Things that were not immediately obvious to me

I think that the process of understanding something can be modeled as a path up an ascending, widening spiral. The height of a point on the spiral indicates the complexity of your model of the subject, the radius of the point indicates the number of related subjects you consider, and the azimuth indicates the particular aspect of the subject you’re studying at any given moment. As you progress in your studies, you return to the same topics again and again, but with ever more sophisticated understanding.

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Editorial Note: This is specific to U.S. politics.

Right now, the issue of abortion looms large in any consideration of whether or not the U.S. House of Representatives will pass the Senate’s “healthcare reform” bill, and thereby reorder the healthcare arrangements of much of the country. One might ask whether or not this is inappropriate: is a tangential issue dominating the discussion of larger and more vital questions? I argue that the answer is no.

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Everyone knows that it’s hard to accurately estimate the duration of a software project. At bottom, this is because you often don’t know exactly what you’re doing, or exactly how you’ll do it, which makes it hard to work out how long it will take. (Possible complicating factor: figuring out what you’re doing and how you’ll do it is 95% of the work; the rest is just a little light typing.) I think a related (and more addressable) problem is that of the seductive tangent.

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In lieu of a 6WS, 11 words from Tom Sowell that I’d be hard put to top:

People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid.

Catchy, I think.