Only When the Words Outdo the Silence

Why wouldn’t you want to work with or hire this person?  From Professor William Cronon of the University of Wisconsin – Madison, a list of the 10 qualities you’re likely to find in a liberally educated person (or one of those liberal arts kids).  In full disclosure, I went to a small liberal arts college.  I’m always annoyed whenever I hear people rag on the education – “What are you going to do with that degree?”, “What fast food spot will we see you at?”, “I should have specialized and picked up a functional degree.”  Hogwash, you can do whatever you like with this degree.

9. They nurture and empower the people around them. One of the most important things that tempers the exercise of power and shapes right action is surely the recognition that no one ever acts alone. A liberally educated person understands that they belong to a community whose prosperity and wellbeing is crucial to their own, and they help that community flourish by giving of themselves to make the success of others possible. If we speak of education for freedom, then one of the crucial insights of a liberal education must be that the freedom of the individual is only possible in a free community, and vice versa as well. It is the community that empowers the free individual, just as it is free individuals who lead and empower the community. The fulfillment of high talent, the just exercise of power, the celebration of human diversity: nothing so redeems these things as the recognition that what seem like personal triumphs are in fact the achievements of our common humanity

This perfectly sums up how I felt about working at Aspyr as a video game tester.  Humor me, people :

And it frequently requires complex thinking. In fixing motorcycles you come up with several imagined trains of cause and effect for manifest symptoms, and you judge their likelihood before tearing anything down. This imagining relies on a mental library that you develop. An internal combustion engine can work in any number of ways, and different manufacturers have tried different approaches. Each has its own proclivities for failure. You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels. For example, the backfire of a too-lean fuel mixture is subtly different from an ignition backfire.

According to the fine folks over at PostRank, the top blogs of 2009 broken out by categories.  Were you wondering which 8 blogs to target for your site, your client’s site?