Josh Shear – Final Archive – The final archive of the former JoshShear.com

Faith, trust and disappointing truths: Sagoyewatha (Red Jacket) responds to Jacob Cram

There’s a story in Judaism that is told in different ways. One version goes something like this: A prospective convert to Judaism wanted to know if anyone could teach him the whole Bible while he stood on one foot. The great teacher Hillel told him, “Love your neighbor as yourself. The rest is commentary.” And…
Telling our stories, remembering our history

I was in elementary school when I learned about the Holocaust. Same with Rosa Parks. I was an adult when I learned about the “Black Wall Street” riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It turns out that last one was sort of by design. Scott Ellsworth, a native Tulsan, published the first comprehensive history of the riot…
JFK’s speech at Rice: Unfolding ignorance and doing difficult things

You know the most famous part of former President John F. Kennedy’s September 1962 speech at Rice University. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” The rest of the speech, though, is also full of gems. First,…
Quiet desperation: On slogans, criticism and self-talk

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden. Some people use this quote as a motivation to work toward quitting their jobs or getting out of bad relationships. Others scoff at it and say, “This from a man who ran away from society and wrote a book about…
9/11, 20 years on

On Tuesday, September 4, 2001, a book called Fooled by Randomness hit bookstores. In it, author Nassim Taleb wrote that we should be aware that we don’t know what’s coming, and we should be ready just in case. Just in case what? Well, who knows, maybe a plane could fly into a building I’m working…
Luck, coincidence and shooting stars

It’s a common esoteric trope that all the decisions you make, big and small, lead to where you are, and that even one small change could lead to a drastic difference in our lives. Some people call this the sliding doors effect, after a 1998 movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow and John Hannah in which two…
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Build || Rebuild

Among my favorite stories about Gandhi may or may not be apocryphal, but it goes something like this: A woman walked many miles for hours with her young son to see Gandhi and ask him to tell her son to stop eating sugar. He told her to come back in two weeks. She did, and…
CTRL+Z: Biden and Trump in the perspective of bad code

When you’re iterating software and something goes amiss, you have two options: write a patch or roll it back. If you patch the code, it’s like putting a bandage on a wound. You take something that didn’t do what you intended it to do, and you put something new you hadn’t intended to create on…
Flipping the calendar: Our greatest creations

We build our greatest creations to God, or the gods, or whatever it is we worship. From Gobekli Tepe to the pyramids at Giza to Stonehenge to Sagrada Familia and the Sistine Chapel, we build extraordinary monuments, sometimes over the course of generations or even centuries, to what some people dismiss as mere superstition but…