched Shift Happens  – And though the presentation is devoid of sources, and therefore I question the actual statistics and credibility, the thesis it espouses is one-hundred percent true.  We Americans have a lot of work ahead of us to stay on top in the years to come.

Of course, a sect of Americans are already on top… so much so that their kids are falling to the bottom.  If anyone can come up with a way to instill work ethic in the children of the richest Americans in the nation… they too will become very wealthy.

I’m off now, to read about mankind’s future in terms of animal evolution, because Jared Diamond is just that awesome.

Links are, as follows:  Youtube presentation on the rapid globalization and diffusion of human knowledge; NY Mag article on raising children in obscene wealth; copy of The Third Chimpanzee on Amazon.com

I have some good thoughts, just never the time to write anything down.

The theory of the five-sentence reply has been floating around the internet for some time now, but e-mail inboxes have not gotten any emptier since the idea first originated.

The five-sentence reply is an attempt to convey information in a succinct and efficient manner. It is an excellent remedy to the open-ended e-mails that many people send, where the question takes little time to craft, but the answer is often very lengthy. Of course, it is not a rigid policy, nor should people worry about crossing over the ‘limit’ — it is intended to simplify lives, not make them more difficult. Is it something that I will begin utilizing? I currently do not face the influx of e-mails which would necessitate such action, but no one has ever complained because they spent less time reading in order to better understand the message.

It’s that easy.

Success!

I may have not applied to any schools that were true ‘reaches,’ but three out of three isn’t too shabby – and I can’t really afford the ‘reach’ schools anyways, so I’m pleased.

Chapel Hill, here I come!

I realized earlier today that I now have proof of the direction my life will take for the next four years. In January of eighth grade, four years previous, I had no idea where I was going to go for high school, much less what I wanted to do with my life. If memory serves, I was still caught up in my fantasy of being a marine biologist, and under the belief that any magnet school other than Garner would be fine with me, though I leaned towards Enloe for the sheer fact that every other person at my middle school seemed to be going there.

Now, as a senior at a school that is definitely not Enloe (though I am still pleased not to be at Garner), I still really don’t know what I will wind up doing with my life. I still feel like a small child every time I watch a special on the ocean (the deep seas episode of ‘Planet Earth’ was the coolest thing ever), but I also feel a calling to do something bigger, to somehow involve myself in some effort to change the world, or at least make it a better place to inhabit. Something to do with public policy, perhaps? Public health? Blow off grad school and join the Peace Corps.? Do both?

The future is far too murky to identify the details, but right now I am certain that I will be Chapel Hill when I make those decisions that matter.

The next few months are going to be spent balancing my high school career with figuring out my ‘wants’ for college. Specific goals are a bit too much, but having a vision, some underlying desires to guide my actions may prove to be hugely important.

I want to write more; I want to have the time which allows me to write. I want discussions which leave my brain exhausted and my mind buzzing with new ideas. I want classes which challenge everything I have ever learned; I want challenges that appear impossible at first glance, and then I want to solve said challenges. I want to meet people whose lives, stories, and futures inspire me; in some small way, I want to inspire someone else.

And call me an egotist, or say that I have an inflated sense of self-worth, but I believe I can make these things happen. And in the intermittent, I know where I will be. Go Heels!

Now, a break from introspective soul searching made public.

The importance of knowledge management in the twenty-first century and its many tools is a post for another day, but the key background information to this story is that I recently set up an RSS feed reader via Google Reader, and it is quickly changing my life. Create a reader account, ask me for some blog suggestions, and you too will learn to love technology.

Robert Scoble, of Scobleizer, recently butted heads with Facebook, and the potential fall-out from this could very well affect every single technologically-literate socially-networked person on the planet. Long story short, Scoble, a well known tech industry writer, began running a data-harvesting script through his Facebook account in order to retrieve the contact information for his 5000+ ‘friends’ and move said information to a different network. Facebook perceived this as a threat and locked his account, thus temporarily erasing the presence of one of the biggest names in the tech blog industry.

Everything was gone. Pictures of him? Gone. Videos of him? Gone. He was immediately removed from the friend lists of over five thousand people, all his postings on walls and in groups were wiped clean – looking at Facebook with one minute after his account was locked, no one could tell he had ever even visited the site.

They have since restored his status provided he stops running the program, despite the fact that it was information he had permission to store. Or did he? That is the debate – when you add someone as a friend, and given them access to see your full profile, are you really intending to give them full access to your contact information? Are you really relinquishing your rights to your privacy? Because if one of your ‘friends’ decides to make their own lives easier by exporting what amounts to a massive, all-inclusive address book, an entirely different storage site has access to that information as well. And when that site goes up for sale, all that information will go with it – currently, the social networks of fifteen million users are up for grabs to any corporation with an extra 100-million dollars lying around.

As Judi Sohn of MomAtHome puts it, “It’s a matter of trust.”

Robert Scoble’s Blog: http://scobleizer.com/

A brief summary of the incident: http://facereviews.com/2008/01/03/facebook-bots-disable-robert-scoble

A response to the Scoble incident, which my post essentially paraphrases: http://www.momathome.com/2008/01/scoble_facebook_plaxo_its_a_matter_of_trust_and_fear/

Plaxo, the other company in question: http://www.plaxo.com/about

Plaxo, by the way, is for sale: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/02/plaxos-for-sale/

It’s a wild and wooly world out there, friends.