Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Giving Heuristics the Finger

I finished Nassim Nicholas Taleb's new book Antifragile, and while I can't say it was fun and delightful, like a Malcolm Gladwell, I will say that it is a book you must read -- while Taleb is no great stylist, his thinking is logical, powerful, anti-establishment, anti-intellectual and apolitical -- which is refreshing; while this book frequents some of the same financial territory as The Black Swan, Taleb also ranges far, wide, and crazy with his thesis about systems that gain from volatility versus systems that are fragile, systems that fall apart in volatile times; I love what he has to say about books and technology . . . he explains that probabilistically, they age in an opposite fashion from humans: when you see an old human, you infer that he will probably live less time than a young human, but you should think in the reverse in regards to technology and books -- the longer the item has been around, the longer it probably will be around . . . we are stuck with cars and bicycles and cups and chairs for a long time, and the same with Shakespeare and Homer and Herodotus (Taleb tries only to read books that have been around for a long long time, and he claims only to drink things that have thousands of years of trials: coffee, tea, wine and water . . . he is a wacky guy) and what his philosophy ultimately comes down to is that you can only trust opinions from people with "skin in the game" and so he hates managers and governments and large institutions and pundits (especially Thomas Friedman, who he claims helped encourage the U.S. to invade Iraq, though he himself wouldn't be put in any danger if this happened) and pretty much anyone who doesn't have their own money on the line each and every day . . . he's brash, obnoxious, smart, frustrating, and also offers some diet and weight-lifting tips along with the finance and philosophy.

Two Blasphemous Statements in One Day

I'd choose to visit Philadelphia over New York City any day of the week (and weekends) and while there, I would rather eat a roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and long hots from DiNic's than a cheesesteak with onions from Jim's Steaks . . . so kill me.

An Endorsement of Bar Culture from Jimmy Stewart and a Giant Rabbit

My boss recommended this You Tube video by author John Green to inspire seniors struggling to write their college essays, and not only does it offer some great advice about how to view your life, but it also teaches you how long one million seconds are and reveals the significance of the classic Jimmy Stewart movie Harvey, which is about an affable tippler (Elwood P. Dowd) and his best buddy -- a six foot three inch invisible rabbit (which is the embodiment of a mischievous Celtic "pooka") -- and this film is one of the weirdest I have ever seen; it is oddly gripping, and my kids watched it in its entirety . . . if you like Jimmy Stewart and you're in the mood for something funny and whimsical that also makes you feel good about frequenting pubs and taverns, then this is the movie for you.

Surfing in the Jungle

So my students were working in groups -- connecting this podcast to this article with some help from Neil Postman -- and I was reading nature essays and just finished a vivid one about a trip to Tanzania and an encounter with a hungry lion, and so I yelled over the din to the girl who wrote the piece: "You went on safari! Wow!" and she looked up from the MacBook Air she was using (we have a cart of ten MacBook Airs for classroom use) and answered "No, I'm on Google Chrome" and I yelled, "No, I mean you went on a safari!" and she said, "No, I didn't go on Safari, I'm using Google Chrome" and I yelled, "NO! You really saw lions! You went on a safari!" and then we both simultaneously realized that we were treating the class to an impromptu farce.

Primitive Struggles of Digital Man

Last week, after a year of touting Spotify, I had a sudden resurgence of interest in Pandora -- soccer is over and I actually have some time in my house now, and so I want my computer to spit out jazz guitar and ambient music and trip-hop songs while I do non-soccer things like reading and cooking and helping the kids with their homework -- but then I started to do some research, and there are some other music streaming services that do things similar to Pandora: Grooveshark, iTunes Radio, Google Play and the one I am liking the most so far: Rdio . . . I can't find any definitive opinions on which is the best, and so I am experimenting with all of them, in the hope that I will find one I really like and then actually pay for it (to assuage some of my guilt for pirating so much music in the past) but the big picture behind all this difficult "research" is this: in 2013, you don't need to own music.

Zero Point Zero

When there are clouds in the sky, even if weather.com reports a zero point zero percent chance of rain, it's better to tell your wife that it might rain, because otherwise, if it does rain (which it did) you're going to get an angry phone-call . . . and the fact that the internet says it's not raining isn't going to make her feel better.

Conspicuous Conservation

Steve and Alison Sexton, two young economists (who happen to be twins) have discovered something they call "the Prius effect,": in places that are more "green," if people buy a hybrid car, they tend to buy a Prius -- instead of a Nissan or Honda -- because the Prius is the only hybrid that is immediately identifiable as a hybrid . . . and people in these especially "green" places do this for a good reason: showing your friends, neighbors, and colleagues that you are "green" is financially and socially beneficial . . . i.e. conspicuous conservation and so, in a sense, they are being less altruistic, because they might be buying the car simply to keep up with the Jones's (the Greens's?) and not to save the planet; this brings me to the real reason for this sentence: Saturday morning, I impulsively donated fifty dollars to the Unicef fund for victims of typhoon Haiyan and no one saw me do it (except my wife) and I'm not sure how to remedy this . . . I should have done it at work and "mistakenly" left the receipt page on the screen of the communal computer in the office, but now it's too late for that, so maybe I should I pretend to donate the money at school . . . but that's kind of cheesy, so maybe I'll just mention that I donated the money here on the blog (but, of course, there's no proof that I actually donated the money, aside from my word, which isn't worth very much).

Socrates Would Be a Blogger

Socrates was no fan of the written word; he did not like that writing is immutable, cannot defend itself, and does contain the give and take of a dialog . . . he compares the written word to a painting, distanced from reality, a reminiscence . . . but if he were around today, I think he would approve of a blog-- despite the ugliness of the name-- because of the "live" nature of digital writing -- nothing here in the blogosphere has the permanence of a book, and I can edit things when I want, revise history, remove stupidity, steal ideas and present them as my own, and even occasionally re-title some of my old posts (when I started this project, I titled each post with the date, which was pretty lame, even for me).

The Art of the False Concession

Sometimes I teach my students how to write, sometimes I teach them how to read, and sometimes I actually teach them something important: last week, I realized that my lesson had run too long the day before, and I was going to probably have to move the due date for an essay back a day . . . but I didn't start the lesson with this information, instead I kept the old due date on the board and waited -- because invariably, if you have an assignment due Friday, some brave kid will ask if the class can have until Monday to complete it -- and, as usual, a kid that I also coached in soccer took the bait and asked -- quite nicely -- if they could have the weekend to finish their writing piece, and I took a moment and thought deeply about his request (acting!) and then sighed and said, "Sure, why not" and then I told the class to thank the student for getting them some extra time on the essay and this kid was the hero . . . even though I planned to move the assignment back all along, but this way I was able to give them something against my will - it was their choice, not mine -- and so I told the next period what I had done, and how this was a very valuable skill called "the false concession" and I told them they should practice this on their friends -- instead of saying, "I'm full, does anyone want the rest of these french fries . . . otherwise, I'm going to throw them out" you should wait and when someone asks you for a french fry, you can say, "Sure, they're really good, but you can have the rest" and gift them to your friend, and when you're sitting around with people and you have to get up to go to the bathroom, you should ask the people if anyone wants a drink or needs anything, and then get up, so they think the reason you are getting up is for them, even though you were going to get up in the first place, and then after I revealed these mysteries, I told them to pass the word along to the student from the earlier period about what happened and one girl did this and the next day he was mildly annoyed with me, because he felt duped, but I explained that adults do this all the time and he should learn to do it too (and along with this rule, this may be the most significant thing I'll teach them all year).

Getting It Wrong

A logical guess as to who said "prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future" is Yogi Berra . . . but it was actually Danish physicist Neils Bohr, and he certainly hit the nail on the head -- humanity is always getting it wrong, very wrong, when we speculate on how technology and culture will evolve . . . to hear more on this topic, listen to the Freakonomics podcast called Who Runs the Internet?; coincidentally, last week one of my students showed the class the picture above and talked about how he loved looking at old visions of the future -- and, as Clay Shirky pointed out during an interview in the podcast-- we had the imagination to conceive all kinds of wild scenarios: flying cars and floating cities . . . but in all of these visions, women were still wearing aprons and stuck in the kitchen . . . we could imagine a mailman wearing a jet-pack, but not a female lawyer in a pantsuit.

What Do You Call a Baby Doing a Baby Freeze? A Baby Baby Freeze?

My family was in Chelsea Market last Saturday and it was crowded; a young couple with a cute blonde toddler were walking directly in front of us, and as we passed through one of the ragged brick arches, the cute toddler threw herself to the ground and froze, and the couple stopped dead in their tracks and instead of doing what any self-respecting parents would do if their kid was blocking a major thoroughfare: grab your kid by the arm and drag her out of the way, instead of doing this, they began asking her a series of polite questions . . . such as: "Don't you want to get up and walk now?" and "Maybe you should stand up now?" and "Don't you want to come with mommy and daddy?" and so my wife and I almost stepped on her head, and all the people behind us had to similarly hurdle this obdurate baby doing a baby freeze in the middle of the market corridor, and I am wondering if this is a new parenting style, and if it is, then I don't like it (and sorry about the lack of funny image -- shockingly -- there are no pictures on the internet of a baby doing a baby freeze).

Tragically Close

I'm trying my best not to lose my temper with my children, my students and my soccer teams (and this is a tough task, because I'm simultaneously trying to drink less beer during the week) and for the majority of Tuesday, I was successful -- I had a smooth soccer practice with my U-9 team, despite the cold weather and the fact that my older son was in attendance -- but he didn't fight with his brother, and the team listened better than usual, and I was patient about explaining the drills and getting things organized (plus I had a lot of help from the other dads) and my kids were rewarded with hot cocoa once we got home, and then my older son showered and the younger one got into the shower, and I figured I was home free: I had navigated an entire day without raising my voice . . . but fifteen minutes later, when I went to check on Ian in the shower, he was just standing there, doing absolutely nothing -- his hair wasn't wet, there was still hot cocoa on his face, he was just letting the hot water run over him while he daydreamed, and while in retrospect, I can see the appeal of this, I couldn't deal with it at the time, and I may have done some yelling and banged a bathroom door and washed his hair rather briskly, so that some soap got into his eyes . . . and it irritates me that I was so close to making it through the day without losing my shit, but this one little incident, because it happened so late in the day, when my patience has worn itself thin, was my undoing . . . but I will take solace in what Hamlet says to his buddy Horatio, when he realizes that his fate is out of his control: "when our deep plots do pall . . . there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will."

Maybe The Soviets Were on to Something (Sort of)

I went to dinner with several couples on Saturday night and I was bombarded with TV recommendations -- because we are living in the Platinum Age of Television -- and so apparently I need to watch Key and Peele and Vikings and Ray Donovan and Banshee and Spartacus and Downton Abbey and new episodes of Eastbound & Down and some other shows that I have forgotten (and this doesn't even include the shows that I'm trying to keep up with: Madmen and The Walking Dead and Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Homeland and Portlandia and American Horror Story and Justified and the first season of 24) and it's all too overwhelming for me, and so I think I'm going to have to take a sabbatical from television, but really what I think I want is a simpler time, when everybody watched the same thing; I recently listened to a 99% Invisible podcast called "Unsung Icons of Soviet Design" and while the Russians didn't have much choice -- everyone played the same arcade games, used the same cassette player, programmed the same awful personal computer and knew the same bedtime song . . . and they all knew this song because they all watched the same program every night at 8:00 PM, and saw the same puppets sing the same lullaby . . . and while I don't think it's necessary that we have a Soviet-style oppressive government that designs all culture and technology, it certainly was nice when you could rely on the fact that everyone you knew watched Seinfeld on Thursday night (and discussed it Friday at work).

I Learn Two Things in One Day!

I have been on a podcast binge, and if you listen to enough podcasts, it's hard not to learn something . . . and so while I was listening to an episode of 99% Invisible about augmented reality called "Reality (Only)" I noticed that Roman Mars was talking much faster than usual, in an almost robotic voice -- but this fit the theme of the show, which was about "reactive music": a unique soundtrack that comes from your headphones, an auditory overlay created by and from the sounds around you, mixed and mastered in your smartphone -- but then a young woman explained something about "reactive music," and her voice was too fast and so I took a look at my Ipod and apparently there is a "variable speed" function for people who don't have the patience to listen to a podcast at normal speed . . . and so I fixed this and Roman Mars returned to normal, his voice deep, calm, and collected and then I actually learned something from a podcast, not about the podcast playing device; and I am going to hyperbolically call this podcast my favorite of all time, it is an episode called "The Modern Moloch," which details how automobiles went from hated, lethal contraptions . . . technological demons to which we sacrificed our children (a political cartoon from the 1920's) to a piece of Americana that we always had a "love affair" with; the podcast explains how an auto lobbying group called "Motordom," realized that it was in the automobile industry's best interest for cars to be allowed unlimited access to the city, and so came up with some NRA style logic -- cars didn't kill people, reckless drivers killed people (this brings to mind Neil Postman's rule of thumb, that no piece of technology is neutral) and along with reckless drivers, you can also have reckless pedestrians . . . this was a paradigm shift, as before this the street was a place for kids to play, adults to socialize, work to be done, and carts to move at somewhere around 5 miles an hour . . . and then Motordom brilliantly co-opted a term for redneck -- a "jay" -- and came up with the novel idea of "jaywalking," which was more a term of ridicule than something legal -- and from this time forward, the streets belonged to the auto (the podcast also has excerpts from Dupont's program where they explain that Americans have a "love affair" with the automobile . . . and since it's "love," then we don't have to behave rationally) and while I try to drive as little as possible, because I hate cars, I know that I'm a hypocrite, because I still use my car to get to work, to go on vacation, and often to get around town, when I could walk, and I often wax eloquently about my Jeep Cherokee and fully understand how many of us fondly remember our first shitty car . . . but it still makes me happy to learn that we didn't always have a "love affair" with automobiles, the affair was shoved down our throat by industry and propaganda, and if we try hard enough, perhaps some day we can take back the streets for our children (I think this bucolic vision involves flying cars).

The Time Is Now (For Michael Jackson Covers and Ghetto Goals)

There comes a time in every man's life when he must take all the scrap lumber from under the deck and nail it together in the form of a primitive soccer goal (which might be referred to as a "ghetto goal") but despite the flimsiness, a man must be proud of his handiwork . . . until it disintegrates into a heap; there also comes a time in every man's life when he must cover a Michael Jackson song, and include literal interpretations of the lyrics (in monologue form) between the verses . . . and while I understand that both of these pieces of "art" might be shoddy work, there is no time like the present (lyrics and more over at Gheorghe: The Blog).

Straight-Edge Psychedelia

My son Ian's latest work of art, made without the use of LSD or any other hallucinogenic (at least that's what he told me).

See You In Heck?

While I loved Enough Said -- Julia Louise Dreyfuss and James Gandolfini are funny and surprisingly understated -- it's kind of weird that this touching and charming little film will be my last memory of the guy that portrayed the giant neurotic Jersey badass Tony Soprano . . . I think I'm going to have to go back and watch the first season of The Sopranos in order to erase the image of "fat" Albert and Eva sitting on the porch together, doing absolutely nothing illegal or violent or depraved, because I want to remember Gandolfini as a looming, anxious and menacing mob boss . . . not a recently divorced semi-slob trying to make a new relationship work despite an odd coincidence (and if I didn't believe in that kind of stuff, I would say it was fated that this this is Gandolfini's last film -- a cinematic eulogy so we remember him as a good guy . . . but, of course, this gets into the weird meta-discussion of the relationship between the roles actors play and their actual personalities, which may have nothing to do with each other . . . but if they do correlate, then Julia Stiles is definitely a major bitch).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Some Restaurants You Should Frequent, Dammit

I'm not going to offer a full review of trader and quantitative analyst turned philosopher and power-lifter Nassim Nicholas Taleb's new book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, other than to say that it is evocative, provocative, bold, brash, learned, and contemptuous -- and if you are at all involved in finance, then you have probably read -- or at least know about -- his previous book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable . . . which explains not so much how financial collapses happen, but how to prepare and even profit from them (as Taleb did with his hedge funds) but I'm using his ideas for more selfish reasons; he often uses the restaurant business to flesh out his "anti-fragile" metaphor, as "restaurants are fragile; they compete with each other, but the collective of local restaurants is anti-fragile, for that reason . . . had restaurants been individually robust, hence immortal, then overall business would be either stagnant or weak," and you can see where this is going -- subsidies and intervention will actually destroy the health of a working system . . . and while logical folks know that opening a restaurant is risky business (though not as risky as urban legend has it) we love the fact that people keep trying, and Taleb explains this in his typical hyperbolic fashion: "in order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with as much honor, but using exactly the same logic" because this person has taken heroic risk that is beneficial to others . . . but BEFORE this happens, please patronize the following restaurants, because they are inexpensive, awesome, and BYOB . . . I don't want them to become fallen soldiers . . .

1) El Gallo Giro 2 . . . a Mexican joint on Route 1 in Edison, just past Open Road Honda . . . they have awesome mole sauce and you can get enchiladas with pork or chicken or chorizo smothered in the stuff, their burritos are ridiculously huge and their tacos and guacamole are fantastic as well, this is our replacement for Taqueria la Juquilita, which changed hands and isn't as good as it once was;

2) Cafe La Terrassa, in New Brunswick, which has a new menu and a new take-out menu . . . this place is amazing, but slightly off the beaten path and never as crowded as it should be, and I will be really pissed off if it doesn't make it, so I am relying on you to eat there (and these reviews are totally unsolicited, as I have received no food, drink, coupons, sexual favors, or preferential seating for my favorable opinions).

Nets: The Reason Why America Doesn't Dominate in Soccer

Statistically speaking, America should be better at soccer; we have a large population and massive participation in the sport, but we can't seem to produce a lot of players who compete at the highest levels of the game, and I have figured out why: we have too many nice goals with nets in them . . . when American kids are milling around before soccer practice, they invariably start shelling someone in goal with dead ball shots from twenty yards out, which is a horrible waste of time -- it's barely soccer-like, rarely happens in a game, and often ends in a head injury -- and so I've banned the practice, my players have to juggle with each other before we begin, but it's really hard because a goal with a net is an attractive nuisance, and so kids can't help doing something totally inefficient which is akin to place-kicking, when they should be dribbling around each other and playing little games in small space  -- street ball -- and so my proposal is radical: remove the goals from the soccer fields and only bring them out on game day, if we do this for a generation, soon enough, we'll be playing like Brazilians (and, as I learned at a SAGE meeting, nets are not even required by the laws of the game).

The Truth About the Truth About Lying

Dan Ariely's new book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone -- Especially Ourselves explains that people are more honest than we should rationally be . . . according to the Simple Model of Rational Crime (SMORC) we should compute the cost/ benefit of cheating and act accordingly -- but we don't do this, in fact, people cheat and rob blind people less, despite the fact that it's much less likely that you will be caught; it's not all good news, however . . . pretty much everyone cheats, but most of us only cheat a little bit -- unless you are truly pathological, you cheat just enough so that you can still confabulate stories about what a wonderful person you are . . . so we cheat more if others around us are cheating or if we are indignant and seeking revenge; we cheat more if we are creative and we cheat more if we think no one is looking, and we cheat for altruistic purposes, but we cheat less if we are reminded that it is our choice or if we are sign our name or take an oath or review morality before we commit an act . . . and while we will never eliminate cheating and lying completely, we can become morally less corrupt by using the convenient "reset" options in our world: confession and Yom Kippur and Ramadan, New Year's Resolutions, taking a new job, turning over a new leaf, and even self-flagellating (the method used by the members of Opus Dei) and while the book isn't going to scare you straight about cheating and lying, the experiments that Ariely conducted are worth the admission price; I promise you'll enjoy the book . . .  but, of course, I could be lying, and not even aware of it, as I wouldn't want to admit that I wasted my precious time reading this, and so if I can convince you to read it as well, then I'll feel like a fabulous person, despite the lie.