Dear S,

Congratulations!

What you've discovered -- and some people never figure this out -- is what I like to call the "work" in work.

Critics talk about an artist's "body of work". There's your first hint.

In fact, even people who aren't artists talk about this stuff all the time, without identifying it for what it is:

"I love what I do, but I really hate the meetings!"

"You know, this job would be great without the politics!"

"I feel like my vision is hostage to the desires of all these other people!"

Work always contains something unpleasant that you'd rather not have to do or face. That's why they call it that. Otherwise they'd call it something else. That's what the money is for. Otherwise it would be "play" and no-one would give you a dime.

The "work" in work for me is getting up in the morning. I'm a night person. I don't mind the meetings. I enjoy the politics. I thrive teaming up with others. I'm good at confrontation, and enjoy the sharpening of purpose that rejection brings. I'm currently at the top of my career involved in a project I love. But getting to the office before 11am? Man that is really, really hard for me. It sounds silly, I know, but that's the "work" in my work.

So, again, congratulations for making this discovery! Cary has already given you lots that might be part of your solution, and I'm sure you'll figure out the rest.

Regards,

In fact, gambling is an analogy that is constantly used in economics textbooks.

John Maynard Keynes -- arguably the father of much of modern economics -- wrote in the 1930s that financial markets are like "beauty contests" where punters would bet on who, after all opinions had been tallied, was going to be deemed the most beautiful girl.

So, he went on to say, people didn't invest in stocks or instruments that seemed to them to be the most "beautiful" -- but rather placed their money on "what average opinion expects average opinion to be".

This is a fundamental insight. So fundamental that many economic events of the last 70 years cannot be understood without understanding the basic truth that Keynes revealed with this specific gambling analogy.

Andrew Leonard's sports betting analogy is accurate, apt, and useful.

Farhad offers:

Remember, people in the survey were trying to place countries on unlabeled maps.

So what!? Unlabeled maps have been part of every single TV news broadcast that has ever been put to air. I can invoke the visual for you with this simple auditory clue:

"And now to Susan with the weather...." And there she is standing in front of a huge unlabelled map.

For global unlabelled maps, see the "world weather" on CNN or the BBC.

But fortunately there's a much simpler and indeed far more rational reason why people all over the world get maps wrong. You can sum this reason up with one word:

Scale.

Maps are massively, vastly scaled. Similar to the a sizable majority of people who simply cannot "see" a 3D room from a 2D plan, a sizable minority of people simply cannot connect a map to anything real that they experience in the world.

The scale is simply too vast.

The skill of understanding maps can be taught even to those who don't naturally "get" it, but only if, like any other skill, someone wants to learn.

Patrick wrote:

I remember how the first "Alien" movie (1979) was revolutionary in its portrayal of spacecraft as industrial machines, greasy and unkempt, a departure from the antiseptic order of "Star Wars" and the like.

Perhaps you meant Star Trek?

Star Wars was seedy bars; broken-down 'droids; Han Solo's filthy, flaky, but fast Falcon that required Fonzie-like whacks on the console to fire up; and a long scene in a trash compactor!

By contrast, the ship in Alien may have been grippingly gothic, but it wasn't gruesomely grody.

Sorry, have to let my geek flag fly sometimes! Otherwise, an evocative and exciting column -- and congratulations on your return to flight!

The crucial change in the environment, which Blumenthal correctly identifies, is that it can now no longer be claimed "we got the intelligence wrong."

It's the difference between an "honest" mistake, and utter perfidy.

The intel was not "uncertain". There was not "as much evidence either way, so safer to act". There was no "balance" of evidence that needed to be "weighed" by the President, requiring him to act to "protect" the American people.

This new information doesn't only confirm that Bush lied about WMD -- we knew that -- this information means that all the "uncertainty" justifications offered by the administration since are also lies.

We often hear the phrase "beyond a reasonable doubt" floated as the standard for determining guilt.

Before this information came to light, one could still make an argument -- howsoever weak -- that "reasonable doubt" still existed. It exists no longer.

It is now clear, and there is now evidence establishing beyond any reasonable doubt that Bush and others in the administration lied and continue to lie. It wasn't a mistake. There was no credible evidence. All the good intel pointed the other way, so they squashed it. And there are witnesses.

Impeach now.

Kras Air is an abbreviation for Krasnoyarskie Avialinii, but that won't stop the well-earned mockery should there be a krash -- er, crash.

I can't be the only one who heard Crass Air!