The Goldfinch
Nerding It Up (German Style)
My family has outstripped Monopoly . . . the house we rent in Vermont has the German board game Settlers of Catan, and while last spring when we didn't have the fortitude to figure out the rules (despite the fact that I had only heard rave reviews about the game) this time the boys and I were determined, and we attacked the game with blitzkrieg furor, and learned as we went, and we all decided that it may be the best game ever (and we even taught mom!) and Catan certainly rivals RISK (while being more cooperative, fun, strategic, random and tactical than the "game" of world domination) and now my kids want it for Christmas, and I want it too . . . but I am wondering if this will send them down a scary path of cardboard chits, lead figurines, multi-sided dice, and larping conventions.
Humblebraggadocio or Idiocy?
I spent two days in Vermont snowboarding without securing the back of my bindings -- and my excuse is that they are rather new, I bought them at the very end of last season and only used them once, and they are a different type of binding (they are Gnu "fast entry" bindings and have a lever you have to initiate on the back to lock them) and I forgot that part of the entry -- so I rode Stratton from top to bottom without being strapped in, and it didn't bother me all that much (aside from the bottom of my right foot hurting from a lot of pronating . . . but then I noticed the lever and remembered what I was supposed to do with it (although the top of one was snapped off, probably because it was hanging loose and got clipped) and so I will leave it to you to determine if you respect me for my exceptional balance or wish to denigrate me for my absolute lack of understanding of my own equipment (and my wife had to help me figure out the lace system in my boots, which I've had for two years, and could remove for the life of me, resulting in some rather loud and embarrassing profanity in a family friendly ski lodge).
Black is Beautiful?
Black Friday uses a positive connotation of the color black -- this is the day when retailers go from "being in the red" to turning a profit -- but Black Monday and Black Tuesday refer to infamous market crashes and use black to refer to the darkness accompanying the event . . . and then, of course, you can be back in black, the man in black, or none more black . . . it's a very versatile color, or lack thereof.
Rdio Knows Me Better Than My Friends (and Pandora)
How did I survive this many years without listening to Finnish surf rock band Laika and the Cosmonauts?
A Side Dish For Sirius
We braved the storm Wednesday afternoon and motored up Route 87 to our favorite spot in Vermont, and when I took the dog out Thursday morning for a Thanksgiving romp in the snow, he enjoyed a delectable vacation treat: he flushed a mole out of a snow-covered pile of hay, chased it down, and gobbled it up (despite my best efforts to get him to spit it out) and while I was a bit worried that it might make him sick, he suffered no ill effects from eating this shovel-footed rodent, which was certainly fresh, and now I know that we don't need a cat to keep our house free of mice.
Bring the Noise (Algorithm)
A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder explains that a little disorder is often more beneficial than organization -- and while we know this to be true in many systems, from evolution to business -- for many people, it's hard to accept this in day to day life . . . we think we need to be more organized, and rarely compute the cost/ benefit analysis of getting organized, and feel guilt over our messiness . . . but sometimes, when things get to clean, we need to manufacture messiness: once cell phone technology got sophisticated enough to filter out all background noise (something engineers loved, because it enabled less transmission of information, and therefore longer battery life and greater channel capacity) the phone companies ended up having to create a mathematical technique (e.g G.711.II) to add"comfort noise" and they had to do this for three reasons
1) when background noise is removed you can hear faint voice echoes, which is unnerving;
2) background noise indicates that the call is still happening, otherwise, whenever there is a pause in the conversation, it sounds as if the other person hung up;
3) at an unconscious level, we desire background noise and the absence of it is disorienting . . . "our brains rebel at the unnatural neatness."
1) when background noise is removed you can hear faint voice echoes, which is unnerving;
2) background noise indicates that the call is still happening, otherwise, whenever there is a pause in the conversation, it sounds as if the other person hung up;
3) at an unconscious level, we desire background noise and the absence of it is disorienting . . . "our brains rebel at the unnatural neatness."
Slow and Steady Loses the Race (When You're Competing Against a Kenyan)
An excellent Radiolab podcast called "Cut and Run" explains why a small area in Kenya produces so many incredible long distance runners (five American high school students have run sub-four minute miles . . . ever . . . while in one class in one school in Kenya, there were four kids who did it) and the program also explains why I get so fucking hot in the summer -- Kenyans generally possess a "nylotic" body type -- tall, slender, and with very long and tapered limbs -- and this body type sheds heat well and people who live in hot and dry climates have often evolved in this manner . . . and I am neither tall nor slender, and my limbs are stubby and thick (Popeye forearms and bulging calves) and while this is good for lifting things, it is NOT good for shedding heat . . . but that's not the only reason that the Kenyans from this region are great runners: for the final piece of the puzzle, you'll have to listen to the podcast, but I will tell you that involves circumcision and a pointed stick (and American runners aren't going to catch up to the Kenyans any time soon, judging by this statistic).
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).
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