Career options for INTJ's

Penelope Trunk says all and only INTJ's are strategists (as opposed to managers). I happen to be an INTJ, so I followed her links and ended up at this page containing Jungian descriptors of the Myers-Briggs types. For INTJ's, here are the top 5 'favored careers,' in order:

-scientist
-dictator
-forensic scientist
-systems analyst
-philosopher

3/5 of these careers are ones I considered at one point in my life -- guess which ones? Now here are the top five 'disfavored careers,' in order:

-advertising executive
-job in entertainment industry
-performer
-singer
-art therapist

I have done all but one of these, speaking in general terms.

Anyway, PT is right on here:

People do what their strengths are regardless of what their job description is. Real leaders will lead in any situation they find themselves. Real writers will always write, no matter what their day job is. And real strategists will always think in terms of the conceptual future, from any job they have.

Friday time-suck: a different kind of world clock.

The Spirit of Now: a world clock keeping a running tally of things like births, deaths, HIV infections, CO2 emissions, etc. The numbers are not quite real-time, but are continuously updating from various international official sources. Unexpectedly transfixing.

Interlude on the beach

Yesterday my hosts and I went to the beach to watch a fire-spinning demonstration. We went around 6, unaware that once the day crowds leave, this particular beach becomes a gathering place for lots and lots of tough guys, along with their fancy cars and good-looking women. Our group spotted an unoccupied firepit and set up camp; immediately several rather intimidating delegates from the parking-lot-wide tailgate party advanced upon us, gesticulating wildly until they got into shouting range. 'That's our firepit,' they announced. 'But there was no one near it,' we said. The situation seemed tense, and some members of our group were in favor of moving on to a less controversial cooking spot, but through continued negotiations we agreed that our party would use the firepit for cooking until dark, at which point we would go looking for our fire-spinning friends, and the tailgate group would take over the area for their bonfire. Hurray for the non-zero-sum thinking displayed by my friend Leslie, the chief negotiator on our side!

Once these formalities were out of the way, we were besieged by all of the kids in the tailgate group, who wanted to know how come we were cooking in a firepit instead of on grills and portable deep fryers. They also wanted to look over our food supplies, inspect and eventually admire our attire, and show us their sand crabs in paper cups. After we finished up with our cooking, we approached the tailgaters to compliment their decorated cars and take our leave; they invited us to hang out at their bonfire and party with them. We had to regretfully decline, although Leslie handed out some business cards; the little girls in particular were sad to see us go. Overall it was a very pleasant beach picnic, although we never were able to successfully meet up with the fire-spinners.

Friday time-suck: tell me what you see.

Check out this incredibly cool blog post over at Neurophilosophy on how the brain interprets 'ambiguous' images -- images that are capable of more than one interpretation, and therefore cause the brain to flip-flop back and forth, perceptually. I could include here the mind-bending sample image, but wouldn't want to deprive you of the opportunity to read the whole thing.

Update: I just saw Voltaire in the Dali painting -- whoa!

Early Friday time suck: do your part to organize the universe.

Following the trend of using human brains to do visual classification work that is easy for us, hard for computers, GalaxyZoo.org uses web surfers to classify the million galaxies being photographed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Procrastinators, follow me!

Woolgathering: Are You Normal?

Via TierneyWeb I see a pointer to this survey from Columbia University psychologist Malia Mason, who is trying to find out if daydreaming tendencies can tell us anything useful about background cortical functions. The upshot is, if you answer 12 questions about your daydreams, you can see how you compare to the "average" daydreamer. (According to the stats at the end of the survey, I spend more time than the average individual in mental wandering, but less time thinking about practical matters or other people.)

Questions I have about daydreaming:

-Does the ability to daydream decrease with age? I remember spending much more time lost in thought as a kid, and find that it's harder to achieve this state now.

-Does daydreaming serve as important a cognitive function as actual, REM dreaming? (I imagine this is part of Dr. Mason's project.)

-Is daydreaming as useful as traditional meditation for reducing stress and bringing mental clarity? Both activities induce alpha brain waves, which are associated with relaxation and rest, as well as theta waves, which are linked with inspiration and creativity (and can also be induced by monotonous driving).