Call Me What You Want's Public Library

In the official Japanese diagnostic system, taijin kyofusho is subdivided into the following categories:

* Sekimen-kyofu, the phobia of blushing (English term: ereuthophobia)
* Shubo-kyofu, the phobia of a deformed body, similar to Body dysmorphic disorder
* Jikoshisen-kyofu, the phobia of eye contact
* Jikoshu-kyofu, the phobia of having foul body odor (English term: osmophobia, bromidrosiphobia)

Since it is not prevalent in American culture, taijin kyofusho is not detailed in the DSM IV. This is under debate, however, as symptoms indicative of taijin kyofusho are sometimes found in patients in the United States.

Yay!!! Finally a new word for Wapanese people. Maybe that’ll get rid of most of the bandwagon hikkis.

…just kidding.

I think it was Jikoshisen-kyofu because as a person who grew up shy and could be considered anti-social and then getting to a certain point where you did become more social, the difference in eye contact is mind boggling to yourself.

All untestable assumptions, and built on a shaky understanding of evolutionary psychology. In other words, “…more research is needed.”

Also, more coffee. Kin I gets mah grant now?

(This one isn't about a conversation spoken in a Hikikomori Board but I've encountered a similar pattern in the old AnonIB Hikikomori board addressed to my way of posting so when I encountered this, since I haven't read that part of anonarchive yet, I thought this was a great example to add because these are words I've spoken and it shows me in a negative light)

Me: Again may I be allowed to disagree? *sweat drops*

The first bit of appealing to pathos is correct. You don't need it to coincide with your own. See all American presidents notably Obama

Secret agendas are also wrong. Of course everyone has secrets but in politics, the best politicians aren't those with

secrets that when revealled gets them kicked out of the office but the ones who's secrets are so open, you can't help but close off your mind to them as a mass and become apathetic to it. aka The Big Lie although the origins and context of that term is controversial.

Still Me: @chocolatehappiness On the contrary, in the Philippines, appealling to logos = voting for the lesser of two devils and the president that will most likely win. ;)

Appealing to ethos would be to suggest welfare projects to fool people into thinking that government is about answering people's needs rather than well... governing :(

chocolatehappiness: go ahead mister speaker

adjudicators are listening :p

chocolatehappiness: case in point: the 9/11 Bush brainwash on the US soldiers is a solid ground of what is stated above that self-interest coincides with... secret agenda

Me: @chocolatehappiness the thing is Bush didn't brainwash the US soldiers nor the culture of the time. They were already brainwashed. I'm not saying believe the conspiracy theories but historically evidence-wise there was already a strong implication of blowback. The only question was when. The fact that Americans didn't even know why someone would hate them so much to risk their lives proves that it was more of a Big Lie than a secret agenda.

Me: Clarification in this case.

...and the chance to be proven wrong without being misunderstood. :p

CognacWest: once we've entered politics or anything that has to do with dirty tricks. let's accept the fact that nobody is clean and too much idealism..

...is bullsh*t!

chocolatehappiness: so what is the bottomline of your argument mister chair?

Me: CognacWest, nah, that's not exactly valid especially after the Ron Paul phenomena during the US primaries. I'm not saying everyone is perfect but it's perfectly possible to be idealistic and not be destroyed by the system to a certain point.

@chocolatehappiness, didn't I already answer that? :p

chocolatehappiness: @Huo, no because your arguments are self-contradicting. hehe

Me: @CognacWest actually he eliminated two top contenders Gulianni and Romney who were originally going to be the big names and large money backing them. Gulianni lost when he went against Paul in the primary debates. After that, he is probably the biggest major upset in recent American political elections This mind you when Paul was basically an unknown and who's politics was considered walking on water for the Republican party. Meanwhile McCain was running out of money but Paul who was a true conservative and had the support of money bombs continued to hang on

CognacWest: really? How Come it's Huckabee and my mentor, John McCain won the primaries? coz u know what, Paul is a double agent working for Democrats!

Me: (cont.) despite the lack of political support. At this point Romney was still in it and...

Actually Huckabee was the 2nd black sheep. He was the most charismatic of that bunch despite the media selling Romney. However his politics while it may have been good compared to everyone else there except Paul, just wasn't enough to keep him afloat unlike Paul What happened with McCain was that as I was saying, the top 3 including Paul despite being the kulelat was still darn close. This was what should have set up what is called a brokered convetion. Romney however despite being on top of the top3 and had the most financial backing, "mysteriously" backed out. With him backing out, even if the odds were low for a brokered convetion before, the situation pretty much was in McCain's favor since Paul was stilll not just as big a name as McCain. This is why Obama faced better competition during the primaries than the general too. McCain was self-destructing everywhere. The only reason people forget the primaries is because McCain kind of distracted everyone with Palin

Me: In fact, you can't legitimately call yourself capitalist if you even support McCain unless you didn't do your research

shares: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUZwL9GPcNw

Err... you're taking the Nba analogy way too literally.

CognacWest: increase eloisa's karma my friend. come on, you have to face the reality not everyone will take matters seriously but if you wanted to...

try joining ANC's square off and imma cheer for you. well, you quite impressed me. :)

in reality, it's a win-win situation, i did even increase your karma.

Me: Btw chocolatehappiness and CognacWest, do you mind if I quote your words here along with your usernames on my blog?

@CognacWest, not really. I don't really care for karma. (I left for awhile and it went to 0) I know this isn't anything special to say

chocolatehappiness: yup u got that right :)

go ahead use our names we really dont care

Note:

This isn’t a replacement for Verbal Self-Defence but I haven’t researched and practiced the latter enough to attempt a guide specifically for Hikkikomoris.

This also just happens to be the next thread that came up when I was reading the AnonIB /hikki/ archives — so I decided to make a collection to highlight how redundant the comments are — even if these are often not exclusively thrown at Hikkikomoris.

Btw this is intended to be a constantly edited topic, it just happens that I got the idea from reading the above topic and started with it.

Well, I'm not even a novice at Verbal Self-Defence as I've pointed out in the post but as I understand it:

In general, there are things said that can produce negative emotions to the receiver who hears it.

The book: The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defence explains this concept more eloquently but the article linked to the post also addresses it to an extent. (as far as I know, the term is linked to one author and one author only and she creates a series of similar books revolving around the term.)

Anyways, the idea that you can feel bad about an insult is fairly obvious.

However because the theme of the book centers around the idea of how to "diffuse" the conflict rather than ignore it or mope around for a few days, it also went into details elaborating everything from why the latter two actions are self-destructive in order to set-up the whole "Self-defence" theme.

As one Amazon reviewer writes:

"Professor Elgin does a good job of analyzing verbal insults to reveal the presumptions underlying them, which we often sense but which we are unable to identify. She also rightly explains that responding to the conclusions reached by our adversaries--but ignoring the presumptions--simply impales us more deeply on their verbal hooks. Her suggestions, however, for dealing with these insults are somewhat in error."

Full text: http://www.amazon.com/review/R233BTKZ7FONL9/ref...

Anyways, I wasn't able to listen entirely to the content because I could only find an audiobook for it via bittorrent and it was choppy and I haven't ordered the book.

However even on the first cd, the author gave a glimpse of how even kind-hearted words can produce this negativity.

My own example (since I no longer have the audio cd) is to use the classical example of telling someone to "keep on practicing."

To the right person, this is a good enough encouraging advice. However to the wrong person, this is worse than giving no advise.

This is why it's not so much that the negativity in the list implies bad or offensive; nor that it needs an alternative "positive" comment list to serve as comparison.

If this is still confusing and you don't mind reading something long, you might want to check out these two links. (which are unrelated to my example but also highlights why the wrong words can have vast and dangerous implications)

With that specific example, the negativity inducing portion was the implication that by using "we" and "many of us", you're creating two negative implications:

1) One, even if you didn't intend it to be interpreted this way, you're sending the idea that you speak for everyone else. (Yes, even if you said many instead of everyone)

2) "We'll get there in time" while complimentary towards the OP sends the message to everyone else working towards that goal the idea that it's going to "take a while" before they manage to mimic the OP's success. For all they know, they might gain this self-realization tomorrow but your words send the message to them that they're not quite progressing as much as they thought they would and while not "Apocalyptic-like" in it's harm -- there's always the chance that the words would unearth the negativity they're trying to combat so much already and further drag them down.

Here's the rub though:

The goal of this post isn't to let these quotes hang out to dry and paint them as "Haha! Look at these jerks."

...Well that's not the main intention although sadly it does send that message to the wrong person too.

Rather the idea is to create a list to numb the Hikikomori to such negativity by showing them how redundant the words are as many of the points are repeated by different people.

It's not the best verbal self-defence nor do I know if the book actually recommends it but it's a much safer way than getting into a beehive of trolls and getting egged and potshotted on to harden your internet nerves.

Also this way allows you to "sit back" and look at the words and intentions rather than be focused on the attack which is another theme promoted by Verbal Self-defence.

#2

No problem. Hell, I'm not sure if being aware of it makes it any easier.

I mean even the average youtuber rants about this all the time but you don't really find most of them being changed by that awareness outside of going "Hear! Hear!" on the posts they like.

Even in this topic, I encountered the problem of trying to be biased by looking at the posts through as close as an objective yet emotional outlook as I can

...vs. feeling bad that I didn't include my own post and wondering if it's because of my bias

...vs. the idea that the longer the post, the less chance of it being offensive because there's more room to put clarifications that may diffuse the offensive sentence.

I wasn’t intending to criticize homeschooling in general. Some of the most articulate teens I’ve met have been homeschooled.

Then again, I’ve also met some individuals who were homeschooled and had parents which actively discouraged their children from learning knowledge essential to surviving in the world because the parents felt these abilities were at odds with their faith.

It’s also quite possible »4917’s parents homeschooled for completely different reasons.

As far as homeschooling, I’ve always been of the opinion that it was only better because traditional schools were that much worse. (This goes beyond what #4 said about U.S. schools) That’s probably why I phrased the question that way.

It isn’t like most schools aren’t fostering isolation either. One just has more physical space while the other has more mental space.

Still, space is still space. If you perceive it as a prison, both are still prison. Perceive it as a workplace and both are workplace. Perceive it as luxury than either one is luxury…

I’m not claiming to understand Lao Tzu better than the writer though.

Rather I’m just comparing the pattern of Lao Tzu’s words to the theme of the writer’s post.

If we were to rephrase the words in such a way that they address the writer’s post, Lao Tzu would have said something along the lines of:

He speaks too much! A Hikikomori who believes he’s a recluse already accepts that he is a recluse. A Hikkikomori who does not think of himself as a recluse already knows that he is not. Where is the need to tell a man who he is if you are already trying to convince them to follow my teachings? Should my teachings not already start to transform them into who they are rather than who they were? Or do you believe these people need not change anything at all to follow my teachings? If this is so, what is the point of trying to convince them to become someone they already are? He is just a man wanting you to feel good!

“learns to unlearn his learning”

My first choice, however, wasn’t Tumblr but forums.

Several things made me reconsider my choice however:

Update: Turns out the script was done and is located in this site: http://anonarchive.hikiculture.com/

Guess there’s not much need for this blog anymore. I’m basically just putting the topics here anyway as a personal motivation task.

Nah. I always read the comments especially since I'm not finished reading through the Anon-Archives.

It's just that I can't see this blog offering much purpose for anyone else seeing as this was suppose to be just mostly an idea to band-aid back-up AnonIB before it went down.

I am a Hikikomori

http://www.experienceproject.com/group_stories.php?g=142181&s=d

Ok, I was banned for the second time in HikiCulture (I don’t know the reason why. It could have something to do with that announcement that something changed in their profiles but since I never put any data in there, I never bothered tweaking it but soon I saw my account/posts disappear despite remaining active.

In fact, my account was deleted around the same time I wrote a reply. It wasn’t a controversial one and it was attributing the fact that despite the admin’s criticisms with the HikiPhpBB forum, the member base growth remained the same and in fact, the previous forum probably had more Hikikomori related topics although it wasn’t the fault of the forum design as there were certain key members that stopped being active at around the time the forum required these members to stay active.

For those looking for a board to talk about Hikikomori issues, as much as I’m ashamed that an attention whore thread got this high in Reddit, that’s probably where we are left with right now judging by this topic:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9k7kk/i_was_a_hikikomori_and_didnt_leave_the_house_for/

I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,

“I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

This Amazon review provides a much shorter and direct issue as to why I'm skeptical:

Source: http://www.amazon.com/rev...pr_viewpnt#R1TY559HFLITPR

You only agree with the idea that it is a culture of impatience after the answer has been given to you.

Yet, when I was reading that paragraph, the thing that strikes me was impatience was the last thing I would attribute it to. Instead I would say the web is a culture of gullibity and I'm not just thinking of scams and such.

There is a wonderful example of this in the story of the so-called Eastern Pearl Harbor, of the Second World War. During the first nine months of 1942, the United States Navy suffered a catastrophe. German U-boats, operating just off the Atlantic coast and in the Caribbean, were sinking our merchant ships almost at will. U-boat captains marvelled at their good fortune. “Before this sea of light, against this footlight glare of a carefree new world were passing the silhouettes of ships recognizable in every detail and sharp as the outlines in a sales catalogue,” one U-boat commander wrote. “All we had to do was press the button.”

What made this such a puzzle is that, on the other side of the Atlantic, the British had much less trouble defending their ships against U-boat attacks. The British, furthermore, eagerly passed on to the Americans everything they knew about sonar and depth-charge throwers and the construction of destroyers. And still the Germans managed to paralyze America’s coastal zones.

The British excelled at the task because they had a centralized operational system. The controllers moved the British ships around the Atlantic like chess pieces, in order to outsmart U-boat “wolf packs.”

►Posted by quant◄

simply impossible

Maybe, we, users, could just admit that we don’t know everything, and have a look at the help file what developer meant by something, and then if some doubt remain, ask in forum or contact developer.

I am sure that most of the answers to user questions that developers get from users can be found in the help files, but users are lazy ... it’s much easier to ask in forum or email developer and get the answer instead of wading though the help file.

The moral of this thread is, RTFM!!!

►Posted by dan7000◄

Hey Pierre,

I’m not intending to criticize your software - I’m just voicing a philosophy I’ve had in my own software development efforts. Disclaimer: I was engineering manager for Quicken for 5 years. I also designed and developed some other fairly popular commercial software. I never met my own standard for intuitive usability but I always pushed my team to think of it this way: if you need to point to the help file, it’s a usability flaw.

Even in this fast moving age specialization can be ok if you’re a person, but what if you’re a service, catering to thousands or millions of people? Sure, if the conditions around you don’t change much, you can satisfy the needs of a certain group very well, but if you exist in a fluid, everchanging medium such as the Internet, where everything shrinks and expands and overlaps all the time, the power that you offer might work against you in the end.

From this notion a new paradigm has arisen. Less is more. Simplicity is power. Create a solid foundation, and let others build a thousand different houses, each catering to a different need, and you’ll never go out of fashion. Simplicity is the key that unlocks the web. Bear with me.

The Twitter Dilemma

I, as many other authors, have bashed my head against the wall thinking: how is it possible that Twitter remains popular despite their frequent technical problems and the fact that there are other similar services out there which offer more? It is an unprecedented situation: normally, a service with solid competition which has the advantage of not having technical difficulties that prevent their user base from using the service (whether or not Twitter’s competition is better with this regard is debatable, but based on current data anything seems to be more reliable than Twitter) would have been dead and buried ages ago. Twitter, however, endures. Why?

The answer is simple: Twitter belongs to a new breed of services, perhaps accidentally discovered, that win by doing less, not more. It’s a foundation upon which hundreds of new applications were built, yet, in itself, it is little more than an API for a simple one-to-many short message broadcast system. I, myself, have thrown my hands up in frustration and tried to find an alternative I can stick with - Pownce, Plurk, and countless others. Unfortunately, it seems, all these services are too good to be a viable alternative.

How can this be? The web, most experts agree, is a platform - a platform for any service that has to do with information of any kind. Unfortunately for developers, as far as platforms go, it’s a very undefined one; there is no universal API for the Internet. Furthermore, the damn thing changes all the time. Web portals were once huge; now they seem clumsy and cluttered, because many new applications have created more elegant ways to start your online day. If you want to develop an application for the Internet, you must first find a way to channel and organize the information that’ll flow through; if you jump on the wrong train here in the very beginning, your application might be doomed.

Some smart developers have thus began to understand that it’s better to build a very simple service that caters to a very basic need, and slap an API on top, than to try and create a specific, complex service that does a lot right from the start. The first type of service, if executed well, has shown to be very resilient: once it breaks the initial attention barrier, competing against it is practically impossible.

By catering to a basic need, creating a service that satisfies it in a simple way and opening it up through an API, you’ve unlocked, or perhaps deciphered, a small part of the web as a platform. You’ve created a mini platform which everyone is going to use because it’s, simply put, good enough. As long as people have a need to send short messages to other people from wherever they are, Twitter is going to be a highly sought for commodity. Unless someone else makes it even more simple.

Less Is More

Add a couple of features to Twitter and it’s Wordpress. Why is a Wordpress minus a couple of features so popular? You have to stop thinking in the traditional way and adopt the new “less is more” philosophy to understand that.

Once upon a time, if you wanted to create a successful application, one of the keys to success was to offer a lot of features your competitors don’t have. Adobe’s Photoshop is one such application. If you need to edit some photos, it’s the best, period, because it has every tool you could possibly need.

But this is the disconnected world we’re talking about. On the web, things change. It’s not only important what you can do; you also want to be able to do it from wherever you want; you want to plug in into other services, you want to work together with other people. Furthermore - and this goes even more for mobile applications and services - on the Internet, complexity is looked down upon. People don’t want big applications that can do everything; they want simple, widgety applications that cater to a specific service.

Partly, this is because complexity makes web applications slow and clumsy. Partly, it is because the attention span of an average Internet user has shortened, and partly, it is because his willingness to learn the nuts and bolts of a complex application has diminished. Most importantly, it is because the Internet constantly changes and it’s really hard to build something big and complex on such shaky grounds.

The Magic Formula

Determine a basic need -> Create a service that satisfies it in the simplest way possible -> Open it up.

“how is it possible that Twitter remains popular despite their frequent technical problems and the fact that there are other similar services out there which offer more?”

A possible answer might be that if one day Scobbles or other “twitter-popular” guy/girl left Twitter it’s possible that many of us would follow him/her where he goes for various reasons. Coz in many cases you dont stay at Twitter because of its simplicity or functionality but because there are some people out there that you follow and interact.

I’m having a tough time separating out ‘web service’ vs ‘online software’ here. This theory applies to a web service like Twitter, for sure, but not as cleanly to online software like Flickr.

What made Flickr so popular isn’t the fact that it is simple to upload photos, but that they added in a whole set of additional functions that made it possible to create all sorts of communities around the photos. If you want to make Flickr simple, you’d remove those extra features and reduce Flickr to a web service to store and display photos.

I think with social networks, people will go to the site where their friends are at. What exactly starts the trend (say, from MySpace to Facebook), well, social media experts are getting paid a lot to try to figure that one out.

There have been a lot of historical studies that examine cultural fads/trends (and I think Twitter qualifies as one) and there are so many different factors that can influence their development–economic, social, political, technological influences as well as generational and gender factors. And sometimes, the popularity of a phenomena is simply illogical. Why did Crocs appear out of nowhere and suddenly be ubiquitous footwear for children? There probably was a business plan but sometimes it’s just the Zeitgeist, a fortuitous blend of timing and luck.

But as a person who doesn’t work in technology, I appreciated your analysis. There is a whole simplicity cultural movement that runs counter to the more consumption-driven trends.

Looking at your examples of Twitter and Google back in the day, it seems that’s how it works.

You offer some interesting opinions on why simple applications tend to succeed, but I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that users’ “willingness to learn the nuts and bolts of a complex application has diminished.” I’m not sure that it’s diminished, but simply that we’re catering to a new crowd now. Then years ago, how many people spent multiple hours a day browsing the internet? Hardly anyone compared to the world of today — probably only your most techsavvy friends. I’d argue that these are the people who are and have always been willing to learn how to get the most out of any complex app, but that these new casual users are not. And since a social networks is only valuable when it has lots of users, it’s best to cater to these casual people as well by focusing on simplicity.

The other I’d say that turns people off about big, do-everything applications is overlap. Nobody really wants to use a service whose features they already make use of at other locations, even if this service provides some different features as well. For example, I don’t know a soul who makes regular use of Facebook chat, because everyone already uses GTalk/Chat, AIM, and other services.

With that said, features are not a bad thing: they make good services better and more powerful, and I doubt there exists someone who’d refuse to use a service because it’s better and more powerful than it otherwise could be. What’s important is being smart in implementing these features, so they don’t make your sight overly complex and turn-off casual users. Equally important is releasing the features at a gradual and easily-manageable pace. Once you have millions of users, it’s okay to pile on the features and improvements — people won’t like them to begin with, but if these features are actually worthwhile then your users will adjust. Hopefully at this point your user-based is being propelled by virtually-unstoppable viral growth, so you app is valuable enough that new users are willing to take the time to learn about your features.

Facebook is a perfect example of this style of development in action.

100% in total agreement. The need for simplicity also reflects the maturity of the market (ironically). The new users are by their nature more technical, more interested in pushing the limits of the product/service. When the market becomes more mainstream, you find that the majority of users just want to use the core functionality. The introduction of whiz-bang bells and whistles just overwhelms the user and adds confusion to the interface. Two examples are… Tivo vs the the VCR/DVD controllers of the past. And the Flip videorecorder vs digital camcorders.

Because Qlubb’s market comprises the mainstream audience, we made a VERY conscious decision to take out functionality rather than add functionality. But it has not been easy; it’s too easy to fall into the feature-race trap.

But as with all markets, a big developing market will need to differentiate among the various user classes – one size does not fit all. And one of those markets will comprise the basic, mainstream user who wants simplicity.

Datum 1. At first I thought being struck by a bullet falling straight down would be no worse than getting hit over the head with a two-by-four--not the average guy's idea of fun, but not fatal either. What goes up must come down, but it needn't do so at the same speed. You run up against what's known as "terminal velocity." A bullet fired straight up will slow down, stop, then fall to earth again, accelerating until it reaches a point where its weight equals the resistance of the air. That's its terminal velocity.

For further insight, we turn to Hatcher's Notebook (1962) by Major General Julian S. Hatcher, a U.S. Army ordnance expert. Hatcher described military tests with, among other things, a .30 caliber bullet weighing .021 pounds. Using a special rig, the testers shot the bullet straight into the air. It came down bottom (not point) first at what was later computed to be about 300 feet per second. "With the [.021 pound] bullet, this corresponds to an energy of 30 foot pounds," Hatcher wrote. "Previously, the army had decided that on the average an energy of 60 foot pounds is required to produce a disabling wound. Thus, service bullets returning from extreme heights cannot be considered lethal by this standard."

If 30 foot pounds doesn't mean much to you, the bullet made a mark about one-sixteenth of an inch deep in a soft pine board. About what you'd get giving it a good whack with a hammer.  Note that we're talking about bullets shot straight up here. If the bullet is fired more or less horizontally, it may not lose much speed before returning to earth and could easily kill someone.

Datum 2. Then someone sent me an article from the Los Angeles Times about the problem of falling bullets in L.A. around New Year's and the Fourth of July.  According to the article, doctors at King/Drew Medical Center, a major L.A. trauma center, published a report in a medical journal (Journal of Trauma, December 1994) saying that between 1985 and 1992 they treated 118 people for falling bullet injuries around New Year's Eve or the Fourth of July. Thirty-eight of the victims died.

"There is some skepticism about the numbers reported by the King/Drew team," the article continued. "The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the Los Angeles Police Department--which serve a vastly larger area-- reported only about half a dozen deaths in the same period. . . . Other hospitals contacted by The Times . . . reported few cases."

King/Drew handles a lot more gunshot cases than other L.A. hospitals. But the King/Drew doctors also used fairly liberal criteria to identify falling-bullet victims (no gunshot heard or weapon seen, wound consistent with bullet falling from above, etc.). Given how confused trauma victims and witnesses often are about what happened, the numbers reported are probably high.

Datum 3. Still, the question isn't how many people get injured or killed by falling bullets, it's whether such things are possible at all. On further investigation, it appears the 60 foot-pound injury threshold cited by Hatcher may be misleading--a falling bullet's kinetic energy (foot pounds) alone is not a good predictor of the speed it needs to inflict a wound. B. N. Mattoo (Journal of Forensic Sciences, 1984) has proposed an equation relating mass and bullet diameter that seems to do a better job. Experiments on cadavers and such have shown, for example, that a .38 caliber revolver bullet will perforate the skin and lodge in the underlying tissue at 191 feet per second and that triple-ought buckshot will do so at 213 feet per second.

Mattoo's equation predicts that Hatcher's .30 caliber bullet, which has a small diameter in relation to its weight, will perforate the skin at only 124 feet per second. It's easy to believe that such a bullet falling at 300 feet per second could kill you, especially if it struck you in the head. In fact, maybe I need to rethink my dismissive comments about the danger of throwing a penny off the Empire State Building, although I still think the penny's tumbling in the updrafts would render it harmless.

Lists, lists and some more lists

Running a single company is a challenge, running a group of companies might look like an unachievable challenge (remember: Richard likes it that way). To get through the day, you got to have a productivity system, right? As with most successful systems, Richard Branson’s system is simple. He takes notes in a standard notebook, and writes everything down. He states that he worked his way through a bookcase full of them. And there’s this quote in his book as well:

“I have always lived my life by making lists: lists of people to call, lists of ideas, lists of companies to start, lists of people who can make things happen. Each day I work through these lists and it is that sequence of calls that propels me forward.”