Various thoughts

I wonder where the phrase 'pound sand' came from as an indicator of something useless?
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I just had an interesting discussion with my wife about cultural anthropology, which segued into a conversation about process improvement in organizations. I'd just read a little bit in the Christian Science Monitor, here, about what the US Army is calling Human Terrain Teams; the idea being, you need to understand how the social map of a conflicted area works if you want to be able to be more attractive to the people there than the insurgent is. More attractive as in 'better at meeting the needs that the insurgent is meeting (either positively, giving things they need, or negatively, as in extortion). " The idea intrigued me -- its the first thing I've read in a long time that suggests a decent reason for foreign aid, even though this isn't nearly at that level of abstraction -- so I poked around a little and found two things -- this, from the Small Wars Journal website, and this, from the US Army itself ( I haven't read the last one yet, but I saved a copy on my PC) -- so that I could learn more about the concept. Certainly, it makes a lot of sense to me. I'm not a military person, and I'm in no way expert in the ways and wiles of counter-insurgency fighting, but I do think that you have as much persuading to do, in a conflict like that, as you do actually guns-and-ammo fighting. I am sure that there are a lot of military people in positions of authority now who remember fondly the old Vietnam War slogan -- If you've got 'em by the balls, their hearts and minds are sure to follow -- and that's how they want to fight this war -- but I don't think that'll work here. Heck, it hardly worked there.
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That conversation also brought to mind something I'd read about ten or so years ago, where some company -- I want to say that it was the Xerox PARC facility, but I'm not sure -- had hired an anthropologist to help them understand how their company handled information -- how it flowed, mostly, but also how it was codified -- not so much the technical details as who got to decide what was important, and what was not; where the bottlenecks were (and just recognition that bottlenecks were not only occurring but were, in some cases, desirable); and how to generally handle information better. My wife wondered if that person was still doing it, and our guess was: No. That was the Idee d'Jour ten years ago. Things are much different now, you betcha, and we don't need that kind of thing any more.
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I love conversations like that. I wish I knew more people to have them with.
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We're mulling over buying some land relatively locally to build a house on in about ten years. One big sticking point: we have very little idea what you even look for in buying land for that purpose, and no idea at all about how to go about finding out. All we can think of it 'look for something that's for sale and looks good'. There must be a better way than that.