Habits are Powerful

I highly recommend The Power of Habit:Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg-- it's Malcolm-Gladwell-meets-self-help-- and not only does he make good on his promise in the subtitle,  but he does it in an entertaining, breezy style (with graphics!) that belies the rather disturbing hypothesis: our consciousness is mainly a bundle of cues, routines, and rewards; this is the same ground that Aristotle tread a couple thousand of years ago-- the only way towards virtue is habitual action and revision of this action towards a golden mean-- and Marvin Minsky's Society of the Mind is applicable as well; anyway, the thrust of the book is that you can't quit habits cold-turkey, you need to replace the routine or the reward with something comparable, and you need to BELIEVE you can change-- because reestablishing these routines and rewards is HARD . . . people do stop drinking and smoking every day, but not without many relapses and difficulty . . . you have to figure out an adequate replacement for the routine and reward when the cue arises; it also seems there are certain keystone habits that are crucial to changing everything, habits that cascade into other habits; Paul O'Neill realized this when he took over Alcoa and so he focused on one thing: employee safety, and vigilance in that one area caused a domino effect that changed the culture of the entire company; anyway, I've been nicotine free since the summer, and this book made me realize how I did it; I only crave chewing tobacco when I'm out past my bedtime and need sleep, and so now when I want to dip, I go home and go to sleep.

Dave's Take on East Coast Comicon

If you've never been to Comicon, I can save you the trouble: imagine the Route 1 Flea Market (the one in Kevin Smith's movie Mallrats) inside a warehouse--but remove the delicious barrel pickles and the arcade-- and now add a bunch of ersatz superheroes and a few stormtroopers; while I found this to be a bit over-stimulating, my children and their two friends loved it, and they all swear they are going to next year's event in costumes . . . and I guess if you're a kid, what's not to love: there's comic books, plastic junk, toys, weapons, posters, merch, and lots of adults dressed as Deadpool; for those of you hoping to make a pilgrimage, the Route 1 Flea Market is long gone, it was razed twenty years ago and replaced by a movie multiplex, and this multiplex often features movies about superheroes . . . but in the movies, the superheroes never seem to hang around en masse in flea markets.

The Test 45: Borderline Insanity

I don't say this often, but you must listen to this week's episode of The Test; in fact, I am giving it Dave's Coveted Platinum-Clad Guarantee of High Quality Fun and Educational Value . . . the premise is a simple one, and I won't give it away (since I introduce the concept with a musical riddle) and the ladies perform heroically, admirably, and humorously (but not knowledgeably) so give it a shot, and don't worry if you fail, because if you're listening to The Test, that means you are still alive and breathing, and that's a good thing.

Applying Things to Other Things

On Thursday in composition class, we listened to an excerpt of Freakonomics about skepticism and critical analysis (The Truth is Out There . . . Isn't It?) and in it-- 17 minutes in, if you want to listen-- a professional skeptic summarized the concept of a Type 1 Cognitive Error-- this is a false positive, and in an evolutionary sense, it's not a bad mistake to make . . . you're a hominid on the plains and you hear a rustle in the grass and even though it might be a squirrel or the wind, you err on the side of caution and head back to your cave-- because that rustle might be a saber-toothed tiger and even though it probably wasn't, by making this error, you survived to see another dawn . . . we humans are designed to make lots of these errors, because they aren't very costly (as opposed to a Type 2 Cognitive Error, where you think the reverse and decide that that rustle in the grass is probably nothing-- because it's usually nothing-- and then you get eaten . . . think about this in modern terms with an electrical socket: better to assume it's live, than actually stick a fork in it to check) and later in the day on Thursday, when I was at the high school turf for soccer practice, and I ran into a mom that I thought was someone I knew (but wasn't quite sure because she was out of context) and realized that I had possibly just sent this person an email about when I was going to pick up her son-- if it was the mom I knew-- and while I wasn't sure it was her, I instinctively knew that it was much less costly to make a Type 1 Error and say hello and tell her that I had sent her an email-- and if she turned out to be someone else, all I would suffer would be a moment of awkwardness-- but if I ignored her and she was the kid's mom, then I would come off as very rude and weird, so I addressed her and she was the person I thought she was and the interaction went as well as it could have (though I couldn't remember her name) and so I'd just like to thank the evolutionary processes that shaped my pattern seeking brain and its ability to suffer through so many Type 1 Cognitive Errors (and I'd like to apologize to all you people that I started waving at, but then-- mid-wave-- realized I didn't actually know you and so started weirdly scratching my head . . . because it's better to wave at a stranger then ignore one of your friends or acquaintances).

Caveat Chapin

The radio station should warn you before playing Harry Chapin's song "Cat's in the Cradle" -- there's are times when you don't need to be that unexpectedly reflective and maudlin (plus, I'm taking both my sons and a couple of their friends to Comicon tomorrow, so that should get me a lifetime pass from ever having to hear those lyrics again).

45.4% and 99%

If you're excited and astounded by the margin Stephen Curry broke his own three point record (402 three pointers this year, vs. 286 last year . . . so nearly a thirty percent increase . . . I think this may be one of those unbreakable records, like Dimaggio's 56 game hitting streak) then you'll enjoy listening to "The Yin and Yang of Basketball," a 99% Invisible episode that describes the evolution of the game, from James Naismith's arbitrary decision to nail the peach baskets up at the ten foot mark to the attempts in the '70's to change the game, which had become ponderous and boring and mainly consisted of big men inching closer and closer to the basket to score; while many ideas were batted around to solve the problem: "no backboard, a convex backboard, a smaller basket, a bigger ball, a smaller ball, a no scoring zone around the basket, and even a height cap, which would work like a team salary cap but using a player's height instead of wages," it was the ABA's adoption of the three-pointer that changed the aesthetics of the game and made last night's impossibe and unsurpassable record possible.

A Review of Some Key Moments in the Film Better Off Dead

One of the joys of having children is forcing them to watch movies from your youth; Saturday night we ate tacos and the entire family enjoyed a screening of Better Off Dead, and while everyone remembers the deranged paperboy who wants his two dollars and the hamburger singing Van Halen's "Everybody Wants Some," this movie has a lot more to it than those scenes and it is much weirder than I remembered . . . here are some moments you might have forgotten:

1. Ricky's mom drinks primer and blows up;

2. the Asian brothers with a PA system mounted in their car;

3. one of the Asian brothers is mute, the other speake like Howard Cosell;

4. Lane tries to commit suicide multiple times;

5. Lane's eight year old brother learns to pick up "trashy women" from a book;

6. Lane's eight year old brother builds a space shuttle from household parts, and it works;

7. Lane transforms from a klutz to a ski-pro in the span of a musical montage;

8. Lane's car transforms from a two hundred dollar heap of junk to a perfectly restored 1967 Camaro SS with a shiny paint job, also in the span of a musical montage;

9. Monique the French exchange student next door is both an an ace mechanic and a professional ski-instructor;

10. Ricky and Lane duel with ski-poles over Monique the French-exchange student;

11. Ricky's mom creates a living slime mold when she botches a recipe, she also cooks a stew that contains a very large living crustacean and has waving cephalopod tentacles;

12. though Monique can actually speak English-- a fact she has hidden from Ricky and his mom-- she substitutes "testicles" for the word "tentacles";

13. Charles de Mar (Curtis Armstrong) wears a top hat the entire movie and-- in an attempt to get high-- snorts both jello and snow;

14. at the end of the movie, Lane and Monique somehow drive the perfectly restored Camaro into Dodger stadium, park it on home plate, and make-out (the stadium is empty and Lane has his saxophone).

Plastic Fantastic Anaphora

I have a dream . . . I have a dream that one day in my kitchen cabinet there will only be one brand of plastic container . . . I have a dream that there will be only one brand of plastic container and whichever lid that I choose will fit any container that I choose-- of the proper shape-- I'm not an idiot . . . I have a dream that I will no longer waste my time searching for the correct brand of lid-- Tupperware, Rubbermaid, Ziploc, Sterilite, Gladware-- to fit the proper brand of container . . . I have a dream to streamline and expedite our plastic container cabinet. . . but when I told my family about this dream, my oldest son said, "Dad, that's the saddest dream I've ever heard."

Fight the Power

I urge you to listen to the 99 Percent Invisible episode "Flying Food"; it describes the relatively recent history of food advertising, and how innovators learned to make food look incredibly appealing-- to make food a delicious and dynamic subject that actually produces a visceral cravings in viewers-- but the important thing to remember, if you don't want to start salivating for burgers and fries every time you watch TV (because we eat WAY too much meat . . . for more on that topic, watch this TED talk by Times food writer Mark Bittman) then you need to remember that the actor who takes a bite out of the perfectly prepared burger and makes that orgasmically satisfied face, probably did that sixty-four times-- until he got the face just right-- and all the times previous, he spit the half chewed bite of burger and bun into a bucket-- the infamous spit bucket-- and if you can think of this image every time you see a delicious food image on TV, the image of the actor spitting a half-chewed bit of that burger or rib or donut into the spit bucket next to the set, a metal bucket slowing filling with half-digested chunks of meat and bread, covered in saliva-- then you are short-circuiting a habit routine . . . and to learn about this, read Charles Duhigg's book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business; you'll learn how to change the middle portion of the cue/routine/reward subroutines that are happening all the time in our lives; in this particular instance, you'll get the same cue-- a commercial with delicious looking food-- but you will go into a different routine, where you talk graphically about the spit bucket with whoever is in the room, and the reward will be that you don't salivate and desire the unhealthy food, but instead share a trade secret that might help others fight the power of this advertising as well (but you'll actually probably come off as a righteous pedant, which is what Dave is all about).

The Test 44: More Shows!

If there's one thing that Stacey and I have learned while making forty-plus episodes of The Test, it's that Cunningham loves shows and knows her shows . . . so give this one a shot, try to identify the TV Theme Songs, listen to Stacey sing, absorb Cunningham's wisdom on what to watch, and see how discerning your ears are . . . because while these shows are popular, their theme songs are tough to identify out-of-context.

An Open Letter to US Youth Soccer:

Dear US Youth Soccer,

While I recognize this as a "first world problem," your top-down bureaucratic decision to align US Youth soccer with the rest of the world, and switch from school year age ranges to calendar year age ranges is an arbitrary pain-in-my-ass (are you also going to dictate that we use the metric system?) and while this change could have been implemented with the youngest teams, and you could have "grandfathered" the older teams, instead you are tearing apart every team, everywhere; in larger towns, this isn't as much of a problem, as they have more participants and so it is easier to do a complete reset and conduct new try-outs, but this dictate truly punishes the small town coaches who have cobbled together competitive teams and now have to either play them "up" a year, which isn't good for anybody-- especially my team, which is generally undersized to begin with-- or send some kids packing (who probably won't have another place to go) and so while I recognize that you want to align yourself with international soccer as far as small sided training, which is beneficial to players, I don't understand why shifting age ranges is going to benefit any player in particular, and it is certainly going to hurt a number of teams, and give a number of volunteer travel coaches a huge headache . . . in fact, I'd far prefer adopting the metric system to dealing with the logistics of this; perhaps you will reconsider . . .

Irately,

Dave.

History Repeats Itself (to Dave's Chagrin)

I was walking the dog this morning in the predawn darkness--staring at the sidewalk, thinking my early morning thoughts about the day-- and then my arm was suddenly horizontal, my dog lunging violently at something . . . but I was able to hold the leash and keep him from chasing whatever it was he wanted to chase . . . it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the lack of light, and then I saw that we nearly walked into a deer-- it was a few feet away and staring at us, not moving at all-- so I pulled Sirius to the other side of the street and kept my eyes peeled for more deer; after a few minutes, I lapsed back into my own head, and that's when Sirius lunged and barked again-- scaring the crap out of me again -- and this time the deer was above my head, on the lawn of my friend's front yard, which is seven feet or so above the sidewalk; the moral to the story is this: at least it wasn't a skunk.

Learning Stuff the Old Fashioned Way

Each morning during the homeroom video announcements at my high school, there is an introductory snippet of a song-- and it's different every day and it's usually a rock song and it's usually from the '90's and I can usually identify it, but the musical fragment from Tuesday eluded me . . . the only lyrics I could make out were "naa naa na na na na naaa" and while I knew the song and knew it was an alternative rock song from my era, I couldn't identify the artist or the title, and-- despite enlisting the aid of the internet and my honors Philosophy class-- there was no figuring it out . . . I will warn you that it's an internet black hole if you Google songs with "na na na" in the lyrics, and so I had to give up and do it the old-fashioned way (remember the old-fashioned way? if you didn't know the name of the guy that had a cameo in the movie, then you had to wait until you ran into your friend who knew all about movies and ask him) and so when I saw the teacher that runs the produces the morning announcements in the hallway, I went up to him and asked him if he knew the song, and he did . . . so take your guess and then follow the link to find out if you're right.

Robots vs. Selfish Drunk People

I recently watched the movie Ex Machina, and I loved it-- especially the "villain," a super-intelligent, super-rich, super-selfish tech wizard who spends his time drunk and alone on his giant estate, building strong AI robots-- which look like beautiful women, of course; I also just finished Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder-- the novel doesn't really contain a villain, per se, unless it's nostalgia for the affected British upper class and all their traditions and foibles . . . but it does contain lots of drunken selfish people and serves as a reminder that there's nothing all that recent (the book was published in 1945) about misdirected intelligence, ethical egoism, louche sensibility, and a general malaise with existing society and morals-- a desire to throw away everything previous and move into a new era, even if it is a rank and gross one-- and the haunting grip that the previous has on the present; I recommend both the book and the movie, they are smart, fun, thought-provoking, and weird.

If You Can Measure It, Then You Will Care About It

I'm not sure where I first heard the sentiment "we can't measure what we care about, so we care about what we can measure" and when I Googled the quotation I found several places where it might have originated-- but it sounds like one of those things that is impossible to pinpoint; anyway, I think it applies to both education and sports, and I'm going to keep it in mind as a teacher and a coach, and I think you should keep it in mind as well (in fact, there will be a quiz on this quotation in seven years time).

The Test 43: Dave Speaks for the Trees

This week on The Test, I speak for the trees . . . because if I don't speak for the trees, who will?

How Do YOU Spell the "C" Word?

Thursday in the English Department, lines were drawn, alliances were formed, vitriol was spewed, judgments (judgements?) were made, umbrage was taken, and words were exchanged that may never be forgotten . . . the vociferous and combative debate centered around how to spell the "c" word, not the profane one, the one synonymous with lousy, and so your choices were:

A. crummy

B. crumby

and nearly the entire department agreed that the proper spelling is "crumby," but there were two dissenters-- Kevin and myself-- and I pointed out to the Crumby Camp that the dissenters happened to be the only two red-blooded American male coaches in department-- besides Terry, and no one asked his opinion on this-- and that the Crumby Crew were a bunch of effete, British literature loving Anglophiles (the type of people who like to go to the theatre and pronounce judgement on the colours of the costumes) and it turns out that Kevin and I were correct, of course-- crummy is the proper spelling, although "crumby" was fine in 19th century England . . . which only fortifies our position, since we reside in New Jersey and Bruce Springsteen would never say "I'm pulling out of this crumby town."

Three Thousand Words

I am usually articulate enough to portray The Life of Dave with words alone, but sometimes only photographs will do the trick:


1) one of the few surviving photos from our hike up Glen Onoko Falls;

2) the spot that I mistook for the men's locker room;

3) a photo of our very tired dog after our very long hike to the Hickory Run Boulder Field . . . normally he would never deign to such humiliation.

T Junctions

Charlie Jane Ander's novel genre-mash-up novel All the Birds in the Sky uses the love affair between a witch and a techno-geek as a metaphor to pit science against magic . . . and while the book has its moments, it's ponderous at times-- the writing is vivid, but I didn't particularly care for the characters; the book does portray earth at an interesting T Junction: the scientists are abandoning ship while the more mystical folks are trying to find a way to save what's left of everything on earth-- not just the humans-- and this portion of the metaphor rings very true, with the presidential election looming and two roads diverging in the yellow wood for our country and the world to travel . . . a slightly less vivid and rather technical (but sort of readable) economic explanation of this is presented by Mohamed A. El-Erian in his book The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse . . . he believes that central banks functioned as critical policy actors, and while they fell asleep at the wheel before 2008, they actually steered us away from total financial collapse . . . but they can't keep it up, and if we don't change political and institutional policies we could be headed down a path of "lost generations, worsening inequality, spreading poverty and political extremism" but if political and financial policy follows some simple guidelines, and there is stronger "multilateral policy coordination" then the "second road of the T junction" leads to much better economic and social outcomes . . . I'm not going to pretend I understood everything in the book, but I did like his ending analogy that incorporated the Ali/Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle" fight and the two possible outcomes predicted by the Ali camp and subsequent training strategies . . . this I understood; rather than read the book, if I were you, I would listen to El-Erian discuss the premise on Slate Money . . . he gives a clear synopsis and you might get hooked on the show, which is generally a lot of fun.

Snakes on a Homonym (Parts 1 and 2)

My boys and their buddy Ben went to the salamander path on Tuesday, to turn over some rocks and find salamanders, but--to their surprise-- they found more reptiles than amphibians: six garter snakes to four red-backed salamanders; they brought the snakes back to the house, marched into the kitchen and -- to my wife's surprise-- tossed them on the counter (which is a geometric plane, of course . . . I know puns are gauche but I couldn't resist . . . and I like to imagine the scene like this: my wife yelling at the kids, Samuel Jackson style, while gesturing at the counter with one of those math-teacher rubber-tipped chalkboard pointers, "There are too many motherf*#$ing snakes on this motherf%$ing plane!") and then they removed the snakes from the kitchen, put them in a cooler, and wheeled them around town to show their friends (and released them in Ben's yard later that afternoon) but they neglected to inform my wife that though they had brought six snakes into the kitchen, they only managed to remove five of them, and so when we got back from soccer practice, there was a snake on the counter under a clear tupperware container-- when my wife started cooking it crept out from behind the spices to enjoy the heat of the burner and she trapped it . . . it was a cute little guy, just enough of a snake on that motherf*&^ing plane (and I was going to title this sentence Snakes on a Plane, but I mentioned this anecdote to an English teaching colleague and he said, "Ah . . . a homonym" and I realized that the only title more annoying than my initial idea is the current one).