TED Community » Thomas Brucia

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Books (over 2,000 volumes in my house). I try to read a book a week. Also heavily into backpacking. I love learning and exploring; the more detail and complex the better.

An idea worth spreading

All ideas which are attempts to explore and understand are worth spreading. Lies, propaganda and ideologies are not.

People don't know that I'm good at

Spanish or that I have an MBA...

My TED Story

I keep stumbling onto TED when I follow links or take up the postings of interesting online friends. The only other place I'm seldom disappointed is The Charlie Rose Show.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +9.40 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

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  A comment on Conversation: What is success to you?

  Apr 26 2013: Success is a dangerous word. It keeps us in fear of its opposite: failure. If I had my life to live over (I'm in my mid-60s) and had a wish it would have been that someone older than me had told me the value of failing. Over and over. Everyone wanted me to be successful, and I was taught "if you can't do something right, then don't do it at all." The message I got was 'don't reach out and try if you're going to fail to do it right.' What a poisonous saying. When I bump into discouraged young folks who are down because they have failed and who are discouraged at their inability to do what they had set out to do, I tell them to be gloriously happy -- because learning to fail is critical to success in life. And I tell them a (true) story: I met a 50-something accountant for a large oil company... well, actually a former accountant. He's gone to a good university and successfully obtained an accounting degree. He had successfully gotten an advanced degree. He had successfully gotten a good job and had had career success. He'd married a great wife, bought an expensive house, and drove nice cars.... And then he was replaced by two kids right out of college who -- together -- cost his firm less than he did. He lost the wife (divorce). He lost the cars. He lost the house (again, the divorce). When I met him he was in a deep depression, lost, living in a one-bedroom apartment. His successful life hadn't prepared him for failure. I realized my checkered past including career changes, being fired, being laid off, failing at supposedly 'simple' jobs (e.g. short order cook) and so on had left me with strengths he lacked. It wasn't that I was smarter or better or anything else redounding to my credit. On the contrary! NO! Failing had prepared me to pick up my marbles and move on, never giving up. He was 50+ and he was lost. I wasn't. His enemy wasn't something he was at fault for. It was something he had experienced: too much success.
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  A reply on Conversation: There exist objective moral truths

  Dec 17 2012: The objective is not only physical (i.e. material) but also involves time and change, an additional dimension other than space in which matter exists. That said, our brains and our sense organs dimly perceive what is 'out their' and are quite capable of creating things inside our heads that go beyond that mysterious place called 'the world'. If one thinks about it, other humans are as inherently mysterious as are chimps or spiders or bacteria or methane gas molecules and we only dimly infer facts about all of these. I don't really know what 'important' means, but I know that female spiders often eat their mates and I'm OK with that. Ditto wars between ant colonies. I draw the line at innocent smallpox viruses using my body to survive and prosper. I have no moral qualms about exterminating the smallpox viruses that survive in the world. I have a big moral qualm with human genocide. Obviously (since genocides are human projects) not all folks agree with me and feel that a world without Tutsi humans (for example) would be just as desirable as a world without smallpox viruses. I don't condone human genocides -- and I like to think I'd have the courage to stand with those dying in a genocide -- but I'm going to throw my towel into the ring with Existentialism (especially Camus) and just say my moral choices are not anything transcendent. They are simply my choices. Patterns in my behavior. Facts on the ground.

• A comment on Conversation: There exist objective moral truths

  Dec 17 2012: The word 'objective' is the root of the problem. Whatever happens inside the head of a person or persons is objective in the sense that neural pathways exist objectively. A similar argument could be made for the existence of God or leprechauns or kappas or angels: they objectively exist as images inside human brains. The ambiguity is that 'objective' can also mean that the objectively existent miscellanea inside our skulls exist outside our minds. (No evidence that they do, since science has discovered a multitude of subatomic particles -- but never a 'morality' particle).
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  A comment on Conversation: How many books have you read this year?

  Jun 12 2012: I try to read a book a week, but sometimes end up taking such detailed notes and look up so many technical details I fall short. Also I often re-read books with a yellow notepad at my side (chuckle: guess it's obvious I'm mostly into non-fiction, huh.). I'd guess that in the last 12 months: 30-40 books; since January 1st, perhaps 15-20. It's hard to pin down which have been the best, since I tend to be selective.... Biggest 'discovery' was Charles Dickens, who I always thought of as 'the guy who wrote about Scrooge'. He's even better than Wilkie Collins! In the non-fiction arena, my most recent (and a fantastic) read was Barbara Tuchman's history of the first month of World War One: "The Guns of August". That one had me scouring the net for maps and looking up biographies and orders of battle on Wikipedia. I'm now re-reading Eric Newby's autobiographical tale about his 1938 trip round the world on one of the last commercial sailing ships. He was 18. The book: "The Last Grain Race". So many books... so little time.
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  A comment on Talk: Julia Bacha: Pay attention to nonviolence

  May 12 2012: It would be great if all those posting were to identify their place of residence, what sources of information they rely on, their religious and ideological loyalties, and (at the least) not throw accusations at each other's sincerity, intelligence or objectivity. Fat chance!

• A reply on Talk: Julia Bacha: Pay attention to nonviolence

  May 12 2012: Precisely! Humans want to see conflict, strife, excitement and violence. It was true of Romans watching the gladiators; it is true of modern people watching their television screens.

• A comment on Talk: Christina Warinner: Tracking ancient diseases using ... plaque

  Apr 22 2012: This talk was like looking through a keyhole into a whole new galaxy of knowledge..... The idea of having a genetic history of pathogens and how they have evolved is a fascinating one. The simple fact that humans survived the biological contest between the ever-changing immune systems and co-evolving micro-organisms (without the benefits of 'medicine') is a bit amazing itself. We are getting ever closer to understanding how 'genetic code' works. The idea of tracking and studying other species (bacteria) and then eventually finding ways of conceptualizing how the 'colliding systems' (humans and bacteria) interact is as awesome a potential universe as any I can imagine. As our antibiotics continue to fail and fall behind in the 'arms race' between evolving bacteria and our bodies, one can only guess what lessons may be learned from this very specialized area of .... 'history' !!!!
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  A comment on Talk: Sherry Turkle: Connected, but alone?

  Apr 22 2012: Toward the very end of this lecture I was IM'd by a friend in Second Life (virtual world) and we 'caught up'. I helped her through a rough patch in her life (depression and abusive husband) by advising her to get in touch with a doc to get 'sample' medicines. (She didn't have any insurance). That was a few years ago. She divorced, recently moved to Tennessee, and has a new and sane boyfriend... and a job she loves! (She had problems with her old boss back in Missouri...). Point? I'm not so sure technology need separate us, nor make us less caring and concerned with each other.
  
  I'll tell you what the real defect in 'virtual communication' is: lack of the physical act of touching! Maybe because I'm more sexual than I perhaps should be, I miss the feeling of touch in any virtual relationship (hey, telephones are 'technology' too, and share this defect!). But it isn't just sex, either. My two grandsons live in Japan and -- though we keep in contact via webcam -- I have come to realize that throwing them up in the air, running to keep up with them in the park, taking toys from their hands that they want to show me.... these all involve touching and are really, really important!
  
  Also, I've 'messed around' with both texting and with Twitter... and I hate both of them. Why? Simply because they limit me.... I'm a 'think in paragraph' person and the *limitations* they impose are that they demand soundbites. It isn't 'technology' per se that's the problem. It's inadequate technology!
  
  Finally, I like to backpack (speaking of solitude) and I don't mind meeting a 'new person' doing that. He's a stubborn, proud, aging cuss who is constantly thinking. He gets tired. He has a body that works pretty well until it fails. Yes, I get to watch myself in action. (Ditto my workouts in 3x a week 'bootcamp'!). The problem isn't sitting in front of a computer or escaping from the idiocy of meetings or classes that are 'content-free'. It's sitting on your butt all da

• A comment on Conversation: A conversation with Prudential: As people are living longer, how can we plan for a retirement that could last up to 30 years or more?

  Apr 20 2012: The secret of surviving in hostile environments is not primarily about planning. (There's a famous quote, paraphrased from Helmuth von Moltke's "On Stategy": "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy!"). Surviving is much more in line with Charles Darwin's statement that "“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” The toolkit is one's mind! Imagination, flexibility, self-discipline, keeping one's head when others panic, and so on.... A successful retirement (as any other project) has little to do with what one HAS, and is all about what one IS.

• A reply on Conversation: A conversation with Prudential: As people are living longer, how can we plan for a retirement that could last up to 30 years or more?

  Apr 20 2012: I'd go a bit further, given the fact of increasing instability of the world. I wonder if we aren't living in something like the years of the Weimar Republic. What German in 1928 would have predicted the partition of Germany, the capital (Berlin) in ruins, armies from Russia, France, Britain and the U.S.. occupying the (partitioned) nation, millions dead (counting both troops and civilians). For reasons unknown, humans tend to project the recent past and the present into the future. Incredible! And now we have nuclear proliferation and biological and chemical agents unknown in 1939-1945.... Still, folks try to 'plan for the future' as if it weren't a mostly futile project. I heartily recommend to all Nassim Taleb's work, "The Black Swan", if only for his depiction of starting his life in a peaceful and prosperous Beirut -- and the fantasies the adults surrounding his life entertained about the nation of Lebanon "returning to normal" (as if there were a 'normal'). Great book. L