Bit of a grab bag this week as things are staying incredibly fast-paced 'round these parts (school, work, family, etc.).
St. Anne the Wife and I hit 13 years still married recently and Josh Thomas – second greatest person in the world (behind Anne obviously) – reminded me of this gem he'd made from Anne and my wedding weekend. Good grief that seems equally forever ago and last month at the same time.
Not only did it remind me that I once had a fun haircut and an ill-fitting white suit, but there's also a young wedding photog in there named Andrew Ryan Shepherd. That same Dallas-based still photographer I'd been absolutely enamored with basically blew up into the creative and directing powerhouse he is today. That dude, who's now making commercial and film magic in Austin with Camp Lucky, turned out to be much more distantly braided into my life than I could've imagined.
In other news, I'm still machete-ing my way through managerial accounting principles and random probability distributions because this creative must have some kind of underlying punishment kink. I figured I could "lighten things up" and picked up another book I'd been eyeing from afar called Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers by Chip Heath and Karla Starr.
"This book is based on a simple observation: we lose information when we don't translate numbers into instinctive human experience."
"When experts are asked to communicate something they understand intimately...they wildly overestimate how much of their mental model of the world is shared by their audience."
"Math can reveal truths about the world that the human mind was never built to intuitively grasp. If you can use math, you have a valuable skill. If you can use it and make it clear, bringing what is obscure and distant into the range where others where others can see it and feel it-well, then you have a superpower."
It's not a terribly long book and it's a nice change from the incredibly dense (to me) grad school books I'm hacking through. I'm only about 20 pages in and I'm sure I'll have more to say about it later, but seems like being able to effectively communicate complex ideas is a superpower we'd all be better having.