Some Cars

More Malcolm Gladwell tidbits from What the Dog Saw: in most cities, five percent of the cars produce 55% of the carbon monoxide pollution; most cars, especially newer models, run quite clean, but "kit" cars, older cars, and dirty engines can produce carbon monoxide emissions which are one to two HUNDRED times more than standard-- so the pollution problem isn't so much about everyone driving, it's about a small group of people driving a small group of annoyingly filthy cars.

1/29/10

According to a Malcolm Gladwell in his new anthology What the Dog Saw (and also according to the cities of Denver and St. Louis) it is easier to cure homelessness than to manage it; in other words, giving the most incorrigibly recalcitrant homeless people their own apartments-- for free-- and providing one counselor per ten homeless people to check up on them and aid them in gaining a foothold in society is far cheaper than paying the medical bills they generate because of frequent ambulance rides, detox, dialysis, pneumonia, and head injuries (they are constantly being brought in to the emergency room, where they are given treatment despite their inability to pay . . . thus how Reno's Million Dollar Murray earned his nickname) but this solution often meets with outrage from the general populus, despite its cost effectiveness, because it just doesn't seem fair that someone might work three jobs in order to make ends meet yet someone who contributes nothing to society gets a free ride . . . but the store owners in Denver were quite happy when the crew of chronic inebriates (whose drink of choice was mouthwash) were no longer a permanent fixture on Sixteenth Street.

Left Tackle Appreciation Day

One of the marks of a good book is how stupid it makes you feel, and The Blind Side: Evolution of A Game (by Michael Lewis, who also write Moneyball) did just that; I usually don't deign to read books about sports, but Malcolm Gladwell listed this as one of his ten favorite books and now I know why: all these years I had considered myself a football fan, but how could I have been a fan when I didn't understand how coveted, rare, highly paid, and important the left tackle is to the modern passing offense-- do you choose a left tackle (or even an offensive line?) in Fantasy Football?-- and not only does the book trace the rise of the left tackle (it all started with L.T.) but it also tells the fantastic story of a poor black kid from the west side of Memphis, who through extraordinary circumstances, escapes the derelict projects of Hurt Village.

How Many Hours In Are You?

Finished the new Malcolm Gladwell book the other day-- and apparently, if someone asks you what you're reading and you reply in an enthusiastic voice, "the new Malcolm Gladwell book!" -- then you are a big asshole; it's called Outliers: The Story of Success and, as usual, it's well-written and will also change the way you think about a lot of things: you will learn why being born in January is important to Canadian hockey players, the magic of 10,000 hours (although some people didn't want to hear about this magic-- they wanted actual magic, we got into an argument in the English office because Gladwell claims the Beatles became the Beatles not because of some perfect chemistry, but because they put in 270 five to eight hour shows at a strip club in Hamburg) the ethnic theory of plane crashes, why Asians excel at math (not why you think) and a cool fact about mathematical ability, you can figure out how well someone will do on a math test by how many questions they answer on a 120 question poll that accompanies the test-- tolerance for tedious, time-consuming work and skill in math exactly correlate-- and, the worst thing of all, but perfectly logical when you look at the numbers, why, if we care about educating the poor, we should not have summer vacation.