Happy Birthday To Us

This is our second anniversary. As blogging customs require, here are some numbers. Since we started this blog in April 2008, we’ve had over 1.6 million pages views for a total of almost 1.500 blog posts. That would be an average of 2.200 views a day (although recently we average around 5.000 views a day), and over a thousand views per post (were it not that many page views are for the home page of this blog, which contains several blog posts).

We publish an average of 2 blog posts a day, although there have been days when we had other things to do. We know that blog readers like a steady stream of alphanumerical characters interspaced with blanks and punctuation marks, and hate checking a blog only to find that there’s nothing new. So we try to be regular.

We’ll organize a reader satisfaction survey sometime in the near future to learn what people think about us. However, if you already have a strong opinion – positive or negative – or a useful suggestion for improvement, take advantage of the current festivities and use the comment section below this post to say whatever you have to say. What we really like to know is what you think about the length of the posts (sometimes too long we guess), the mix of different kinds of posts (perhaps there’s too much frivolity and not enough “serious” stuff), about the general content, and of course the style (too “didactic” probably and not snarky or polemical enough).

We receive a lot of comments, and have approved 5.100 of them (an average of 3.4 per post). It’s amazing how many spam comments we get; more than one in two comments are spam. Probably some of those have escaped the spam cage and are currently disfiguring this blog. It’s sometimes hard to tell and we are generous by nature. We use this occasion to thank all the commenters, as well as all the more silent readers (a large majority).

We also use it to remind readers of some useful but relatively unknown features of this blog: there are a number of ways to subscribe to this blog (see here); you can follow the blog and read the posts on Twitter; and you can participate in our ongoing polls on moral dilemmas. If you’d like to guest write, send us a proposal.

Anyway, we are jolly good fellows, and so are all of you. We’ll try to be still around next year.

Human Rights: Thinking Outside the Box

(source)

The expression “thinking outside the box” means thinking beyond convention or conventional wisdom, beyond the boundaries of the familiar and the usual, off the trodden path. It means imagining unusual, creative and new solutions to problems, solutions that are different from the normal, knee-jerk reactions to things, and from the normal way of looking at things and doing things. It implies forgetting all the assumptions that everyone else is making.

The expression has become part of standard management mumbo jumbo, unfortunately. Future managers are taught to think outside the box, in an effort to encourage them to be creative and original (but not too much). The expectation is that managers who are creative and innovative will help to boost the company’s profits.

The phrase comes from a riddle many of you probably already know. For those who don’t: take a look at the image below. You see a “box” containing 9 dots. The goal is to link all 9 dots using 4 straight lines or less, without lifting the pen.

The solution is here. I guess that makes the meaning of the expression somewhat clearer. I try to apply this approach to the subject of human rights. A few examples (click on the links to know more):

• The rule of law, although normally a prerequisite for the enforcement of human rights, can often be the most efficient tool to violate them. See here and here.
• Oppression and exploitation can occur by mutual agreement.
• Human rights activism can be counter-productive and self-defeating.
• No matter how hard we try to protect people’s human rights, they often don’t care about human rights, or even reject them. So why do we try?
• Human rights violations may be self-inflicted.
• Some human rights violations may actually benefit the victims, and may not benefit the perpetrator.
• Some human rights may be taken to such a logical extreme that they become duties.

Here‘s a post that deals in some detail with the topic of “thinking” (inside or outside the box). And there’s another riddle here.

Math Riddle

(This is the solution to the riddle published here).

AC is the same distance as BD, because it’s a rectangle. Given that B is at the center of the circle, BD = radius of the circle. And radius = 7 + 12 cm. So AC, because AC=BD, also equals 7 +12 = 19 cm. Normally the letter for radius is “r”. See here.