Recovering from a Crisis of the Heart

Recovering from a Crisis of the Heart

On January 13, 2022, I underwent coronary artery bypass surgery. Afterward, I was groggy with three long draining-tubes below my rib cage. My chest hurt since the surgeon had to break bones to get to my heart. I needed to hug a heart-shaped pillow to protect my chest...

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Surviving a Crisis of the Heart

Surviving a Crisis of the Heart

On January 13, 2022 at 7:30 am, I underwent cardiac bypass surgery. Dr. Fayyaz Hashmi replaced four arteries, two feeding blood into my heart and two out of it. For a 75-year-old, I was active, with a resting heart rate of 55 beats per second. Yet, a slight pressure...

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NEGOTIATING LANGUAGE AND COMPROMISE

NEGOTIATING LANGUAGE AND COMPROMISE

Has anyone enjoyed the experience of negotiating with a car dealer? Or enjoyed any form of negotiation at all? What if you wanted to become an effective negotiator, adept at using the appropriate negotiating language? Where do you start? I took a first step by...

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Twilight Thinking for Creativity

Twilight Thinking for Creativity

How do you get ideas to fuel your creativity for innovation or problem-solving? I will describe one of my methods. Many of the ideas for this article came during the short period between sleeping and waking. To me it is a twilight zone. It happens for about 10 to 20...

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A Principled Way to Share Expertise

A Principled Way to Share Expertise

I am searching for “principles” to use when explaining how to model. I want to distill them from my experience modeling with many disciplines. Some principles, I suspect, are out of my conscious awareness. My actions reflect my principles. How do I uncover these...

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Only the Young Can Be Creative

Only the Young Can Be Creative

You overhear Sam, a man in his mid-forties, say to a much younger man: “Only the young can be creative.” Einstein said something similar: Anything truly novel is invented only during one’s youth. Later one becomes more experienced, more famous - and more blockheaded!...

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Side-Stepping Violence

Side-Stepping Violence

I was never very tall, even as a kid. When I was in 8th grade, I had to go to a middle school for three months before beginning high school. One day I was in a music class. Being shy, I sat near the back of the room, which was like a miniature auditorium with stadium...

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Thinking about Deception

Thinking about Deception

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” ― Noel Langley, the Wizard of Oz Someone called my 90-year-old mother-in-law claiming to be her grandson.  He wanted her to wire him some money. The need for senior citizens to protect themselves against scammers is a...

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A Storyteller’s Tale

A Storyteller’s Tale

I tell personal stories in many of my essays and blog posts. Yet, there is something about telling a story to an audience that appeals to me. People pay attention when you say the words “let me tell you a story.” After I told my last story before an audience on...

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The Dark Side of Expertise

The Dark Side of Expertise

“… science in general can be considered a technique with which fallible men try to outwit their own human propensities to fear the truth, to avoid it, to distort it.” Abraham Maslow, 1966 Expertise has two dark sides. The first is what others think of experts. Many...

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My Mission

To explore the unknown through modeling. To understand the modeler’s inner world and external behavior as he or she models. And to communicate it all with stories.

Pascal is a master modeler, who has modeled physical phenomena, satellite motion, and the behavior of people, organizations, and corporations. Learn more...

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