Randomness, Optionality & Gladwell, Dawkins, Clinton and more

Randomness and optionality are the governing forces I heap my praise.

Some chance invites this past week had New York City offering a gorge at a sophist smorgasboard. First was the NY Stem Cell Foundation honoring the brilliantly entrepreneurial Joel Marcus of Alexandria Real Estate with Frank Gehry and Barry Diller. Joel's facilities and labs house some of the most cutting edge startups in the country. The following night had Bill Clinton presenting a group of us with you-are-there recap of Middle East policy from just before his presidency till today.

Two key takeaways: First, in any situation, only you, can grant the power to someone to humiliate you. Second, demography, technology and time are not allies of Israel's seemingly intractable situation. In other words: faster population growth of its hostile neighbors coupled with increased availability of GPS guided precision missiles mean time is not in its favor.

Next came intimate talks from Malcom Gladwell on why it isn't that drinking makes you uninhibited, but merely myopically focused. Followed the next day by Jim Surowiecki who spoke to a crowd on why we procrastinate, what it means and how stop doing it.

That was followed by a release party for Andrew Ross Sorkin's rising best-seller “Too Big Too Fail” which had nearly all the players in his insider's account of what just happened to our economy in attendance. The next night Richard Dawkins spoke at the New York Academy of Sciences on The Greatest Show on Earth, evolution.

And last night a traverse to Tribeca's Barnes & Noble had Dawkins again signing throngs of books. By sheer coincidence, or the draw of Dawkins, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, was holding court with an orbit of 20 people, talking about life, the universe and everything.

When the Barnes & Noble staff, not recognizing one of its own best-selling authors, moved Tyson to the obsolete CD & DVD section, he—as any great scientist might—refused on grounds that such a request was irrational. There, I stood in an ironic moment within the store's shelved labyrinth of letters, bookended to my left by Richard Dawkins—irritant to the irrational—and to my right Neil deGrasse Tyson—popularizer of the rational—standing his ground against store staff selling a dying medium.

The saving grace of a modern bookstore is intellectually curious people gathering to meet with each other and admired authors in physical space and buy books. And they were being herded to the music and video section. To randomness and optionality...