TGIF – I Lost My Fork!

As the week winds down, we wind down with some tidbits for your information, education, health, and enjoyment.

Quote of the Week: “There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.”  Francis Bacon

Humor Break:

Bev: Al, how on earth can we lose a sock in a dryer?

Al: Quantum theorists explain it all by a generalized exclusion principle–it is impossible for two socks to be in the same eigenstate, and when it’s in danger of happening, one of the socks has to vanish.  Does that help?

Stat of the Week: I lost a fork.  It wasn’t particularly special.  I have a few more just like it.  If I run short, I have a super collection of plastic sporks from KFC.  What I can’t understand is how a fork can just up and leave.  It lived its whole life in a kitchen with occasional trips to the eating area.  I could understand if it fell in love with a spoon and eloped … but all my spoons are still resting comfortably in the spoon space.

Have you had a similar experience?  Maybe at the beginning of a wash/dry cycle you put in a pair of socks and two hours later when you removed your clothes from the dryer there was only one?  Today’s Stat of the Week is 4,857.  This number is provided courtesy of a recent Time Magazine report.  The bad news: This was the number of reported lost items over the past 20 years in hospital surgery rooms.  The good news: They were all found! … inside patients.  Yikes!!!  I guess losing a fork isn’t as traumatic as I thought.

Action Tip: If you are contemplating surgery, ask your surgeon if she/he has read The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (previously reviewed).  Those who have and practice with checklists are far less likely to lose something at work.

Self-Development Corner: Consider continuing your higher education this week with these free online courses beginning in the next 7 days: For you readers who have a business finance interest, there are two similarly titled courses to pick from this week: Microeconomics Principles (8 weeks, University of Illinois) and Principles of Microeconomics (9 weeks, University of Pennsylvania). If you have more of a medical interest there is Medical Neuroscience (8 weeks, April 8, Duke University).

I am probably not the person to ask about what this course is about except that is for folks with programming skills, but the instructor is the Co-Founder of Coursera, which brings you all these courses, Probabilistic Graphical Models (11 weeks, April 8, Stanford University). I have heard her talk. She is a great presenter. She is a hard worker and expects the same from her students – so not a course for the casual student. However if you are not up for the effort required in her course, you can still master the universe by taking Understanding Einstein: The Special Theory of Relativity (8 weeks, April 8, Stanford University). Footnote: I plan to audit this course, which means only watching the videos – the author promises some great Einstein quotes … which may appear here in this Blog in the future!

And it is still not too late to join me in what is likely the #1 course of the year for being the most fun, slightly wacky and so educational both professionally and personally: A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior (6 weeks, Duke University).

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.