Reverend Lovejoy: . . . try a bowl of this Unitarian ice cream.
Bart: But there’s nothing in it.
Reverend Lovejoy: Exactly!

The New York Inquirer: Blasphemy or Enlightenment?

After spending a week cleaning my house, another normal week at work and finally a weekend living in the “clean” house - I’ve realized I’ve run into another example of the 80/20 rule.

“The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes.”

Wikipedia - Pareto principle

The house is much cleaner than it was, but yet I still have a little notebook that I carry around with me, and am filling up my list of chores and tasks much faster than I can complete them. Our house is much much better than it was. It was at 0%, now it is at 80%. It took me 6 days to get it there. To get the other 20% done, I think I’ll need another 24 days. I’m not planning on taking any more vacation time, and it would be a serious bummer to dedicate my next 12 weekends to doing 20% of my house work.

So, my version of the 80/20 rule is this, 20% of the work results in 80% of the results. The remaining 80% of the work can be safely ignored.

A more detailed description of this can be seen on the Notes to Self blog posting, “Applying the 80-20 Rule to Daily Activities.”

• Don’t try to do more. Just do more of the right things.
• If you have a lot of work to do, break it down to specific activities and figure out what twenty percent of the tasks listed contributes to eighty percent of the results you seek. Second, give your maximum concentration to those 20 percent tasks.
• With a little effort, and the application of the 80-20 rule, we can save a lot of our emotional and physical energy to concentrate on stuffs that really matter and enrich our life.
• So how do you know if you’re working on the twenty percent that really matters?
  1. It makes you feel good because you are doing what you always wanted or you know it’ll help with your goals.
  2. You are doing the tasks that you’d like to procrastinate, but know that it is essential.
  3. You delegate tasks to others that you aren’t good at.
  4. You are doing something that uses your creativity
• Hints that you aren’t utilising your time effectively:
  1. You are doing things that other people want you to do.
  2. You are doing things that you aren’t good at.
  3. You are doing things you don’t enjoy doing (provided that it doesn’t also contribute to your goals).
  4. You are doing things that always take you a lot of time and energy.

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“Are you ready to save the planet? Here’s how you humans can get it together, stop killing eachother, end global warming, and live happily ever after. Video excerpt from a recent Pentagon briefing.” - alienhelper

I went a little copy/paste happy, most of this is from Wikipedia, but munged:

In order for there to be knowledge, a statement must be justified, true, and believed, though not all that is both true and believed counts as knowledge. All justifications in pursuit of knowledge must justify the means of their justification, and in doing so they have to justify the means of their justification - an attempt to solve a problem which re-introduced the same problem in the proposed solution. The initial problem will recur infinitely and will never be solved.

Assuming that Jesus claimed to be the God, a result is one of three things must be true:

1. Lunatic: Jesus was not God, but he mistakenly believed that he was.
2. Liar: Jesus was not God, and he knew it, but he said so anyway.
3. Lord: Jesus was God.

Or, in software/project management: “Quick, Cheap, Good: Pick two”.

Or, “I wish God were alive to see this.” - Homer Simpson.

“The Babel fish,” said The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quietly, “is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.”

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’

‘But,’ says Man, ‘The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’

‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
-Douglas Adams

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