Plant Dreaming Deep by May Sarton (January 2017)
My first read of 2017 proved underwhelming. In this work, Sarton explores her experience of buying and living in an old house somewhere north (New Hampshire?) and connects the observations of her finely tuned senses to deeper themes of life, growth, and loss.
I thought this book came really close to making an impact on me. Throughout, the high quality of writing kept me reading and the reflections were infused with thought and meaning. Often, I find this kind of writing is an indication of a memorable chapter soon to arrive and it seemed the breakthrough passage was always the next one coming.
It didn't, though, and I can only speculate why. I think one explanation was the focus on the who, what, and when of the author's experience. Too often, I would find myself waiting for the 'why' that never came- why the need to live in such a place, why the compulsion to water a plant during a drought, why the chest-constricting concern for a hummingbird's survival? The most frustrating moments came when these 'why' questions were explained away instead with a response to the unasked 'how'- how she renovated the house, how she stealthily watered the plant, how she viewed the bird.
Despite the lack of payoff in the end, though, I did find rewarding the challenge of understanding my reaction to this book. Chapter eleven- 'Death and the Maple'- represents this feeling best. A meditation on death and dying, I found the chapter frustrating for how close it came to being enriching.
One quote exemplifies my commonly felt disappointment with what I'll call 'fool's gold' insight. In contemplating that '...the way people die expresses the central person as the way they have lived or the way they have loved...', I found my initial agreement quickly giving way beneath the accumulating weight of counter-example piling upon counter-example. My thought process revealed to me my disappointment with ideas that seem true on the surface until deeper consideration reveals the ease of generating counter-examples. (1)
I found in this chapter the clearest example of the separation of self and place that kept me in the world of 'who, what, and when' despite my desire to understand the 'why' of her life. In describing the death of a maple tree as 'the first death that came to Nelson (the name of the town), to me', I recognized that I needed to know more, that I needed to know why a woman in her mid-fifties was tracking such a metric so closely.
Sarton's intimate tour of her home is a memoir that many will love. But like any tour, the reader roams only within the allowed spaces. The rooms I wanted to explore most- those explaining how her experiences filtered the scenes she describes so wonderfully throughout- were the ones behind the locked doors.
One up: I enjoyed the way Sarton's love of place and ability to fully immerse herself in the present moment shone through in many of these chapters. I think there is an awful lot here for those who relate better to the stated topic of this book than I do.
One down: I thought this book very much scratched the surface when I wanted more depth. The story of her reluctance to dig into her land in search of a water source and her delight with how easy it turns out to be is perhaps symbolic of my own response to much of the book.
Just saying: Soon after I began reading, this book reminded me of past instances where I recognized the futility of my efforts and yet remained fully immersed in the project. Perhaps the best example comes from the moment during a timed run when I realize that I do not have the reserves needed to cross the finish line ahead of my stated goal. And yet, I continued on with all the effort I could muster regardless of the clock.
I recognized with Plant Dreaming Deep that I deeply trust my method for choosing books. Such faith in the process explains why I persevere with lost causes (and perhaps suggests an underlying self-protection instinct in my gravitation towards shorter work).
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. OK- a footnote about Chinese food!
It is obvious from the final sentence of this paragraph that I commonly find fortune cookies disappointing. Here are some cookies I've accumulated over the years that best exemplify the idea- true at the end of the meal, false on the walk home...
'Do not spend the money that you don't have.'
"You...you said...what'd you say a minute ago? They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait? Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they're so old and broken down that they...do you know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000?" -George Bailey
'A true friend walks in when the rest of the world walks out.'
My friends' wives love it when I walk into the party fifteen minutes before everyone is about to go home.
'There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but only one view.'
Ninety degree turns.
'Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom.'
Actually, this one is pretty good.
Friday, March 31, 2017
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
leftovers: bitter old man: "i'm sorry"
Hi folks,
Today's post grew out of a couple of throwaway comments from my 'proper admin' notes about a post from February. As I proofread those comments, I realized there was more to it than I thought and decided to expand it out into its own post.
I'll quickly summarize the original post. It was about the 'supermoon' last November and my disappointment with it. It included the standard TOA ranting and raving about a number of loosely related topics and made a half-hearted attempt to explain why I liked sunrise more than Super Moon Rise.
In hindsight, the post was well-intended but not among my best. In fact, in some ways I consider it my worst. I've been thinking quite a bit about why this is.
It is inevitable on TOA (as it is with any collection of writing) that some posts will come out better than others. Despite my best efforts, hours of toil may produce digital litter. One time, I hit 'ctrl-p' by accident and produced actual (recyclable!) litter. That's part of the process, especially with essay writing. When I start, I rarely know how good the product will be.
But there was something different about this failure. Each revision did nothing to improve the post. I sensed the post was doomed but I could not quite pinpoint what the cause was. I only knew there was a problem.
The topic of the supermoon seemed good enough, the writing had room for improvement, and the post was possibly the wrong length. But I acknowledged that the standards around here are pretty low, concluded that my technical shortcoming were not dragging the piece down, and did not find a satisfying solution to the length question.
Eventually, like with most TOA-related neuroses, I forgot about the post soon after I scheduled it.
At the end of February, I reread David Foster Wallace's essay collection, Consider the Lobster. In 'Authority and American Usage', Wallace makes a point about the remote or 'imperial' persona, often established by those who insist on using 'one' or 'we' in the place of the first-person.
The idea intrigued me. Using 'one' or 'we' instead of the first person- I must have missed school the day this concept was taught. But clever me, I knew what Wallace referred to. I wondered how often I used 'one/we' in the past when a simple 'I' would have improved my writing.
It seems inevitable to leave school thinking this is the best way to relate knowledge. Teachers almost always instruct students by explaining someone else's ideas, discoveries, or understandings. A teacher's original ideas become unrelated to the teacher's authority. In most classrooms, a teacher has no choice but to acknowledge the distance from the material by using the vocabulary Wallace points out ('one sees the crab rangoons fall, we know this is due to gravity, though those greasy fingers from the spring rolls did not help did they, heh heh heh...'). (1)
A quick browse through my own history on TOA unearths severalthousand such constructions. I wrote this way for many reasons- to establish my authority, to create a sense of solidarity with another person or group, to work out the ambiguity of pronouns in the best way I could. And like with any tool, I'm sure I'll be back to borrow it at some point (I do not own any useful writing tools). Once one identifies the best way to do a job, we recognize one must do the best one can to execute that plan.
But in each case of such writing, the distancing effect is obvious. It is the common denominator of each sentence that sees 'one' or 'we' deputize for 'I'. When Wallace pointed out this style in his usage essay, I immediately understood that it applied to me. And I knew exactly which post to review first.
One of my favorite cartoons is from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. The concept covered is 'Mount Stupid', the name given to the rush of excitement that comes when learning anything new. Atop Mount Stupid, self-appointed experts mingle with newly-minted geniuses to trade hot stock tips, identify 'Black Swan' events, and deliver uninterrupted monologues about the individual mandate.
Last week, those on this esteemed summit (perhaps on break from filling out Mensa applications) might have spotted me halfway down the other side as I reread my post about the supermoon on a borrowed laptop (I do not own any useful writing tools). Like anyone stumbling down to base camp, I realized that my initial ascent to the peak of 'Mount Stupid' was merely the starting point- for from that vantage point, I saw how much more remained to learn about distant writing.
In reviewing my supermoon post, I noted once more the detached writing. But I was surprised to find sparing use of the 'one/we' technique. Most of the post was written about what I saw, what I did, and so on.
And yet, the distance was there. Merely injecting first-person pronouns did not bring me any closer to the topic. Or to put it another way, to talk of what 'one knows' guarantees distant writing but to replace it with 'I know' does not necessarily bridge the gap. (All fruits are apples, not all apples are fruits, or something like that?)
The distance between me and the post came not from sentence construction but from my avoidance of WHY the topic was worth writing about. The post reminded me of a publisher's comment- 'writing about the weather is difficult'. It's true if the writing only describes the weather. And that's all this post did, essentially stating 1) there was a big-ass moon and 2) it wasn't all that big, though, because 3) did I mention I like sunrise?
What I should have focused on instead was why expecting this to be a Big Event was an error. The flaw in my reasoning: I was going out to see a moon despite never thinking 'you know what, I wish the moon was bigger' during any past moon viewing.
Though no money changed hands, my trip to the harbor that evening exemplified all the values of Rampaging Consumerism: bigger = better, novelty = beauty, don't miss The Big Game or the Once In A Lifetime Opportunity, etc. A post about THAT might have worked.
So, to my readers, a sincere apology. I am sorry for simply listing observations without engagement. The next time I catch myself falsifying membership in a group I am unqualified to join, I will delete the post and replace it with something heartfelt instead. Maybe I can write about that wild Maniac Magee?
Thank you for reading, though, and thank you for coming back.
Until Friday,
Tim
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. Not a Chinese food footnote (sorry)
In On Writing, Stephen King wrote about the importance of the reader understanding that the author believes in what is written. This must extend to teaching. A student who understands that the teacher believes in the lecture will respond differently than a student who suspects the teacher is parroting another's beliefs.
In college, I used to laugh with friends about professors who simply read the textbook aloud. I thought it was clever to point out that I could just read the book and get the same information.
What I would have pointed were I as clever as I thought was that these professors never made us students feel that they believed in their own lecture. The best professors did this naturally by relating the lesson to current events or applying the concepts to real-world problems.
The worst professors eroded their own authority by unleashing wave after wave of quoted textbook on us slumbering students, reading aloud from the expensive text with an air of 'well, if you happen to disagree with this proven concept, don't complain to me, I didn't come up with it, go ask the author yourself'.
Today's post grew out of a couple of throwaway comments from my 'proper admin' notes about a post from February. As I proofread those comments, I realized there was more to it than I thought and decided to expand it out into its own post.
I'll quickly summarize the original post. It was about the 'supermoon' last November and my disappointment with it. It included the standard TOA ranting and raving about a number of loosely related topics and made a half-hearted attempt to explain why I liked sunrise more than Super Moon Rise.
In hindsight, the post was well-intended but not among my best. In fact, in some ways I consider it my worst. I've been thinking quite a bit about why this is.
It is inevitable on TOA (as it is with any collection of writing) that some posts will come out better than others. Despite my best efforts, hours of toil may produce digital litter. One time, I hit 'ctrl-p' by accident and produced actual (recyclable!) litter. That's part of the process, especially with essay writing. When I start, I rarely know how good the product will be.
But there was something different about this failure. Each revision did nothing to improve the post. I sensed the post was doomed but I could not quite pinpoint what the cause was. I only knew there was a problem.
The topic of the supermoon seemed good enough, the writing had room for improvement, and the post was possibly the wrong length. But I acknowledged that the standards around here are pretty low, concluded that my technical shortcoming were not dragging the piece down, and did not find a satisfying solution to the length question.
Eventually, like with most TOA-related neuroses, I forgot about the post soon after I scheduled it.
******************
At the end of February, I reread David Foster Wallace's essay collection, Consider the Lobster. In 'Authority and American Usage', Wallace makes a point about the remote or 'imperial' persona, often established by those who insist on using 'one' or 'we' in the place of the first-person.
The idea intrigued me. Using 'one' or 'we' instead of the first person- I must have missed school the day this concept was taught. But clever me, I knew what Wallace referred to. I wondered how often I used 'one/we' in the past when a simple 'I' would have improved my writing.
It seems inevitable to leave school thinking this is the best way to relate knowledge. Teachers almost always instruct students by explaining someone else's ideas, discoveries, or understandings. A teacher's original ideas become unrelated to the teacher's authority. In most classrooms, a teacher has no choice but to acknowledge the distance from the material by using the vocabulary Wallace points out ('one sees the crab rangoons fall, we know this is due to gravity, though those greasy fingers from the spring rolls did not help did they, heh heh heh...'). (1)
A quick browse through my own history on TOA unearths several
But in each case of such writing, the distancing effect is obvious. It is the common denominator of each sentence that sees 'one' or 'we' deputize for 'I'. When Wallace pointed out this style in his usage essay, I immediately understood that it applied to me. And I knew exactly which post to review first.
******************
One of my favorite cartoons is from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. The concept covered is 'Mount Stupid', the name given to the rush of excitement that comes when learning anything new. Atop Mount Stupid, self-appointed experts mingle with newly-minted geniuses to trade hot stock tips, identify 'Black Swan' events, and deliver uninterrupted monologues about the individual mandate.
Last week, those on this esteemed summit (perhaps on break from filling out Mensa applications) might have spotted me halfway down the other side as I reread my post about the supermoon on a borrowed laptop (I do not own any useful writing tools). Like anyone stumbling down to base camp, I realized that my initial ascent to the peak of 'Mount Stupid' was merely the starting point- for from that vantage point, I saw how much more remained to learn about distant writing.
In reviewing my supermoon post, I noted once more the detached writing. But I was surprised to find sparing use of the 'one/we' technique. Most of the post was written about what I saw, what I did, and so on.
And yet, the distance was there. Merely injecting first-person pronouns did not bring me any closer to the topic. Or to put it another way, to talk of what 'one knows' guarantees distant writing but to replace it with 'I know' does not necessarily bridge the gap. (All fruits are apples, not all apples are fruits, or something like that?)
The distance between me and the post came not from sentence construction but from my avoidance of WHY the topic was worth writing about. The post reminded me of a publisher's comment- 'writing about the weather is difficult'. It's true if the writing only describes the weather. And that's all this post did, essentially stating 1) there was a big-ass moon and 2) it wasn't all that big, though, because 3) did I mention I like sunrise?
What I should have focused on instead was why expecting this to be a Big Event was an error. The flaw in my reasoning: I was going out to see a moon despite never thinking 'you know what, I wish the moon was bigger' during any past moon viewing.
Though no money changed hands, my trip to the harbor that evening exemplified all the values of Rampaging Consumerism: bigger = better, novelty = beauty, don't miss The Big Game or the Once In A Lifetime Opportunity, etc. A post about THAT might have worked.
So, to my readers, a sincere apology. I am sorry for simply listing observations without engagement. The next time I catch myself falsifying membership in a group I am unqualified to join, I will delete the post and replace it with something heartfelt instead. Maybe I can write about that wild Maniac Magee?
Thank you for reading, though, and thank you for coming back.
Until Friday,
Tim
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. Not a Chinese food footnote (sorry)
In On Writing, Stephen King wrote about the importance of the reader understanding that the author believes in what is written. This must extend to teaching. A student who understands that the teacher believes in the lecture will respond differently than a student who suspects the teacher is parroting another's beliefs.
In college, I used to laugh with friends about professors who simply read the textbook aloud. I thought it was clever to point out that I could just read the book and get the same information.
What I would have pointed were I as clever as I thought was that these professors never made us students feel that they believed in their own lecture. The best professors did this naturally by relating the lesson to current events or applying the concepts to real-world problems.
The worst professors eroded their own authority by unleashing wave after wave of quoted textbook on us slumbering students, reading aloud from the expensive text with an air of 'well, if you happen to disagree with this proven concept, don't complain to me, I didn't come up with it, go ask the author yourself'.
Sunday, March 26, 2017
reading review- small is beautiful
Small Is Beautiful by Ernst F. Schumacher (January 2017)
EconTalk podcast host Russ Roberts made an interesting point about free trade during a January episode. He cited free trade as a mechanism that, although it advances our quality of living, tends to come without an open discussion about the costs involved.
Free trade generally advances quality of life by making cheaper products available. But, often, the cost is disproportionately borne by those whose industries are directly impacted by the agreement. In other words, for some the savings realized by purchasing cheaper products does not offset the cost of entering into a free trade agreement.
The problems that grow out of an initial failure to consider the costs of free trade agreements (or any agreement, really) tend rear their heads at just the worst time. Groups that are left entirely unaccounted for tend sit idle, perhaps convinced that their well-intended neighbors will not allow them to come to harm. When they choose to step forward and be counted, the corrective movement is significant enough to cause a number of negative outcomes. These might include delayed progress, destabilization of important services, or further divisions among groups along their differences.
Schumacher's 1973 Small Is Beautiful is a thoughtful example of how to address such considerations before they explode in a manner reminiscent of pent-up anger. Today, the general drift of this book is familiar thanks to many years of discussion on issues such as climate change, peak oil, and development economics. But in his time, the thesis ran counter to two decades of fixation on growth and the firm belief that more is always better. For some readers, the ideas in this book were simply revolutionary.
Schumacher criticized profit-driven economics for its failure to address the critical question of what people are put on Earth to do. It reduces business to measurement of just the profit factor and results in primitive thinking among its leadership. Such calculations do not consider the cost to the human spirit. These leaders become unable to even consider, much less answer, simple questions such as 'how is it so hard to find something for the unemployed to do when there is so much in the world to work on?' unless it is first reformatted into a neat profit/loss calculation.
Schumacher saw that economics, like any social science, rarely produced ideas about how or why to live. Instead, the mad rush in these fields to explain every trivial technical detail about the world led thinkers toward problems that could be solved logically or empirically. Thus, the advent of mass production instead of determining ways for the masses to produce. Though such thinking is useful at times, it provided no help in sorting out the real problems of living- those that require the reconciliation of seemingly incompatible interests, ideas, or groups.
Such reconciliations will lay the foundations for peace. To Schumacher, peace is the philosophy of the wise. Without the restoration of wisdom, the end of conflict remains impossible. Unfortunately, the current economic system, built on the glorification of accumulation, cultivates greed and envy as its natural by-products. As long as these destructive values are normalized by the capitalist system, the pathways to peace remain obstructed and unclear.
Where Schumacher may perhaps wish most strongly for peace is in man's battle with nature. Schumacher reasons that a business quickly churning through its capital is not considered viable yet notes that the same standard is not applied to society's use of natural resources. From his point of view, a good first step toward reducing some of our damage to the environment would involve the restoration of 'tolerance margins' that allow human mistakes to occur without causing permanent harm to the environment.
The concern of man's ongoing relationship with nature occupies Schumacher for two reasons.
First, to him the current condition of man's superiority implies a higher-order responsibility to take great care of nature's resources.
Second is the wise observation that, even when man bests nature, he is destined to occupy the losing side.
As Russ Roberts pointed out, to enter into any agreement without factoring in the costs implies that the bill will be steep when it finally does come due. The failure to consider the costs defines our relationship with the planet. The longer nature remains the left behind party, the longer its pent-up anger at having its concerns ignored will build.
And when nature's pent-up anger explodes, man always loses.
One up: In my first read of this book, I found that a number of Schumacher's concepts translated nicely to managerial concepts.
His insight into the psychology of automation was fascinating. Workers become intellectually confused in environments where the elimination of work is constantly preached. They also find it confusing to think for themselves if the computer is idolized as the solution to the worker's burden of using a brain.
Over time, the worker is worn out by the contradicting approach. Why put in the effort if the goal is to install the systems that will eventually render effort moot? A strong organization must combat this potential malaise by defining success through worker efforts and framing technological advances as tools to free up, not restrict, the strengths of each contributing member in the team.
Another idea I drew on was originally described as a framework for development economics. There is no sustained development in societies that lack one of education, organization, or discipline.
Applied to a work environment, it meant that new initiatives required equal consideration to the three. Employees that are trained for the task, understand their role in it, and know when they will be held accountable are equipped to bring the new initiative to productive fruition.
One down: This is a 'big idea' book that might not sit well with those who like being told exactly what to do next, step by step. And with current events as they are, a book that discusses these larger topics might seem irrelevant, perhaps a case of 'putting the cart before the horse'.
Such books work for me in these times because, whenever life has been turbulent or uncertain for me, I've responded by focusing simultaneously on the very short and very long term. Only when things are more stable do I shift my attention to the three to six week time frame with which I'm most comfortable.
Just saying: It occurred to me that, as wonderful as this book is in its entirety, the biggest themes from it are just as easily expressed in short phrases.
One example: "growth is the ideology of the cancer cell". That comment made to the right person at the right time will probably have the same kind of impact as reading this entire book did for me.
EconTalk podcast host Russ Roberts made an interesting point about free trade during a January episode. He cited free trade as a mechanism that, although it advances our quality of living, tends to come without an open discussion about the costs involved.
Free trade generally advances quality of life by making cheaper products available. But, often, the cost is disproportionately borne by those whose industries are directly impacted by the agreement. In other words, for some the savings realized by purchasing cheaper products does not offset the cost of entering into a free trade agreement.
The problems that grow out of an initial failure to consider the costs of free trade agreements (or any agreement, really) tend rear their heads at just the worst time. Groups that are left entirely unaccounted for tend sit idle, perhaps convinced that their well-intended neighbors will not allow them to come to harm. When they choose to step forward and be counted, the corrective movement is significant enough to cause a number of negative outcomes. These might include delayed progress, destabilization of important services, or further divisions among groups along their differences.
Schumacher's 1973 Small Is Beautiful is a thoughtful example of how to address such considerations before they explode in a manner reminiscent of pent-up anger. Today, the general drift of this book is familiar thanks to many years of discussion on issues such as climate change, peak oil, and development economics. But in his time, the thesis ran counter to two decades of fixation on growth and the firm belief that more is always better. For some readers, the ideas in this book were simply revolutionary.
Schumacher criticized profit-driven economics for its failure to address the critical question of what people are put on Earth to do. It reduces business to measurement of just the profit factor and results in primitive thinking among its leadership. Such calculations do not consider the cost to the human spirit. These leaders become unable to even consider, much less answer, simple questions such as 'how is it so hard to find something for the unemployed to do when there is so much in the world to work on?' unless it is first reformatted into a neat profit/loss calculation.
Schumacher saw that economics, like any social science, rarely produced ideas about how or why to live. Instead, the mad rush in these fields to explain every trivial technical detail about the world led thinkers toward problems that could be solved logically or empirically. Thus, the advent of mass production instead of determining ways for the masses to produce. Though such thinking is useful at times, it provided no help in sorting out the real problems of living- those that require the reconciliation of seemingly incompatible interests, ideas, or groups.
Such reconciliations will lay the foundations for peace. To Schumacher, peace is the philosophy of the wise. Without the restoration of wisdom, the end of conflict remains impossible. Unfortunately, the current economic system, built on the glorification of accumulation, cultivates greed and envy as its natural by-products. As long as these destructive values are normalized by the capitalist system, the pathways to peace remain obstructed and unclear.
Where Schumacher may perhaps wish most strongly for peace is in man's battle with nature. Schumacher reasons that a business quickly churning through its capital is not considered viable yet notes that the same standard is not applied to society's use of natural resources. From his point of view, a good first step toward reducing some of our damage to the environment would involve the restoration of 'tolerance margins' that allow human mistakes to occur without causing permanent harm to the environment.
The concern of man's ongoing relationship with nature occupies Schumacher for two reasons.
First, to him the current condition of man's superiority implies a higher-order responsibility to take great care of nature's resources.
Second is the wise observation that, even when man bests nature, he is destined to occupy the losing side.
As Russ Roberts pointed out, to enter into any agreement without factoring in the costs implies that the bill will be steep when it finally does come due. The failure to consider the costs defines our relationship with the planet. The longer nature remains the left behind party, the longer its pent-up anger at having its concerns ignored will build.
And when nature's pent-up anger explodes, man always loses.
One up: In my first read of this book, I found that a number of Schumacher's concepts translated nicely to managerial concepts.
His insight into the psychology of automation was fascinating. Workers become intellectually confused in environments where the elimination of work is constantly preached. They also find it confusing to think for themselves if the computer is idolized as the solution to the worker's burden of using a brain.
Over time, the worker is worn out by the contradicting approach. Why put in the effort if the goal is to install the systems that will eventually render effort moot? A strong organization must combat this potential malaise by defining success through worker efforts and framing technological advances as tools to free up, not restrict, the strengths of each contributing member in the team.
Another idea I drew on was originally described as a framework for development economics. There is no sustained development in societies that lack one of education, organization, or discipline.
Applied to a work environment, it meant that new initiatives required equal consideration to the three. Employees that are trained for the task, understand their role in it, and know when they will be held accountable are equipped to bring the new initiative to productive fruition.
One down: This is a 'big idea' book that might not sit well with those who like being told exactly what to do next, step by step. And with current events as they are, a book that discusses these larger topics might seem irrelevant, perhaps a case of 'putting the cart before the horse'.
Such books work for me in these times because, whenever life has been turbulent or uncertain for me, I've responded by focusing simultaneously on the very short and very long term. Only when things are more stable do I shift my attention to the three to six week time frame with which I'm most comfortable.
Just saying: It occurred to me that, as wonderful as this book is in its entirety, the biggest themes from it are just as easily expressed in short phrases.
One example: "growth is the ideology of the cancer cell". That comment made to the right person at the right time will probably have the same kind of impact as reading this entire book did for me.
Friday, March 24, 2017
just stating the facts, vol 1
#1
A sample size of one is nowhere near large enough to prove a causal link between two variables.
#2
Just this past January, Whole Foods announced plans to close its food preparation facility in Everett, Massachusetts.
#3
The only time I ever left work early due to illness was just before Memorial Day weekend in 2015.
#4
I often finished my lunch hours after removing it from the fridge.
#5
Since moving to Beacon Hill in September 2014, almost all of my grocery store trips have been to the Whole Foods location on Cambridge Street.
#6
The Boston Globe found one hundred and twenty-seven violations at the supermarket location it identified as the city's worst offender in a review it conducted of food safety at area supermarkets.
#7
In June of 2016, the FDA sent a warning to Whole Foods corporate headquarters in Austin, Texas.
#8
I learned how to properly wash my hands in March of 2016 and started applying the corrected technique immediately.
#9
I left work at just past noon with a mild fever, aching muscles, and an ever-increasing nausea.
#10
The FDA acknowledges that food left out at room temperature for two hours is at high-risk for developing bacteria and is potentially unsafe to eat.
#11
In the spring of 2016, The Boston Globe reviewed three years of citation records from the city's Inspectional Services Department.
#12
I worked at the same company for five and a half years, a tenure that works out to approximately thirteen hundred lunches.
#13
Rotisserie chickens, particularly those from Whole Foods, are delicious.
#14
Most people consider public transit a breeding ground for germs.
#15
The FDA cited numerous health code violations accumulated over a series of visits to the supermarket chain's food preparation facility in Everett, Massachusetts.
#16
The incubation period of listeria is widely considered to be at least two days.
#17
One problem with food poisoning is that identifying the cause is difficult.
#18
If I forgot to put my lunch into the fridge upon arrival, it usually sat on my desk until I ate.
#19
The Boston Globe review found that the supermarket with the most violations was the Whole Foods located on Cambridge Street.
#20
In the days prior to getting sick, I ate my usual meals save for the rotisserie chicken I bought at Whole Foods the night before.
#21
Symptoms of listeria include fever, muscle ache, and nausea.
#22
We often were allowed out of work early, sometimes just past noon, if a holiday or three day weekend was approaching.
#23
I never skipped eating lunch at work.
#24
Everett is located about a fifteen to twenty minute drive from Beacon Hill.
#25
A sample size of around one hundred or so is a good starting point for those seeking to prove that changes to one variable explains changes observed in another variable.
#26
The FDA noted the discovery of listeria, a bacteria with life-threatening potential, in the Everett facility.
#27
My commute to work included a twenty minute ride on a bus.
#28
Since Memorial Day 2015, I have purchased exactly zero (0) rotisserie chickens from Whole Foods.
A sample size of one is nowhere near large enough to prove a causal link between two variables.
#2
Just this past January, Whole Foods announced plans to close its food preparation facility in Everett, Massachusetts.
#3
The only time I ever left work early due to illness was just before Memorial Day weekend in 2015.
#4
I often finished my lunch hours after removing it from the fridge.
#5
Since moving to Beacon Hill in September 2014, almost all of my grocery store trips have been to the Whole Foods location on Cambridge Street.
#6
The Boston Globe found one hundred and twenty-seven violations at the supermarket location it identified as the city's worst offender in a review it conducted of food safety at area supermarkets.
#7
In June of 2016, the FDA sent a warning to Whole Foods corporate headquarters in Austin, Texas.
#8
I learned how to properly wash my hands in March of 2016 and started applying the corrected technique immediately.
#9
I left work at just past noon with a mild fever, aching muscles, and an ever-increasing nausea.
#10
The FDA acknowledges that food left out at room temperature for two hours is at high-risk for developing bacteria and is potentially unsafe to eat.
#11
In the spring of 2016, The Boston Globe reviewed three years of citation records from the city's Inspectional Services Department.
#12
I worked at the same company for five and a half years, a tenure that works out to approximately thirteen hundred lunches.
#13
Rotisserie chickens, particularly those from Whole Foods, are delicious.
#14
Most people consider public transit a breeding ground for germs.
#15
The FDA cited numerous health code violations accumulated over a series of visits to the supermarket chain's food preparation facility in Everett, Massachusetts.
#16
The incubation period of listeria is widely considered to be at least two days.
#17
One problem with food poisoning is that identifying the cause is difficult.
#18
If I forgot to put my lunch into the fridge upon arrival, it usually sat on my desk until I ate.
#19
The Boston Globe review found that the supermarket with the most violations was the Whole Foods located on Cambridge Street.
#20
In the days prior to getting sick, I ate my usual meals save for the rotisserie chicken I bought at Whole Foods the night before.
#21
Symptoms of listeria include fever, muscle ache, and nausea.
#22
We often were allowed out of work early, sometimes just past noon, if a holiday or three day weekend was approaching.
#23
I never skipped eating lunch at work.
#24
Everett is located about a fifteen to twenty minute drive from Beacon Hill.
#25
A sample size of around one hundred or so is a good starting point for those seeking to prove that changes to one variable explains changes observed in another variable.
#26
The FDA noted the discovery of listeria, a bacteria with life-threatening potential, in the Everett facility.
#27
My commute to work included a twenty minute ride on a bus.
#28
Since Memorial Day 2015, I have purchased exactly zero (0) rotisserie chickens from Whole Foods.
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
prop admin- winter 2017
Hi all,
Welcome to 'proper admin', my bi-monthly cleanup of everything I can't quite work into its own post.
Thanks for reading these past couple of months.
Tim
Blog Admin- Winter 2017
The schedule adjustment I explained in the last 'prop admin' is going very well. With things settled on that front- I am more or less scheduled out for a month in advance- I've turned my attention to blog layout.
The obvious layout change is the subscription feature. It is a bit clumsy, I think, when compared to similar options on other sites. But what do you expect here, anyway? The relevant thing is that it works.
So, give it a try if you want to get posts mailed straight to your inbox each morning. If you need directions: enter your email in the box to the right and respond to the confirmation message. The emails go out sometime around 7am each morning.
However, the subscription concept is forcing a change to my posting time. Instead of waiting until the 11am hour on Wednesdays and Fridays, all of my posts will now go up between 5am and 6am. This change is necessitated by the subscription feature- an early morning post will reach inboxes on the same day while a late morning post would go out in the next day's email.
The 'in progress' layout change is this section. Starting April 1 (not a joke) the space at the top of the blog will highlight blog admin (also not a joke). I am optimistic that the adjustment will take advantage of that top space (this could be a joke). Just to state one anticipated benefit, the change will communicate layout adjustments faster (aka- 'immediately', a joke depending on how seriously you read that) than I do now (when I wait up to two months until this 'prop admin' post, which is a joke in a non-literal sense).
I do not think this section will be missed. Historically, I've only explained the obvious or the trivial. The change leaves open the question of how I will start the next 'prop admin'.
Stay tuned, I guess.
The word from the peanut gallery...
At the very minimum, it's a good spam tester- if TOA goes straight your inbox, you need to get your filter a tune-up.
Commentary- Winter 2017 blog posts (True On Average)
*1/1- New Year’s Resolutions, Part 2
*1/6- Leftovers: Make America Debate Again
If I were to add one more thought to this post, I would investigate the relationship of voting results and victimization.
For example, if it became illegal by popular (or even electoral college) vote tomorrow to exercise on public property, does that make me the victim of an inconvenient new policy? Or does it simply give voice to those shoved aside, stepped on, or startled everyday by ignorant joggers and overzealous cyclists?
*1/9- Prop Admin- December 2016 Reading Review, Part One
The bi-monthly Moya rant is here to stay, folks. (Editor's note: Tim is desperate for Proper Admin content. Send him ideas, though food is also welcome.)
Have a look at Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador if you want to get in on the joke. Or just read the summary I wrote in this post.
*1/16- 2016 Books of the Year, Part One
I casually listed some early front-runners for '2017 Band of the Year' in the footnotes. About one-fourth of the way in, it's clear that I should have included Rubblebucket.
According to their website, Rubblebucket is an 'indie pop dance band' (which is an early front-runner for 'Least Helpful Description' of 2017). I first saw them in October as the opener for Lake Street Dive and I immediately liked the band. They have great energy on stage and have at least twice as much fun as anyone else in the room.
During the performance I saw, at one point the band fled the stage with their instruments to form a marching band that snaked its way through the aisles of the Wang Theatre. Based on some research I conducted, this appears to happen regularly during their shows (or perhaps the drummer has a flatulence problem).
I'm still going strong with Slow Club. For those seeking a four-minute distraction, I recommend their video for 'In Waves'. Rebecca Taylor uses a GoPro camera to record the kind of day she sings about. The highlights for me were a Google search ('does Victoria Beckham have collonics?'), the layout of her vegetable crisper, and 'melted cheese on fucking everything'.
The video reminded me of two soccer commercials I still remember from a decade ago. Each used the same first-person format and the style captured my imagination. The first was a three-minute Nike production, directed by Guy Ritchie, that highlighted the ascent of a young soccer star. The second was the English Football Association's parody that advertised the (perhaps) more glamorous lifestyle of an average semi-professional player.
So, go on and have a look at those videos.
(...)
Hold on, I'll be back in ten minutes.
*1/23- Prop Admin- December 2016 Reading Review, Part Two
OK- back!
I'll shorten the several hundred word (second) summary of Stoner I prepared to make up for the time you just spent watching those videos: is the acceptance of disappointment heroic or tragic?
*1/27- Leftovers: Messy…
I mentioned in my post about the 'T' that I had two additional stories. The first took place while reading this book. I was standing on the platform, waiting for a train, when a guy walked over and turned his head sideways to get a better view of the book.
I glanced at him and he nodded his head. Then I realized he was actually shaking his head, thanks to the aforementioned sideways head turn.
"Thought it was about soccer," he muttered before walking away.
For the record- like all the British- Harford calls it football.
*2/1- Prop Admin- Early Winter 2016
I am very pleased with the schedule adjustment I described here. The shorter posts allow me to schedule content in advance. This means that I rarely work on anything going up in the next day or two and that, in turn, means more time to work on the quality of the writing.
It also means that, in the unlikely event I get trampled by a flock of angry Canadian geese, there will be a month or so of posts going up here on TOA. Sounds like the plot of a movie you would come up with at three in the morning after several drinks and a pile of Chinese food, right?
No?
Oh.
*2/3- Wild Times on the ‘T’
The other 'T' story is from running into a former colleague. When this person lived in my neighborhood, I used to run into her every once in a while. But she moved a few miles north about six months ago and the chance meetings ended.
In January, I rode the Green Line to a job interview. And surprise of all surprises, we ended up on the same train. But as always is the case when running into anyone, it seemed perfectly explainable in the moment. Only afterward did I consider the long sequence of events that had to go just right for it to happen:
*My decision to ride the train instead of walk
*The speed at which I walked to the station
*Loading enough money onto my Charlie Card so I could skip buying a ticket
*The travel logistics- the car I boarded, the direction I faced, the place I stood...
And so on.
Plus, the person I run into has his or her own similar list of little details that, any single one altered, changes the course of the day and prevents the chance meeting. Sometimes, it is a wonder that I ever run into anyone at all.
*2/5- 2016 Books of the Year: Tiny Beautiful Things
So the whole 'review a book in the style of the book' idea is nothing particularly new or clever. More importantly, it does not guarantee the review becomes more interesting. But when I stumbled across a draft of an email that vaguely resembled a note to myself, I thought it might be worth a shot for this post.
The style of this post- as well as an inspiration for my 'What I Learned' post from July- came from this column (which is featured in the book). My understanding is that many rate this column as their favorite from Strayed's tenure as the 'Dear Sugar' columnist.
*2/8- But What’s the Wind Chill?
This post is a decent argument for a single-payer system. So, what's the delay?
Well, UHC's CEO took home over $100 million in 2010. In 2014, his pay was dramatically reduced- $66 million. (It's unclear if his employer also covered his health insurance plan- perhaps 'compensation' was a little higher in those years.)
Systems that produce such figures do not change very quickly. After all, in whose interest is it to change this system? Not for anyone with the power to do it, that's for sure.
*2/10- Talking Shits, January 2017
Sources for specific quotations include Hungarian proverbs, CNN, Medium, Paul Graham's essays, Brain Pickings, Mr. Money Mustache, This Is Anfield, my own nonsense, The New Yorker, Farnham Street, Thought Catalog, The Boston Calendar, IMDB, M.I.A., and The Boston Globe.
I should also note the influence of The Art of War. The book is a series of voices contributing quotes to a larger narrative arc. I thought it was an interesting coincidence that I wrote up notes for this book, started doing 'Talking Shits', and read Lincoln In The Bardo- a book written with a similar multi-narrator style- in the span of one month.
*2/12- Reading Review: Tenth of December
George Saunders's appearance on February 17 was great. I'll write about the specifics when I review Lincoln In The Bardo.
I almost skipped going to the event. Around 3pm that day, my stomach cramped up. The pain was not very intense but I felt bloated and uncomfortable. I tried to sit, then stand, then walk. Nothing helped. As the 7pm start time approached, cramping replaced my discomfort.
Finally, I walked into CVS and, for the first time in my life, bought some over the counter medicine (antacids). Surprise, this last ditch effort worked...I suppose every rule ('avoid over the counter medicine') requires an exception ('unless you paid $5 to hear an author make dick-jokes').
*2/15- Prop Admin- December 2016 Reading Review, Part Three
The poem from milk and honey explains a pillar of my learning process. I learn from bad teachers by negative example- I try to avoid making their mistakes.
*2/17- Bitter Old Man: “I’ve seen bigger.”
The best place in Boston to see the full moon is from the Longfellow bridge at moonset. A clear night sky is ideal (though a cloud or two might add an interesting dimension to the visual).
*2/19- 2016 Books of the Year: Fallen Leaves
I laughed aloud at his suggestion that a tourist is anyone who mistakes novelty for beauty.
*2/22- Boston’s Sad Squirrels
I hope this post does not come back to haunt me when I run for mayor.
*2/24- The TOA Game Show Channel Presents: Real or Fake?
FAKE
1) Honeyball: How Big Data is Changing Your Relationships
2) The Porridge Clause: The True Story Of Goldilocks and Her Flight From Justice
4) The Sphere-A-Mid Scheme: How Big Insurance Passes The Buck To Keep Their House Of Cards Upright
5) Apocalypse Tomorrow: Why So Many Predict the End- And Why It Never Comes
8) The Baby Doomers- The Generation of Waste and Excess That Failed America- and What We Must Do To Fix It
11) All Geek To Me: The Decade of Comic-Con, Star Wars, and The Rise of Silicon Valley
12) Heroes To Zeroes: Tales of Fleeting Success
14) The Sneer of the Tiger: How Animals Proved Everything Zoos Knew About Captivity Was Wrong
15) Born To Gun: The Second Amendment and How It Fulfilled Our Manifest Destiny
17) Barking at the Wrong Me: How To Recognize- And Treat- Your Aging Dog's Mental Decline
18) Dressing In Disguise: Salsa, Hummus, and Other Healthy Ways to Garnish Your Salad
19) ci2i: The Abbv Age and How It Is Changing Communication
20 ) Let Lying Dogs Sleep: How To Navigate A Modern World of Deceit, Deception, and Misinformation
REAL
3) Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It
6) The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story
7) Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
9) The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy
10) Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream
13) Furious George: My Forty Years Surviving NBA Divas, Clueless GMs, and Poor Shot Selection
16) Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Explanation
*2/26- Reading Review: The Art of War
Books like The Art of War occupy space on executive bookshelves. Why this might be the case is understandable. There is a lot of wisdom in books like this for leaders of any organization.
But I remain wary of books that provide all the answers. I think time is better spent seeking questions. Leadership means diagnosing problems, not applying prescriptions.
Hubway update!
Just kidding.
A blog is different...
I took an Uber ride in February and was struck by a thought- I hate talking in these cars. It seems contradictory giventhis blog how freely I talk in public spaces. But when I sit in a ride-share vehicle, I'm always uncomfortably aware that some unknown party is listening in on the conversation.
I'm not sure what the cause of my discomfort is. Perhaps the obvious presence of technology reminds me of how easy it is to record a conversation.
Or maybe I just feel rude sitting in the car and chattering on, actively ignoring the driver. I've never been fully comfortable actively ignoring others- even when it is considered normal, like having a phone conversation in front of someone else.
I did watch the Super Bowl, I swear!
If I wrote for The Onion, I would surely have contributed this headline: 'Brady finds missing jersey where he last left it'.
The Chinese food equivalent of a four-leaf clover?
I got a fortune cookie the other day which had TWO cookies in it. The heck?
I still collect fortunes but this was too much even for me to handle- I passed the cookie(s) along. I guess I was not mentally (or emotionally) prepared to process two inaneand therefore life-altering messages at the same time.
Oh no, is that Moya coming?
"Sit, Moya, sit, you remind me of the people on the train, they stand as soon as the train leaves the station, I haven't a clue why, I ask 'did Atticus Finch board?' but everyone is too busy, jostling and tweeting and shoving aside every civilized passenger who is standing, holding on for dear life, Moya, as the train hurtles down the wobbly tracks, as if it were going anywhere important, like anyone could ever be in a hurry to reach Brookline or Newton or Fenway Park, to watch a bunch of men swing a stick at a ball, a hurry to reach someplace, as the train lurches along, throwing us to and fro like loose crates scattering on the deck of a fishing boat, and for what, you wonder, sit, Moya, sit right here, the bartender is going to think you need another whiskey, it's crazy to stand before one is ready to depart and yet, here in this town, they all stand, en masse, as if the train would leave the station before every fool had disembarked, I've ridden the train so long I remember tokens, Moya, tokens, like children at an arcade, and not once has a train closed its doors before the passengers got off, if anything the train sits dumbly, doors agape, cold wind and fare dodgers and paper trash breezing aboard, but these folks have convinced themselves, they don't need to pay, no fare is fair, maybe that's why they stand, they think the train will move on with them still aboard as punishment for not paying, they stand and knock us all aside to queue at the doors, a full stop before they must get off, mumbling 'excuse me, excuse me' into their phones before barging ahead, does 'excuse me' mean 'out of the way, I am not pausing?', knocking laptops to the ground and fearing imminent arrest, while we are just trying to keep our feet as the train rattles and pitches its way down the track, just so we can all get to the game a second earlier so we can watch these 'athletes', who calls them 'athletes', Moya, no athlete in my book stands stock-still for hours in the grass, they stand there for hours, watching other men swing a stick, watching other men toss a ball, these guys aren't athletic enough to keep their balance on the train..."
Did you leave the apartment at all?
For some reason I could not quite figure out, there is something between Somerville and Everett (just next to Assembly Square) called the 'Amelia Earhart Dam'. It's obviously named for the aviator. But why?
I have no theories and could find no information. It is possibly the last fact missing from Google. Shout if you have any information!
Anything else?
I admit that I tend to like books more than most people. I'm perfectly content to read for an hour to find one good sentence, a process that mystifies people who will stop reading a book that is too dull or slow for them.
One hypothesis I have on the matter is that this is related to how I get so many books out of the library. People love to get things for FREE. And so I wonder if it is possible that those who check out a book from the library for FREE are primed to enjoy the book more than those who pay for it at a book store.
Of course, reader, if you disagree, let's run a little experiment. Each time you read a post, send me one dollar. Or just burn it. And keep track of how much you enjoy these posts...
Welcome to 'proper admin', my bi-monthly cleanup of everything I can't quite work into its own post.
Thanks for reading these past couple of months.
Tim
Blog Admin- Winter 2017
The schedule adjustment I explained in the last 'prop admin' is going very well. With things settled on that front- I am more or less scheduled out for a month in advance- I've turned my attention to blog layout.
The obvious layout change is the subscription feature. It is a bit clumsy, I think, when compared to similar options on other sites. But what do you expect here, anyway? The relevant thing is that it works.
So, give it a try if you want to get posts mailed straight to your inbox each morning. If you need directions: enter your email in the box to the right and respond to the confirmation message. The emails go out sometime around 7am each morning.
However, the subscription concept is forcing a change to my posting time. Instead of waiting until the 11am hour on Wednesdays and Fridays, all of my posts will now go up between 5am and 6am. This change is necessitated by the subscription feature- an early morning post will reach inboxes on the same day while a late morning post would go out in the next day's email.
The 'in progress' layout change is this section. Starting April 1 (not a joke) the space at the top of the blog will highlight blog admin (also not a joke). I am optimistic that the adjustment will take advantage of that top space (this could be a joke). Just to state one anticipated benefit, the change will communicate layout adjustments faster (aka- 'immediately', a joke depending on how seriously you read that) than I do now (when I wait up to two months until this 'prop admin' post, which is a joke in a non-literal sense).
I do not think this section will be missed. Historically, I've only explained the obvious or the trivial. The change leaves open the question of how I will start the next 'prop admin'.
Stay tuned, I guess.
The word from the peanut gallery...
"Shame on you."Like anyone is surprised. I write these blogs from the highest horse I can find, so long as that horse has free wi-fi.
-anonymous commenter (respond to something I criticized very directly)
"I've started getting the TOA subscription service..."It works! GIVE ME YOUR EMAILS NOW.
-anonymous
At the very minimum, it's a good spam tester- if TOA goes straight your inbox, you need to get your filter a tune-up.
Commentary- Winter 2017 blog posts (True On Average)
*1/1- New Year’s Resolutions, Part 2
*1/6- Leftovers: Make America Debate Again
If I were to add one more thought to this post, I would investigate the relationship of voting results and victimization.
For example, if it became illegal by popular (or even electoral college) vote tomorrow to exercise on public property, does that make me the victim of an inconvenient new policy? Or does it simply give voice to those shoved aside, stepped on, or startled everyday by ignorant joggers and overzealous cyclists?
*1/9- Prop Admin- December 2016 Reading Review, Part One
The bi-monthly Moya rant is here to stay, folks. (Editor's note: Tim is desperate for Proper Admin content. Send him ideas, though food is also welcome.)
Have a look at Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador if you want to get in on the joke. Or just read the summary I wrote in this post.
*1/16- 2016 Books of the Year, Part One
I casually listed some early front-runners for '2017 Band of the Year' in the footnotes. About one-fourth of the way in, it's clear that I should have included Rubblebucket.
According to their website, Rubblebucket is an 'indie pop dance band' (which is an early front-runner for 'Least Helpful Description' of 2017). I first saw them in October as the opener for Lake Street Dive and I immediately liked the band. They have great energy on stage and have at least twice as much fun as anyone else in the room.
During the performance I saw, at one point the band fled the stage with their instruments to form a marching band that snaked its way through the aisles of the Wang Theatre. Based on some research I conducted, this appears to happen regularly during their shows (or perhaps the drummer has a flatulence problem).
I'm still going strong with Slow Club. For those seeking a four-minute distraction, I recommend their video for 'In Waves'. Rebecca Taylor uses a GoPro camera to record the kind of day she sings about. The highlights for me were a Google search ('does Victoria Beckham have collonics?'), the layout of her vegetable crisper, and 'melted cheese on fucking everything'.
The video reminded me of two soccer commercials I still remember from a decade ago. Each used the same first-person format and the style captured my imagination. The first was a three-minute Nike production, directed by Guy Ritchie, that highlighted the ascent of a young soccer star. The second was the English Football Association's parody that advertised the (perhaps) more glamorous lifestyle of an average semi-professional player.
So, go on and have a look at those videos.
(...)
Hold on, I'll be back in ten minutes.
*1/23- Prop Admin- December 2016 Reading Review, Part Two
OK- back!
I'll shorten the several hundred word (second) summary of Stoner I prepared to make up for the time you just spent watching those videos: is the acceptance of disappointment heroic or tragic?
*1/27- Leftovers: Messy…
I mentioned in my post about the 'T' that I had two additional stories. The first took place while reading this book. I was standing on the platform, waiting for a train, when a guy walked over and turned his head sideways to get a better view of the book.
I glanced at him and he nodded his head. Then I realized he was actually shaking his head, thanks to the aforementioned sideways head turn.
"Thought it was about soccer," he muttered before walking away.
For the record- like all the British- Harford calls it football.
*2/1- Prop Admin- Early Winter 2016
I am very pleased with the schedule adjustment I described here. The shorter posts allow me to schedule content in advance. This means that I rarely work on anything going up in the next day or two and that, in turn, means more time to work on the quality of the writing.
It also means that, in the unlikely event I get trampled by a flock of angry Canadian geese, there will be a month or so of posts going up here on TOA. Sounds like the plot of a movie you would come up with at three in the morning after several drinks and a pile of Chinese food, right?
No?
Oh.
*2/3- Wild Times on the ‘T’
The other 'T' story is from running into a former colleague. When this person lived in my neighborhood, I used to run into her every once in a while. But she moved a few miles north about six months ago and the chance meetings ended.
In January, I rode the Green Line to a job interview. And surprise of all surprises, we ended up on the same train. But as always is the case when running into anyone, it seemed perfectly explainable in the moment. Only afterward did I consider the long sequence of events that had to go just right for it to happen:
*My decision to ride the train instead of walk
*The speed at which I walked to the station
*Loading enough money onto my Charlie Card so I could skip buying a ticket
*The travel logistics- the car I boarded, the direction I faced, the place I stood...
And so on.
Plus, the person I run into has his or her own similar list of little details that, any single one altered, changes the course of the day and prevents the chance meeting. Sometimes, it is a wonder that I ever run into anyone at all.
*2/5- 2016 Books of the Year: Tiny Beautiful Things
So the whole 'review a book in the style of the book' idea is nothing particularly new or clever. More importantly, it does not guarantee the review becomes more interesting. But when I stumbled across a draft of an email that vaguely resembled a note to myself, I thought it might be worth a shot for this post.
The style of this post- as well as an inspiration for my 'What I Learned' post from July- came from this column (which is featured in the book). My understanding is that many rate this column as their favorite from Strayed's tenure as the 'Dear Sugar' columnist.
*2/8- But What’s the Wind Chill?
This post is a decent argument for a single-payer system. So, what's the delay?
Well, UHC's CEO took home over $100 million in 2010. In 2014, his pay was dramatically reduced- $66 million. (It's unclear if his employer also covered his health insurance plan- perhaps 'compensation' was a little higher in those years.)
Systems that produce such figures do not change very quickly. After all, in whose interest is it to change this system? Not for anyone with the power to do it, that's for sure.
*2/10- Talking Shits, January 2017
Sources for specific quotations include Hungarian proverbs, CNN, Medium, Paul Graham's essays, Brain Pickings, Mr. Money Mustache, This Is Anfield, my own nonsense, The New Yorker, Farnham Street, Thought Catalog, The Boston Calendar, IMDB, M.I.A., and The Boston Globe.
I should also note the influence of The Art of War. The book is a series of voices contributing quotes to a larger narrative arc. I thought it was an interesting coincidence that I wrote up notes for this book, started doing 'Talking Shits', and read Lincoln In The Bardo- a book written with a similar multi-narrator style- in the span of one month.
*2/12- Reading Review: Tenth of December
George Saunders's appearance on February 17 was great. I'll write about the specifics when I review Lincoln In The Bardo.
I almost skipped going to the event. Around 3pm that day, my stomach cramped up. The pain was not very intense but I felt bloated and uncomfortable. I tried to sit, then stand, then walk. Nothing helped. As the 7pm start time approached, cramping replaced my discomfort.
Finally, I walked into CVS and, for the first time in my life, bought some over the counter medicine (antacids). Surprise, this last ditch effort worked...I suppose every rule ('avoid over the counter medicine') requires an exception ('unless you paid $5 to hear an author make dick-jokes').
*2/15- Prop Admin- December 2016 Reading Review, Part Three
The poem from milk and honey explains a pillar of my learning process. I learn from bad teachers by negative example- I try to avoid making their mistakes.
*2/17- Bitter Old Man: “I’ve seen bigger.”
The best place in Boston to see the full moon is from the Longfellow bridge at moonset. A clear night sky is ideal (though a cloud or two might add an interesting dimension to the visual).
*2/19- 2016 Books of the Year: Fallen Leaves
I laughed aloud at his suggestion that a tourist is anyone who mistakes novelty for beauty.
*2/22- Boston’s Sad Squirrels
I hope this post does not come back to haunt me when I run for mayor.
*2/24- The TOA Game Show Channel Presents: Real or Fake?
FAKE
1) Honeyball: How Big Data is Changing Your Relationships
2) The Porridge Clause: The True Story Of Goldilocks and Her Flight From Justice
4) The Sphere-A-Mid Scheme: How Big Insurance Passes The Buck To Keep Their House Of Cards Upright
5) Apocalypse Tomorrow: Why So Many Predict the End- And Why It Never Comes
8) The Baby Doomers- The Generation of Waste and Excess That Failed America- and What We Must Do To Fix It
11) All Geek To Me: The Decade of Comic-Con, Star Wars, and The Rise of Silicon Valley
12) Heroes To Zeroes: Tales of Fleeting Success
14) The Sneer of the Tiger: How Animals Proved Everything Zoos Knew About Captivity Was Wrong
15) Born To Gun: The Second Amendment and How It Fulfilled Our Manifest Destiny
17) Barking at the Wrong Me: How To Recognize- And Treat- Your Aging Dog's Mental Decline
18) Dressing In Disguise: Salsa, Hummus, and Other Healthy Ways to Garnish Your Salad
19) ci2i: The Abbv Age and How It Is Changing Communication
20 ) Let Lying Dogs Sleep: How To Navigate A Modern World of Deceit, Deception, and Misinformation
REAL
3) Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It
6) The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story
7) Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
9) The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy
10) Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream
13) Furious George: My Forty Years Surviving NBA Divas, Clueless GMs, and Poor Shot Selection
16) Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Explanation
*2/26- Reading Review: The Art of War
Books like The Art of War occupy space on executive bookshelves. Why this might be the case is understandable. There is a lot of wisdom in books like this for leaders of any organization.
But I remain wary of books that provide all the answers. I think time is better spent seeking questions. Leadership means diagnosing problems, not applying prescriptions.
Hubway update!
Just kidding.
A blog is different...
I took an Uber ride in February and was struck by a thought- I hate talking in these cars. It seems contradictory given
I'm not sure what the cause of my discomfort is. Perhaps the obvious presence of technology reminds me of how easy it is to record a conversation.
Or maybe I just feel rude sitting in the car and chattering on, actively ignoring the driver. I've never been fully comfortable actively ignoring others- even when it is considered normal, like having a phone conversation in front of someone else.
I did watch the Super Bowl, I swear!
If I wrote for The Onion, I would surely have contributed this headline: 'Brady finds missing jersey where he last left it'.
The Chinese food equivalent of a four-leaf clover?
I got a fortune cookie the other day which had TWO cookies in it. The heck?
I still collect fortunes but this was too much even for me to handle- I passed the cookie(s) along. I guess I was not mentally (or emotionally) prepared to process two inane
Oh no, is that Moya coming?
"Sit, Moya, sit, you remind me of the people on the train, they stand as soon as the train leaves the station, I haven't a clue why, I ask 'did Atticus Finch board?' but everyone is too busy, jostling and tweeting and shoving aside every civilized passenger who is standing, holding on for dear life, Moya, as the train hurtles down the wobbly tracks, as if it were going anywhere important, like anyone could ever be in a hurry to reach Brookline or Newton or Fenway Park, to watch a bunch of men swing a stick at a ball, a hurry to reach someplace, as the train lurches along, throwing us to and fro like loose crates scattering on the deck of a fishing boat, and for what, you wonder, sit, Moya, sit right here, the bartender is going to think you need another whiskey, it's crazy to stand before one is ready to depart and yet, here in this town, they all stand, en masse, as if the train would leave the station before every fool had disembarked, I've ridden the train so long I remember tokens, Moya, tokens, like children at an arcade, and not once has a train closed its doors before the passengers got off, if anything the train sits dumbly, doors agape, cold wind and fare dodgers and paper trash breezing aboard, but these folks have convinced themselves, they don't need to pay, no fare is fair, maybe that's why they stand, they think the train will move on with them still aboard as punishment for not paying, they stand and knock us all aside to queue at the doors, a full stop before they must get off, mumbling 'excuse me, excuse me' into their phones before barging ahead, does 'excuse me' mean 'out of the way, I am not pausing?', knocking laptops to the ground and fearing imminent arrest, while we are just trying to keep our feet as the train rattles and pitches its way down the track, just so we can all get to the game a second earlier so we can watch these 'athletes', who calls them 'athletes', Moya, no athlete in my book stands stock-still for hours in the grass, they stand there for hours, watching other men swing a stick, watching other men toss a ball, these guys aren't athletic enough to keep their balance on the train..."
Did you leave the apartment at all?
For some reason I could not quite figure out, there is something between Somerville and Everett (just next to Assembly Square) called the 'Amelia Earhart Dam'. It's obviously named for the aviator. But why?
I have no theories and could find no information. It is possibly the last fact missing from Google. Shout if you have any information!
Anything else?
I admit that I tend to like books more than most people. I'm perfectly content to read for an hour to find one good sentence, a process that mystifies people who will stop reading a book that is too dull or slow for them.
One hypothesis I have on the matter is that this is related to how I get so many books out of the library. People love to get things for FREE. And so I wonder if it is possible that those who check out a book from the library for FREE are primed to enjoy the book more than those who pay for it at a book store.
Of course, reader, if you disagree, let's run a little experiment. Each time you read a post, send me one dollar. Or just burn it. And keep track of how much you enjoy these posts...
Sunday, March 19, 2017
life changing books, pre-2011: the black swan
The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Winter 2010)
Taleb became very famous for the 'black swan' idea that graces the title of this book. By his definition, a black swan event is not predictable, has an outsize impact, and might retrospectively be described in a way that makes it seem as if it could have been predicted.
The book has two general aims- explore ways to minimize the impact of negative 'black swan' events and find ways to take better advantage of positive 'black swan' events. It left me with three major reflections, each having a different impact on my life.
First, almost immediately, I began to question the way I envisioned applying my undergraduate education. My double major in economics and mathematical sciences (basically statistics) seemed pretty handy on graduation day. Taleb caused me to reconsider my conclusions by systematically describing how 'useful' statistical models and 'empirical' economic forecasts based on applied theory played a starring role in the various financial crises of the past one hundred years.
This brief history lesson would have been distressing had it not rang so true. Clearly, I would need to think a little harder if I wanted to apply my education. (1)
Second, it dawned on me that when most people read, they made one of three common errors. They did not retain what they read, they misunderstood what they read, or they just did not read at all but pretended they did, perhaps by substituting a related article or summary they found elsewhere. (2)
I first noticed this after reading this book. A lot of people talked about 'black swans' around me but I often found that their understanding of the term was incorrect. They generally misapplied the idea to things that were either predictable or did not have outsize effects.
Thanks to reading this book, I discovered that most people talked about this book incorrectly. Fully absorbing this observation over time caused me to realize that the advantages of reading were lost without understanding, retaining, and applying the material.
I also became a bit extreme in my position that there is 'no substitute for the reading'. Luckily, rather than annoy everyone around me, I settled for recognizing the world of opportunity for anyone who actually did do the reading and doubled my own effort in this area. (3)
The third and final one is easily my favorite idea from the book. It comes right at the end and captures the essence of the text- 'don't run for the subway'. (4)
The idea made me consider- each time I ran for the subway, what was I running for? To get home five minutes earlier? This would be crucial- but on how many occasions did I return home to think 'if only I made it home five minutes ago, I would be so much happier' (the answer is zero).
And the flip side- how many times did I ruin my own experience of a subway or bus ride by running after it to board entirely out of breath and somewhat sweaty (the answer is more than zero).
In looking over all three of these reflections, I see a trend where I sought to apply the larger concept of the book in my own little way. Whether the specific domain was in applying my education, reading retention, or time management, I began to consider the leverage my decisions had on the ensuing event.
So, instead of seeking careers where I would need to understand economics at all times, I sought opportunities where my infrequent application of those principles would make a major impact. Rather than reading energetically with the goal of retaining each word, I started taking notes in a way that separated reading and retention. I stopped chasing down buses unless getting to my destination faster carried some significance beyond applying the primitive 'bigger, faster, stronger' philosophy that once propelled my younger legs.
I really admire what books like The Black Swan try to do. As people, we are secure within routine, predictability, and consistency. And yet, we are at our best when challenged to be creative in solving novel problems or dealing with new situations. This book tries to help people become more aware of when their instinct for security is suppressing their potential.
Taleb became very famous for the 'black swan' idea that graces the title of this book. By his definition, a black swan event is not predictable, has an outsize impact, and might retrospectively be described in a way that makes it seem as if it could have been predicted.
The book has two general aims- explore ways to minimize the impact of negative 'black swan' events and find ways to take better advantage of positive 'black swan' events. It left me with three major reflections, each having a different impact on my life.
First, almost immediately, I began to question the way I envisioned applying my undergraduate education. My double major in economics and mathematical sciences (basically statistics) seemed pretty handy on graduation day. Taleb caused me to reconsider my conclusions by systematically describing how 'useful' statistical models and 'empirical' economic forecasts based on applied theory played a starring role in the various financial crises of the past one hundred years.
This brief history lesson would have been distressing had it not rang so true. Clearly, I would need to think a little harder if I wanted to apply my education. (1)
Second, it dawned on me that when most people read, they made one of three common errors. They did not retain what they read, they misunderstood what they read, or they just did not read at all but pretended they did, perhaps by substituting a related article or summary they found elsewhere. (2)
I first noticed this after reading this book. A lot of people talked about 'black swans' around me but I often found that their understanding of the term was incorrect. They generally misapplied the idea to things that were either predictable or did not have outsize effects.
Thanks to reading this book, I discovered that most people talked about this book incorrectly. Fully absorbing this observation over time caused me to realize that the advantages of reading were lost without understanding, retaining, and applying the material.
I also became a bit extreme in my position that there is 'no substitute for the reading'. Luckily, rather than annoy everyone around me, I settled for recognizing the world of opportunity for anyone who actually did do the reading and doubled my own effort in this area. (3)
The third and final one is easily my favorite idea from the book. It comes right at the end and captures the essence of the text- 'don't run for the subway'. (4)
The idea made me consider- each time I ran for the subway, what was I running for? To get home five minutes earlier? This would be crucial- but on how many occasions did I return home to think 'if only I made it home five minutes ago, I would be so much happier' (the answer is zero).
And the flip side- how many times did I ruin my own experience of a subway or bus ride by running after it to board entirely out of breath and somewhat sweaty (the answer is more than zero).
In looking over all three of these reflections, I see a trend where I sought to apply the larger concept of the book in my own little way. Whether the specific domain was in applying my education, reading retention, or time management, I began to consider the leverage my decisions had on the ensuing event.
So, instead of seeking careers where I would need to understand economics at all times, I sought opportunities where my infrequent application of those principles would make a major impact. Rather than reading energetically with the goal of retaining each word, I started taking notes in a way that separated reading and retention. I stopped chasing down buses unless getting to my destination faster carried some significance beyond applying the primitive 'bigger, faster, stronger' philosophy that once propelled my younger legs.
I really admire what books like The Black Swan try to do. As people, we are secure within routine, predictability, and consistency. And yet, we are at our best when challenged to be creative in solving novel problems or dealing with new situations. This book tries to help people become more aware of when their instinct for security is suppressing their potential.
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. So...?
As it turned out, the math background was dead useful for my start in computer programming a couple of years later. The logical thought process involved was second nature to a former math major.
And I utilized economics in examining 'second order effects'- what happens after an initial event has changed overall conditions, in a sense- and thinking on a deeper level about how complex parts interacted.
2. Item three on your list makes no sense. How could 'not reading' be a mistake from reading?
True, maybe. I suppose what I mean there is that, to an outsider, there is not much difference between someone who actually read and someone who claimed to read.
In terms of my 'common reading mistakes', I was often found in group one. A card carrying member, you could say. Nothing I read ever stuck in my head. I started writing things down three years later.
3. This was the first time you thought this?
Well, it was the first time that I was ready to act on it. I was told something similar to this approximately seven hundred times from ages seven through twenty-two.
There is an interesting phenomenon with books like The Black Swan that is similar to this. Some of the writing in the book is, for the lack of a better word, obvious. When I first read it, I was in that category of readers who would think 'well, duh' or 'only an idiot would learn from this'.
Coincidentally, I learned almost nothing from it the first time.
Today, I read in almost the opposite way. It does not bother me at all to read something I already knew. I suppose one reason for this is a low-level world weariness; too often, I've been surprised by how the expert-types who categorically dismiss this kind of obvious stuff seem to make elementary mistakes over and over.
Perhaps if they took the basics more seriously, they would do a better job with basics like keeping appointments, managing time, and organizing their thoughts. I try to get ahead of this problem by taking the basic more seriously.
Coincidentally, I now learn a lot more books like The Black Swan.
4. Didn't you once sprint for fifteen minutes through downtown Lowell to catch a train...?
Well, unless it is the last one. Then you better RUN FOR THE SUBWAY!!!
Perhaps the full text read: "don't run for the subway, assuming that there is another subway coming within a reasonable length of time and that your arrival at your destination is not irreparably time-dependent."
"Don't run for the subway" just sounds a little better.
As it turned out, the math background was dead useful for my start in computer programming a couple of years later. The logical thought process involved was second nature to a former math major.
And I utilized economics in examining 'second order effects'- what happens after an initial event has changed overall conditions, in a sense- and thinking on a deeper level about how complex parts interacted.
2. Item three on your list makes no sense. How could 'not reading' be a mistake from reading?
True, maybe. I suppose what I mean there is that, to an outsider, there is not much difference between someone who actually read and someone who claimed to read.
In terms of my 'common reading mistakes', I was often found in group one. A card carrying member, you could say. Nothing I read ever stuck in my head. I started writing things down three years later.
3. This was the first time you thought this?
Well, it was the first time that I was ready to act on it. I was told something similar to this approximately seven hundred times from ages seven through twenty-two.
There is an interesting phenomenon with books like The Black Swan that is similar to this. Some of the writing in the book is, for the lack of a better word, obvious. When I first read it, I was in that category of readers who would think 'well, duh' or 'only an idiot would learn from this'.
Coincidentally, I learned almost nothing from it the first time.
Today, I read in almost the opposite way. It does not bother me at all to read something I already knew. I suppose one reason for this is a low-level world weariness; too often, I've been surprised by how the expert-types who categorically dismiss this kind of obvious stuff seem to make elementary mistakes over and over.
Perhaps if they took the basics more seriously, they would do a better job with basics like keeping appointments, managing time, and organizing their thoughts. I try to get ahead of this problem by taking the basic more seriously.
Coincidentally, I now learn a lot more books like The Black Swan.
4. Didn't you once sprint for fifteen minutes through downtown Lowell to catch a train...?
Well, unless it is the last one. Then you better RUN FOR THE SUBWAY!!!
Perhaps the full text read: "don't run for the subway, assuming that there is another subway coming within a reasonable length of time and that your arrival at your destination is not irreparably time-dependent."
"Don't run for the subway" just sounds a little better.
Friday, March 17, 2017
i say bing is the best search engine
Ask anyone what the best internet search engine is and you get one answer- Google. Google it if you don't believe me!
Every once in a while, I Google 'True On Average', just to see where it pops up on the list. I scroll through the first one hundred hits, then stop. At this point, websites about baseball, economics, penis size (...), and spider consumption by sleeping humans all check into the top one hundred ahead of my pointless little blog. (I assume we make the list eventually but I always cut off my search after one hundred results.)
I last did this one day in November. However, frustrated with the lack of results, I then popped over to Bing, Google's 'rival' (in the sense that ice and heat are 'rivals'), and did the same search. And wouldn't you know it, True On Average checked in at #3! I'm not sure what will be easier- getting this blog up to #3 on Google's results page or getting everyone in the world to start using Bing as their primary search engine. (Stay tuned...)
In thinking over these, er, 'events', I was reminded of a comment I believe I've referenced once before on this space. It came during 'Writer Idol', a highly-entertaining event during the Boston Book Festival. This event featured three publishers serving as judges of audience-submitted manuscripts. In the process of explaining their decisions, the publishers served up a number of insights into the industry of book publishing.
The most memorable idea from the event came about halfway through. A judge revealed to us audience members that her rule of thumb is to consider whether ten thousand people would spend twenty-six dollars to buy this book.
I'm not sure what the intended effect of this revelation was. From my perspective, I found it emboldening. Anyone can convince ten thousand people to do anything. (1)
So to apply the idea to my search engine shenanigans, if my goal was to have any collection of ten thousand people find the blog via search, I would be best served by doctoring the results a little bit and using optimization techniques to improve the blog's ranking. But if my goal was to have people who tend to run phrases like 'true on average' into their search engines click on this blog ten thousand times, a better approach might be to find a way to get those people to switch their main search engine.
I suspect writers seeking publication run into this type of conundrum at one point or another. Do they optimize their work to make it the best possible piece of writing? Such a work will likely appeal as broadly as possible but may have little relationship to whether ten thousand people choose to buy it if it fails to reach some threshold of relative quality.
Or, do writers seek their niche? This means trying to get ten thousand purchases from the type of book reader who will seek a specific kind of book purchase. I'm leery of this approach. It seems a recipe for reducing the quality of writing (and lowers the maximum return for the publisher). To return to my search engine analogy, perhaps the question is whether a blog that is found via Bing is of higher absolute quality than one found via Google.
But in the context of getting those required ten thousand readers, the approach is a very tempting one indeed.
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. Well, this is true, but what if they lend out their copy?
One could argue that book readers exhibit a variation of the 'network effect'- one person reads a book and says it is good, thereby making it a more useful, valuable, or prestigious read for the next person. So in the end, it might even be a smaller number than ten thousand people if one concedes that a good enough book (and your book is good enough, no doubt about it, dear reader) will sell additional copies through recommendations or gift purchasing.
Every once in a while, I Google 'True On Average', just to see where it pops up on the list. I scroll through the first one hundred hits, then stop. At this point, websites about baseball, economics, penis size (...), and spider consumption by sleeping humans all check into the top one hundred ahead of my pointless little blog. (I assume we make the list eventually but I always cut off my search after one hundred results.)
I last did this one day in November. However, frustrated with the lack of results, I then popped over to Bing, Google's 'rival' (in the sense that ice and heat are 'rivals'), and did the same search. And wouldn't you know it, True On Average checked in at #3! I'm not sure what will be easier- getting this blog up to #3 on Google's results page or getting everyone in the world to start using Bing as their primary search engine. (Stay tuned...)
In thinking over these, er, 'events', I was reminded of a comment I believe I've referenced once before on this space. It came during 'Writer Idol', a highly-entertaining event during the Boston Book Festival. This event featured three publishers serving as judges of audience-submitted manuscripts. In the process of explaining their decisions, the publishers served up a number of insights into the industry of book publishing.
The most memorable idea from the event came about halfway through. A judge revealed to us audience members that her rule of thumb is to consider whether ten thousand people would spend twenty-six dollars to buy this book.
I'm not sure what the intended effect of this revelation was. From my perspective, I found it emboldening. Anyone can convince ten thousand people to do anything. (1)
So to apply the idea to my search engine shenanigans, if my goal was to have any collection of ten thousand people find the blog via search, I would be best served by doctoring the results a little bit and using optimization techniques to improve the blog's ranking. But if my goal was to have people who tend to run phrases like 'true on average' into their search engines click on this blog ten thousand times, a better approach might be to find a way to get those people to switch their main search engine.
I suspect writers seeking publication run into this type of conundrum at one point or another. Do they optimize their work to make it the best possible piece of writing? Such a work will likely appeal as broadly as possible but may have little relationship to whether ten thousand people choose to buy it if it fails to reach some threshold of relative quality.
Or, do writers seek their niche? This means trying to get ten thousand purchases from the type of book reader who will seek a specific kind of book purchase. I'm leery of this approach. It seems a recipe for reducing the quality of writing (and lowers the maximum return for the publisher). To return to my search engine analogy, perhaps the question is whether a blog that is found via Bing is of higher absolute quality than one found via Google.
But in the context of getting those required ten thousand readers, the approach is a very tempting one indeed.
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. Well, this is true, but what if they lend out their copy?
One could argue that book readers exhibit a variation of the 'network effect'- one person reads a book and says it is good, thereby making it a more useful, valuable, or prestigious read for the next person. So in the end, it might even be a smaller number than ten thousand people if one concedes that a good enough book (and your book is good enough, no doubt about it, dear reader) will sell additional copies through recommendations or gift purchasing.
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
hello ladies
I took an epidemiology class in my last college semester. Its most memorable assignment was to read The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, an account of John Snow's investigation into London's 1854 cholera epidemic. Snow's key discovery was that drinking from a contaminated water source leads to illness. (1)
Interesting. My friend reads a lot of excellent books. His recommendations have led me to some of my favorite reads. At no point did it occur to me that his selections were biased. If anything, he seemed biased against rubbish literature. But bias against women?
And yet, there it was, clear as day, in the form of a (non) resolution, a suggestion about how to do better in the coming year. What the idea suggests is that, intended or otherwise, any selection process is prone to bias. And as John Snow proved in 1854, drawing from a contaminated source is the fastest way to an undesired outcome.
So (even though I knew I was a perfectly unbiased human being) I decided to check my own book selection process for any signs of bias. At the very minimum, by going through this entirely academic exercise I would have evidence in the future to wave in anyone's face- check this out, there's no 'i' in bias, at least as it applies to me...
My first step was to measure my own performance. Did anything in my reading history suggest bias in my book selections?
In 2016, I read one hundred and twenty-nine books. The breakdown was seventy-five men to fifty-eight women, a 56% male author proportion. Not proof of unbiased selection but I suppose it could have been worse (like, 57%). (3)
Next, I looked at mycritically acclaimed books of the year posts. Of the twenty-five authors I mentioned, fifteen were male. Again, not so bad, though the subset fared worse than my overall list. (I suppose I can mention that I included Impro, a male-authored book I did not actually read. So, let's call it fourteen to ten.)
Still, 'not bad' is sometimes a way of saying 'not good'. I was not quite at a male chauvinist level but there was an obvious imbalance. So, I considered another question. Could I explain away some or all of my unbalanced reading by identifying bias in my recommendation sources? (4)
Now, I was not out to accuse anyone who recommended a book to me of bias. And I was not out to find the evidence required to pompously make this accusation. But I considered the possibility because almost all my reading starts with a recommendation from one source or another. If I was pulling books off biased shelves, I would likely see these biases reflected in my end of year reading list. (5)
First, I looked at the two blogs I read most frequently. Lacking the energy to catalog each book mentioned in 2016, I instead opted for a proxy measure. Each blog published a 'books of the year' post similar to my own and I counted the authors they cited to represent the 'bias' shown by each blog.
Blog A did pretty well- ten women, six men. Blog B was a, umm, a tiny bit, well, just a little less, er, balanced- fourteen men, two women.
Next, I reviewed the websites I use to preview books. Again, I employed a similar technique to create a proxy measure.
Amazon split their books of the year lists into "editor's picks" and "reader's picks". The editors came out to a 50% split while the readers did a little worse, choosing titles with male authors for just over thirteen out of twenty books (I believe there were a couple of titles with two authors).
I browsed Goodreads but found that their lists drilled down into very specific genres. Given the small sizes of these lists, I opted to skip measuring this website.
Finally, I popped over to the Boston Public Library's main branch in Copley. Of their most borrowed books in 2016, six of the top ten were written by women.
Those numbers don't lead to firm conclusions. I suppose a couple of the totals skew one way or the other but, as I learned in statistics classes, sample size is always relevant. Without gathering a lot more data, I don't really have the ability to make a conclusion.
So, my data brought me to a final question, which takes us back to my initial interest in my friend's (non) resolution. Are my friends and family biased in the way they recommend books to me?
Answering this question, in a way, mirrored the approach I took above. I did not ask anyone for their reading lists, opting instead to allow my intuition to guide me (my hunch- no bias). I then thought about potential sources they may have used to get their own initial notice about a possible read.
I found myself stuck at this point. The basic issue was figuring out how to aggregate the way all the unrelated individuals in my life first learn about the books they eventually read.
After some thought, I concluded that looking at the industry at the broadest possible level was the best (and perhaps safe) bet. Marketing is the starting point for almost everything in this consumerist society of ours. (7)
So, I did a little bit of research on the state of the publishing field. My most interesting finding came via The Stella Prize, an Australian organization that champions cultural change through its support of women's writing. This group found that women make up approximately two-thirds of the Australian author population.
So, in a world without bias, this implies that marketing efforts would allocate two-thirds of its resources to books authored by women. And yet, in a 2015 survey, this group found that twelve of thirteen publications it studied reviewed a higher proportion of male authors than it did female. This chart shows the five-year trend for nine of these publications. (8)
Now, proxy measures are always a problematic problem solving tool. In this case, I am using Australian publishing data to suggest that my American family and friends are exposed to book reviews championing the work of male writers over the work of female writers. This method would not hold up in the academic world, I'm guessing.
On New Year's Day, I was brought back to this lesson for the first time since my college days. In the aftermath of my post about (non) resolutions, a friend shared with me one of his (non) resolutions for the coming year- 'read more books by women'. (2)
Interesting. My friend reads a lot of excellent books. His recommendations have led me to some of my favorite reads. At no point did it occur to me that his selections were biased. If anything, he seemed biased against rubbish literature. But bias against women?
And yet, there it was, clear as day, in the form of a (non) resolution, a suggestion about how to do better in the coming year. What the idea suggests is that, intended or otherwise, any selection process is prone to bias. And as John Snow proved in 1854, drawing from a contaminated source is the fastest way to an undesired outcome.
So (even though I knew I was a perfectly unbiased human being) I decided to check my own book selection process for any signs of bias. At the very minimum, by going through this entirely academic exercise I would have evidence in the future to wave in anyone's face- check this out, there's no 'i' in bias, at least as it applies to me...
My first step was to measure my own performance. Did anything in my reading history suggest bias in my book selections?
In 2016, I read one hundred and twenty-nine books. The breakdown was seventy-five men to fifty-eight women, a 56% male author proportion. Not proof of unbiased selection but I suppose it could have been worse (like, 57%). (3)
Next, I looked at my
Still, 'not bad' is sometimes a way of saying 'not good'. I was not quite at a male chauvinist level but there was an obvious imbalance. So, I considered another question. Could I explain away some or all of my unbalanced reading by identifying bias in my recommendation sources? (4)
Now, I was not out to accuse anyone who recommended a book to me of bias. And I was not out to find the evidence required to pompously make this accusation. But I considered the possibility because almost all my reading starts with a recommendation from one source or another. If I was pulling books off biased shelves, I would likely see these biases reflected in my end of year reading list. (5)
First, I looked at the two blogs I read most frequently. Lacking the energy to catalog each book mentioned in 2016, I instead opted for a proxy measure. Each blog published a 'books of the year' post similar to my own and I counted the authors they cited to represent the 'bias' shown by each blog.
Blog A did pretty well- ten women, six men. Blog B was a, umm, a tiny bit, well, just a little less, er, balanced- fourteen men, two women.
Next, I reviewed the websites I use to preview books. Again, I employed a similar technique to create a proxy measure.
Amazon split their books of the year lists into "editor's picks" and "reader's picks". The editors came out to a 50% split while the readers did a little worse, choosing titles with male authors for just over thirteen out of twenty books (I believe there were a couple of titles with two authors).
I browsed Goodreads but found that their lists drilled down into very specific genres. Given the small sizes of these lists, I opted to skip measuring this website.
Finally, I popped over to the Boston Public Library's main branch in Copley. Of their most borrowed books in 2016, six of the top ten were written by women.
SUMMARY
Blog A: 6 / 16
Blog B: 14 / 16
Amazon editors: 10 / 20
Amazon readers: 13 / 20
Boston Public Library: 4 / 10
Total: 47 / 82
Blog A: 37.5%
Blog B: 87.5%
Amazon editors: 50%
Amazon readers: 65%
Boston Public Library: 40%
Total: 57.3%I acknowledge that there are some glaring design problems with the above and some omissions on my part in terms of checking all my sources. Still, it was interesting to me that the proportion of my proxy measures worked out pretty close to my own observed rate- above parity. (6)
Those numbers don't lead to firm conclusions. I suppose a couple of the totals skew one way or the other but, as I learned in statistics classes, sample size is always relevant. Without gathering a lot more data, I don't really have the ability to make a conclusion.
So, my data brought me to a final question, which takes us back to my initial interest in my friend's (non) resolution. Are my friends and family biased in the way they recommend books to me?
Answering this question, in a way, mirrored the approach I took above. I did not ask anyone for their reading lists, opting instead to allow my intuition to guide me (my hunch- no bias). I then thought about potential sources they may have used to get their own initial notice about a possible read.
I found myself stuck at this point. The basic issue was figuring out how to aggregate the way all the unrelated individuals in my life first learn about the books they eventually read.
After some thought, I concluded that looking at the industry at the broadest possible level was the best (and perhaps safe) bet. Marketing is the starting point for almost everything in this consumerist society of ours. (7)
So, I did a little bit of research on the state of the publishing field. My most interesting finding came via The Stella Prize, an Australian organization that champions cultural change through its support of women's writing. This group found that women make up approximately two-thirds of the Australian author population.
So, in a world without bias, this implies that marketing efforts would allocate two-thirds of its resources to books authored by women. And yet, in a 2015 survey, this group found that twelve of thirteen publications it studied reviewed a higher proportion of male authors than it did female. This chart shows the five-year trend for nine of these publications. (8)
Now, proxy measures are always a problematic problem solving tool. In this case, I am using Australian publishing data to suggest that my American family and friends are exposed to book reviews championing the work of male writers over the work of female writers. This method would not hold up in the academic world, I'm guessing.
There are obvious problems beyond geography, as well. I have no clue whether a given book reviewer knows the gender of the author under review. And as always, who is to say if the imbalance is a product of pure chance?
On the other hand, it's not hard to find other observations of the same phenomenon. Take this Guardian article, for example, which cites a study by the US-based Vida confirming a similar general pattern in the US and UK book markets.
Again, I'm not making any firm conclusions with the data I've presented above. If at any point a blog I read, a website I browse, or a friend I trust has looked at a book and said 'you know what, I was just about to read this, but look at that first name, sounds girly...' I remain unaware of it (and ready to react with righteous shock were I ever informed of such an incident).
And though I'm open to examining my process and studying the flaws, it does seem like my 56% male author percentage from last year would rank pretty well, at least in Australia (assuming The Stella Group would rank my reading list alongside its actual book reviewing publications, the odds of such a thing being equivalent to zero). (9)
And yet, something's there. People at organizations like The Stella Group or Vida are devoting their entire professional lives to the cause of championing women's work in literature. Their work identifies positive role models for girls and ensures the display cases of our stores and libraries reflect merit and accomplishment. Such mission based organizations don't just pop up because of one or two unfounded accusations about bias in the world of publishing. (10)
From my own limited experience, I think the bias we observe in hindsight results from processes that stick too long with what one knows, lack imagination in defining requirements, or utilize criteria that contain their own bias. The malicious intent of discrimination isn't there. But the comfort zone of routine makes it difficult to pinpoint how the process is influencing selections. (11)
I think this helps explain what's happened to my reading list. I, like many, rely on publications to review new books. I lookup award-winners to point me toward the forgotten classics. But given the skewed proportions highlighted by organizations like The Stella Group or my understanding of how gender bias in the past prevented many women from being published at the same rate as men, my quality-seeking approaches are sure to lead me somewhat astray in living up to some of my big-talk about using merit to choose my next read.
But in the grand scheme of things, 56% isn't too bad. It's not 50%, though, so I'll keep my eye on the metric in the coming years. If this proportion drifts upward, I'll consider some adjustments to my book selection process.
For now, a better use of my time will involve continuing to honestly assess my own process as frequently as needed. Otherwise, I'm sure to fall into biased behavior as the unintended result of seeking comfort, familiarity, or routine.
That said, it might not hurt to have a second look at those blogs I read.
Thanks for reading.
Tim
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. Fine...
No need to suggest I am making a biased recommendation here.
2. Non-resolution is now a thing? Like humblebrag?
No hashtags, please.
My basic rule of thumb is that any statement without a specific plan of action is a non-resolution.
3. Math whiz gets four more authors than books!!!
I did need to make some design concessions here. For authors I read more than once, I counted them each time a book of theirs appeared on my list. For books co-authored, I counted each author once. I did not include authors of picture or children's books.
If I did this over, I would probably just count each author once regardless of total books read. Is this convenient preparation for next year's post when I count the twelve George Saunders books as one male author?You bet your ass it is!
4. AKA...
*'The Passing The Buck' Stage
*'Don't Blame Me, I'm a Product of My Time' Stage
*'Tim is Officially Out Of Ideas' Stage
5. But my library only stocks male authors! How can I be blamed for my 100% male reading list?
I think in the short-term, its OK to read the books available to you. But eventually, the answer shifts. Go find a better library, man! At some point, everyone goes from 'helpless victim' to 'needing their suffering'.
6. What about Porter Square Books? Or the Cambridge Library?
I considered checking other branches or bookstores but thought it might be overkill. I browse the shelves at places like Porter Square Books, the Harvard Book Store, or the Cambridge Main Library about once or twice a year. So, including these as 'recommendation sources' alongside those I use once or twice a month did not seem like a very robust method.
7. Talk about a method only a goldfish would love....
For books published long ago, I assumed that any change in gender bias since the publication date would reflect the larger societal movement toward equality.
In other words, if I found evidence of bias in today's landscape, I would assume that things were at least just as biased in the past.
8. This is kind of beside the point, but...
The survey also cited that male reviews tended to prefer reviewing male authors while female reviewers tended to review male and female authors with near-equal frequency.
Have a look at the full survey here.
9. Relatively speaking is all well and good...
Of course, when it comes to questions of bias, being 'relatively' less biased is like having a bone that is 'less broken' than your ER neighbor's fracture. I'm either biased or I'm not. So, though I might look good by comparison to my, er, 'colleagues' Down Under, it's a completely irrelevant comparison to make. What's important here is doing the best I can with what I have control over.
10. This is not actually related, though it seems like it is...
It's an interesting sign that my Google searches for 'bias against women' returns 2.3 million hits compared to the 1.1 million hits I get for 'bias against men'.
11. I spent an hour and half trying to decide if this was a footnote, its own blog, or junk...
I'm always intrigued by findings that note an example of how good intentions lead to unintended results. A common one involves the admissions process for highly selective schools. Most schools do not use the homogeneity in their student populations as a selling point to prospective students and yet somehow 'balanced' admission processes around the country are producing that exact outcome. Even if the only 'discrimination' in the selection process is against inferior applicants, the accepted method of filtering prospective students by standardized test scores, grouping them into intelligence ranges by using criteria like admissions essays, and breaking any ties by using something like a legacy preference might lead to outcomes consistent with what a 'biased' process would produce.
The underlying wealth-based factors that impact things like primary school performance or the correlation of education level to wealth makes me suspect that the college application process is just as likely to measure a prospective student's surroundings as much as their ability.
On the other hand, it's not hard to find other observations of the same phenomenon. Take this Guardian article, for example, which cites a study by the US-based Vida confirming a similar general pattern in the US and UK book markets.
Again, I'm not making any firm conclusions with the data I've presented above. If at any point a blog I read, a website I browse, or a friend I trust has looked at a book and said 'you know what, I was just about to read this, but look at that first name, sounds girly...' I remain unaware of it (and ready to react with righteous shock were I ever informed of such an incident).
And though I'm open to examining my process and studying the flaws, it does seem like my 56% male author percentage from last year would rank pretty well, at least in Australia (assuming The Stella Group would rank my reading list alongside its actual book reviewing publications, the odds of such a thing being equivalent to zero). (9)
And yet, something's there. People at organizations like The Stella Group or Vida are devoting their entire professional lives to the cause of championing women's work in literature. Their work identifies positive role models for girls and ensures the display cases of our stores and libraries reflect merit and accomplishment. Such mission based organizations don't just pop up because of one or two unfounded accusations about bias in the world of publishing. (10)
From my own limited experience, I think the bias we observe in hindsight results from processes that stick too long with what one knows, lack imagination in defining requirements, or utilize criteria that contain their own bias. The malicious intent of discrimination isn't there. But the comfort zone of routine makes it difficult to pinpoint how the process is influencing selections. (11)
I think this helps explain what's happened to my reading list. I, like many, rely on publications to review new books. I lookup award-winners to point me toward the forgotten classics. But given the skewed proportions highlighted by organizations like The Stella Group or my understanding of how gender bias in the past prevented many women from being published at the same rate as men, my quality-seeking approaches are sure to lead me somewhat astray in living up to some of my big-talk about using merit to choose my next read.
But in the grand scheme of things, 56% isn't too bad. It's not 50%, though, so I'll keep my eye on the metric in the coming years. If this proportion drifts upward, I'll consider some adjustments to my book selection process.
For now, a better use of my time will involve continuing to honestly assess my own process as frequently as needed. Otherwise, I'm sure to fall into biased behavior as the unintended result of seeking comfort, familiarity, or routine.
That said, it might not hurt to have a second look at those blogs I read.
Thanks for reading.
Tim
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. Fine...
No need to suggest I am making a biased recommendation here.
2. Non-resolution is now a thing? Like humblebrag?
No hashtags, please.
My basic rule of thumb is that any statement without a specific plan of action is a non-resolution.
3. Math whiz gets four more authors than books!!!
I did need to make some design concessions here. For authors I read more than once, I counted them each time a book of theirs appeared on my list. For books co-authored, I counted each author once. I did not include authors of picture or children's books.
If I did this over, I would probably just count each author once regardless of total books read. Is this convenient preparation for next year's post when I count the twelve George Saunders books as one male author?
4. AKA...
*'The Passing The Buck' Stage
*'Don't Blame Me, I'm a Product of My Time' Stage
*'Tim is Officially Out Of Ideas' Stage
5. But my library only stocks male authors! How can I be blamed for my 100% male reading list?
I think in the short-term, its OK to read the books available to you. But eventually, the answer shifts. Go find a better library, man! At some point, everyone goes from 'helpless victim' to 'needing their suffering'.
6. What about Porter Square Books? Or the Cambridge Library?
I considered checking other branches or bookstores but thought it might be overkill. I browse the shelves at places like Porter Square Books, the Harvard Book Store, or the Cambridge Main Library about once or twice a year. So, including these as 'recommendation sources' alongside those I use once or twice a month did not seem like a very robust method.
7. Talk about a method only a goldfish would love....
For books published long ago, I assumed that any change in gender bias since the publication date would reflect the larger societal movement toward equality.
In other words, if I found evidence of bias in today's landscape, I would assume that things were at least just as biased in the past.
8. This is kind of beside the point, but...
The survey also cited that male reviews tended to prefer reviewing male authors while female reviewers tended to review male and female authors with near-equal frequency.
Have a look at the full survey here.
9. Relatively speaking is all well and good...
Of course, when it comes to questions of bias, being 'relatively' less biased is like having a bone that is 'less broken' than your ER neighbor's fracture. I'm either biased or I'm not. So, though I might look good by comparison to my, er, 'colleagues' Down Under, it's a completely irrelevant comparison to make. What's important here is doing the best I can with what I have control over.
10. This is not actually related, though it seems like it is...
It's an interesting sign that my Google searches for 'bias against women' returns 2.3 million hits compared to the 1.1 million hits I get for 'bias against men'.
11. I spent an hour and half trying to decide if this was a footnote, its own blog, or junk...
I'm always intrigued by findings that note an example of how good intentions lead to unintended results. A common one involves the admissions process for highly selective schools. Most schools do not use the homogeneity in their student populations as a selling point to prospective students and yet somehow 'balanced' admission processes around the country are producing that exact outcome. Even if the only 'discrimination' in the selection process is against inferior applicants, the accepted method of filtering prospective students by standardized test scores, grouping them into intelligence ranges by using criteria like admissions essays, and breaking any ties by using something like a legacy preference might lead to outcomes consistent with what a 'biased' process would produce.
The underlying wealth-based factors that impact things like primary school performance or the correlation of education level to wealth makes me suspect that the college application process is just as likely to measure a prospective student's surroundings as much as their ability.
Sunday, March 12, 2017
2016 books of the year, part 4- eureka street
Hi,
The final 'book of the year' from 2016.
Tim
******************
Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson (October 2016)
Wilson's 1996 novel, set in Belfast during the tail end of The Troubles, is a story about how a city goes on despite the constant fear and turmoil brought on by politically-motivated violence.
One of the key events in Eureka Street involves graffiti. One night, the letters 'OTG' appear on a wall. There is no explanation. As the graffiti reappears again and again around Belfast, speculation mounts about what these letters might mean.
'OTG', unfortunately for the city's amateur sleuths, can stand for anything. It might mean nothing at all, an easy enough thing to scribble for anyone bored enough to vandalize a wall. But in bomb-torn Belfast, the most common guesses dismiss this possibility. Everyone is convinced of the graffiti's hidden political meaning. Perhaps a new group is announcing itself. Or maybe the letters are a new slogan from an existing group.
The way the characters of Wilson's world automatically assume political origins for the graffiti is a subtle but important point about how history shapes the stories told about a place. Each new report of pointless violence confirms its unassailable presence in the story of daily life. Every new happening is tailored to fit into the existing narrative arc of politics and division.
Thinking about the 'OTG' graffiti in this way confused me at first. It did not mesh particularly well with another feature I considered important in this book, its opening line- 'All stories are love stories.' How was this negative speculation about a vandalized wall an example of such a story? How could any of the violent stories in a city like Belfast be love stories?
One problem is that, like with 'OTG', Wilson's opening line could literally mean anything. Over the pages of Eureka Street, Wilson's writing is filled with various examples of what the opening line in action looks like.
Some of his explorations are simple, even expected, such as when he follows his characters on their searches for romance or in his descriptions of the many friendships that enrich the story. In other portions of the story, Wilson's idea of a love story comes through in a much more complex way, such as in his satirical depictions of how major cultural figures relate to their homelands or in the response of a character's witnessing the tender way a husband shows his love for a sick wife.
What I realized over the course of Eureka Street is that stories driven by an underlying love progress differently than those lacking the feeling. A love story is expansive in its possibilities and beckons the best of its characters forward. A story without love remains stuck in place and brings out the ugliness of those involved.
I think for Wilson the worst possible story is the one of death. The loss of life reverberates far beyond just the cessation of one person's story. Its loss is also felt as the stories that the deceased was involved in come to an end. The gravity of this reality pulls and tugs at those in mourning. The suffering and grief that comes with a death roots the bereaved to one spot.
The love story, its infinite possibilities, and the way it demands the best in people withers away. In its place enters the smothering reality of loss, the endless and unchanging experience of grief, and the ugliness that it brings out in those most deeply affected. The lost love writes a story that is permanently stuck in the past.
A city that loses too much suffers in this way. As losses accumulate, every citizen is touched. The pressure to turn towards their ugly sides becomes too great to resist. Ideology and politics in such an environment only fuel the negative feeling. A city that lives on despite frequent conflict and destruction spends each day in fear of the same violence that marred the past. The fear alters thought patterns and impedes the way life might move forward.
How does a city stand up again when it is pulled down by pain and suffering? I suppose its suggested in the opening line. People who love their home like Wilson's characters love Belfast will find ways to write a new story about a place.
The new story evolves and grows in spite of the suffocating forces that once authored an alternative narrative. It is no accident in Eureka Street that the main characters, best friends, are a Protestant and a Catholic.
Instead of defining others by the story of their politics, such people instead seek stories that build common ground across differences. In charged environments, it is so easy to mix together a person with their politics. But such interactions only fuel further aggression, violence, and hate.
As stories intersect and cultivate the potential of unexplored territory, the weight of the past becomes a lighter burden to carry. The hope for a better future becomes a destination that slowly comes into view. In Wilson's version of Belfast, events like the 'OTG' graffiti incident represent brief opportunities to glimpse this new future.
Sure, it could be some version of the same old. But it might stand for something new, something different. Each person who understands the infinite possibility of these letters becomes another example of how love nurtures what hate smothers.
The final 'book of the year' from 2016.
Tim
******************
Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson (October 2016)
Wilson's 1996 novel, set in Belfast during the tail end of The Troubles, is a story about how a city goes on despite the constant fear and turmoil brought on by politically-motivated violence.
One of the key events in Eureka Street involves graffiti. One night, the letters 'OTG' appear on a wall. There is no explanation. As the graffiti reappears again and again around Belfast, speculation mounts about what these letters might mean.
'OTG', unfortunately for the city's amateur sleuths, can stand for anything. It might mean nothing at all, an easy enough thing to scribble for anyone bored enough to vandalize a wall. But in bomb-torn Belfast, the most common guesses dismiss this possibility. Everyone is convinced of the graffiti's hidden political meaning. Perhaps a new group is announcing itself. Or maybe the letters are a new slogan from an existing group.
The way the characters of Wilson's world automatically assume political origins for the graffiti is a subtle but important point about how history shapes the stories told about a place. Each new report of pointless violence confirms its unassailable presence in the story of daily life. Every new happening is tailored to fit into the existing narrative arc of politics and division.
Thinking about the 'OTG' graffiti in this way confused me at first. It did not mesh particularly well with another feature I considered important in this book, its opening line- 'All stories are love stories.' How was this negative speculation about a vandalized wall an example of such a story? How could any of the violent stories in a city like Belfast be love stories?
One problem is that, like with 'OTG', Wilson's opening line could literally mean anything. Over the pages of Eureka Street, Wilson's writing is filled with various examples of what the opening line in action looks like.
Some of his explorations are simple, even expected, such as when he follows his characters on their searches for romance or in his descriptions of the many friendships that enrich the story. In other portions of the story, Wilson's idea of a love story comes through in a much more complex way, such as in his satirical depictions of how major cultural figures relate to their homelands or in the response of a character's witnessing the tender way a husband shows his love for a sick wife.
What I realized over the course of Eureka Street is that stories driven by an underlying love progress differently than those lacking the feeling. A love story is expansive in its possibilities and beckons the best of its characters forward. A story without love remains stuck in place and brings out the ugliness of those involved.
I think for Wilson the worst possible story is the one of death. The loss of life reverberates far beyond just the cessation of one person's story. Its loss is also felt as the stories that the deceased was involved in come to an end. The gravity of this reality pulls and tugs at those in mourning. The suffering and grief that comes with a death roots the bereaved to one spot.
The love story, its infinite possibilities, and the way it demands the best in people withers away. In its place enters the smothering reality of loss, the endless and unchanging experience of grief, and the ugliness that it brings out in those most deeply affected. The lost love writes a story that is permanently stuck in the past.
A city that loses too much suffers in this way. As losses accumulate, every citizen is touched. The pressure to turn towards their ugly sides becomes too great to resist. Ideology and politics in such an environment only fuel the negative feeling. A city that lives on despite frequent conflict and destruction spends each day in fear of the same violence that marred the past. The fear alters thought patterns and impedes the way life might move forward.
How does a city stand up again when it is pulled down by pain and suffering? I suppose its suggested in the opening line. People who love their home like Wilson's characters love Belfast will find ways to write a new story about a place.
The new story evolves and grows in spite of the suffocating forces that once authored an alternative narrative. It is no accident in Eureka Street that the main characters, best friends, are a Protestant and a Catholic.
Instead of defining others by the story of their politics, such people instead seek stories that build common ground across differences. In charged environments, it is so easy to mix together a person with their politics. But such interactions only fuel further aggression, violence, and hate.
As stories intersect and cultivate the potential of unexplored territory, the weight of the past becomes a lighter burden to carry. The hope for a better future becomes a destination that slowly comes into view. In Wilson's version of Belfast, events like the 'OTG' graffiti incident represent brief opportunities to glimpse this new future.
Sure, it could be some version of the same old. But it might stand for something new, something different. Each person who understands the infinite possibility of these letters becomes another example of how love nurtures what hate smothers.
Friday, March 10, 2017
talking shits- february 2017
Hi all,
My collected quotes from February.
As usual, anything written without the proper grammar or capitalization comes directly from me.
Thanks for reading.
Tim
******************
This is pretty obvious. I’m sure you already do it. But I’d study what the best people are doing, figure out how to standardize it, and then bring it to everyone to execute.
---
Customization should be five per cent, not ninety-five per cent, of what we do.
---
The best way to make good decisions is to use a system that allows you to know when you have an edge.
---
UPS trucks almost never take left-hand turns.
---
The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.
---
Unshod (or minimally-shod) populations experience almost none of the common foot problems that shoe-wearing populations do.
---
Take the modified pigeon stretch.
“Most people stand with their hips shifted to the right, which causes their left hip to tighten up,” Kechijian says. This pose helps redistribute that weight.
---
Many dogs lose their eyesight and/or hearing as they age, so it makes sense to train them early on for such times. Add body contact to your play and teaching routines. For example, tap their butt twice to ask them to sit down. If you communicate with a mix of verbal commands, hand signs and body contact, you’ll be able to use one of those even if they become deaf, blind, or senile.
---
In December 2015, Chan was appointed as the manager of Eastern Sports Club in the Hong Kong Premier League, replacing Yeung Ching Kwong. She was the first female manager in the league.
Chan became interested in association football through her admiration as a teenager for David Beckham.
---
It’s not only football, for me there’s a few strange decisions in 2016/17: Brexit, Trump, Ranieri.
---
Even the worst teachers are great. They educate us not to be like them. If you think this way, you can learn from anyone.
---
I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.
As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?
What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert.
Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.
The most intriguing thing about this theory, if it's right, is that it explains not merely which kinds of discussions to avoid, but how to have better ideas. If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
---
What made, for instance, James Baldwin and Margaret Mead’s superb 1970 dialogue about race and identity so powerful and so enduringly insightful is precisely the fact that it was a dialogue — not the ping-pong of opinions and co-reactivity that passes for dialogue today, but a commitment to mutual contemplation of viewpoints and considered response.
---
"As a Christian, my whole philosophy in life is pull up the unfortunate," Bohon said, a comment that drew verbal affirmation from others in the room. "The individual mandate: that's what it does. The healthy people pull up the sick."
---
This passage has 3,316 underliners:
---
“Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not… No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”
---
The phrase was extensively described as Orwellian; by Thursday 26 January 2017, sales of the book Nineteen Eighty-Four had increased by 9,500 percent, becoming the number one best seller on Amazon.com.
---
the thing about 1984- the government was very well-run
---
What Orwell failed to predict is that one day we’d carry those around in our pockets and fill them with compromising personal information willingly. Is there an Arcade Fire song on this topic? You bet.
---
It's not a good look to repeatedly and self-righteously defend your own self-interests.
---
That note got MBTA Fiscal and Management Control Board member Brian Lang to mention a conversation he had recently with college students who told him they have found that UberPool costs about the same as the T and provides a better service.
---
Uber was on track to lose $3 billion or so globally last year based on its performance from the first three quarters.
---
In the startup world, most good ideas seem bad initially. If they were obviously good, someone would already be doing them.
---
Meanwhile, Uber's biggest competitor, Lyft, took a decidedly different stance. The company emailed customers Sunday morning, condemning Trump's order. Lyft called the executive order "antithetical to both Lyft's and our nation's core values." Lyft also said it was donating $1 million to the ACLU over the next four years.
---
In 2016, Lyft generated about $700 million in sales, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the financials are private.
---
As one of my medical school mentors would say, true – true and unrelated, or two problems can co-exist and our tendency is to try to get them into the same basket for a neat and tidy explanation.
---
First, the goal of your resume is to get you an interview for the job. You may believe your resume has other purposes:
-To showcase your every achievement
-To mention when you received promotions, awards, or recognition
-To describe the size of your organization, team or budget
Trust me, none of those are the goals of your resume.
---
A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.
That sounds right, but is it simply a description of how to be successful in general? I don't think so. This isn't the recipe for success in writing or painting, for example. In that kind of work the recipe is more to be actively curious. Resourceful implies the obstacles are external, which they generally are in startups. But in writing and painting they're mostly internal; the obstacle is your own obtuseness.
Being relentlessly resourceful is definitely not the recipe for success in big companies, or in most schools. I don't even want to think what the recipe is in big companies, but it is certainly longer and messier, involving some combination of resourcefulness, obedience, and building alliances.
---
But though I can't predict specific winners, I can offer a recipe for recognizing them. When you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that's merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you're probably looking at a loser.
---
Before Google, companies in Silicon Valley already knew it was important to have the best hackers. So they claimed, at least. But Google pushed this idea further than anyone had before. Their hypothesis seems to have been that, in the initial stages at least, all you need is good hackers: if you hire all the smartest people and put them to work on a problem where their success can be measured, you win. All the other stuff—which includes all the stuff that business schools think business consists of—you can figure out along the way. The results won't be perfect, but they'll be optimal. If this was their hypothesis, it's now been verified experimentally.
---
What super-angels really are is a new form of fast-moving, lightweight VC fund. And those of us in the technology world know what usually happens when something comes along that can be described in terms like that. Usually it's the replacement.
---
The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If Yahoo merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less.
---
Good programmers want to work with other good programmers.
---
Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results.
---
What people wished they'd paid more attention to when choosing cofounders was character and commitment, not ability. This was particularly true with startups that failed.
---
This is the city of Houten, just South of Utrecht and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. You can’t get around the city by car, because the roads don’t connect in the middle. A car would have to drive out to the ring road, and then back in the other side. As a result, 66% of in-town trips are by bike or on foot. Also, a central train station whisks you to other cities if desired. One of my life goals is that we – quite literally you and me – build a city like this here in the USA.
---
Every time you drive within a town, you destroy a bit of the feeling of community. Every single time you walk, you build the community, and advertise the idea of walking to every person who sees you.
---
It’s a real puzzle to me why most Americans won’t consider a scooter as an alternative to a second car. It seems to be some sort of cultural prejudice. In most third world countries the scooter is the most popular form of urban transportation – the streets are filled with them. I think scooters hit the sweet spot between driving a car and biking in urban areas.
---
The average American gets the most expensive car he can afford, and drives it as much as he can – for virtually 100% of trips out of the house. And yet he has a net worth of nearly zero, and subpar physical health, for most of his life.
---
The Environmental Protection Agency tests and rates each new car model to figure out its fuel consumption in typical use. The funny part about their rating system is that they have to keep changing it because the average US person drives so inefficiently that they end up using even more fuel than the EPA estimates.
---
I think that as long as we keep the government out of businesses that the private sector could provide more efficiently (designing products, for example), but use them in places where the private sector has been proven to suck (preserving groundwater quality, or providing national health insurance, for example), we will come out ahead.
---
The authors noted, however, that previous guidelines going back more than a decade had recommended such remedies, and doctors were still not providing them to more than two-thirds of patients. One study examined how long it took several major discoveries, such as the finding that the use of beta-blockers after a heart attack improves survival, to reach even half of Americans. The answer was, on average, more than fifteen years.
---
To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men.
---
I think most peoples’ financial goals are far too feeble, stuff like “Pay off my $20,000 student loan over the next ten years”.
---
A few days ago I realized something surprising: the situation with time is much the same as with money. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work
---
I believe that life has much more to offer us than doing the same thing every day for the majority of our waking hours. But I’ve read that our brains change if we keep ourselves locked into routines as we age. Over time, people become addicted to the routine of work, and eventually that’s all they know – it becomes impossible to let go or really experience anything else.
---
If you’re writing something other than a nice exciting novel, you should really be able to make your point in 200 pages or less, don’t you think?
---
Now, when coding, I try to think "How can I write this such that if people saw my code, they'd be amazed at how little there is and how little it does?"
Over-engineering is poison. It's not like doing extra work for extra credit. It's more like telling a lie that you then have to remember so you don't contradict it.
---
Because the list of n things is the easiest essay form, it should be a good one for beginning writers. And in fact it is what most beginning writers are taught. The classic 5 paragraph essay is really a list of n things for n = 3. But the students writing them don't realize they're using the same structure as the articles they read in Cosmopolitan.
---
The greatest weakness of the list of n things is that there's so little room for new thought. The main point of essay writing, when done right, is the new ideas you have while doing it.
---
Most "word problems" in school math textbooks are similarly misleading. They look superficially like the application of math to real problems, but they're not. So if anything they reinforce the impression that math is merely a complicated but pointless collection of stuff to be memorized.
---
Two famous authors, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller are talking at a party hosted by a billionaire hedge fund manager. Kurt says to Joseph, “You know, this billionaire makes more money in one day than you made in your whole lifetime from your novel Catch-22“. Joe responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have… enough.”
---
When we were kids I used to annoy my sister by ordering her to do things I knew she was about to do anyway.
---
The core of the philosophy seems to be this: To have a good and meaningful life, you need to overcome your insatiability.
My collected quotes from February.
As usual, anything written without the proper grammar or capitalization comes directly from me.
Thanks for reading.
Tim
******************
This is pretty obvious. I’m sure you already do it. But I’d study what the best people are doing, figure out how to standardize it, and then bring it to everyone to execute.
---
Customization should be five per cent, not ninety-five per cent, of what we do.
---
The best way to make good decisions is to use a system that allows you to know when you have an edge.
---
UPS trucks almost never take left-hand turns.
---
The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.
---
Unshod (or minimally-shod) populations experience almost none of the common foot problems that shoe-wearing populations do.
---
Take the modified pigeon stretch.
“Most people stand with their hips shifted to the right, which causes their left hip to tighten up,” Kechijian says. This pose helps redistribute that weight.
---
Many dogs lose their eyesight and/or hearing as they age, so it makes sense to train them early on for such times. Add body contact to your play and teaching routines. For example, tap their butt twice to ask them to sit down. If you communicate with a mix of verbal commands, hand signs and body contact, you’ll be able to use one of those even if they become deaf, blind, or senile.
---
In December 2015, Chan was appointed as the manager of Eastern Sports Club in the Hong Kong Premier League, replacing Yeung Ching Kwong. She was the first female manager in the league.
Chan became interested in association football through her admiration as a teenager for David Beckham.
---
It’s not only football, for me there’s a few strange decisions in 2016/17: Brexit, Trump, Ranieri.
---
Even the worst teachers are great. They educate us not to be like them. If you think this way, you can learn from anyone.
---
I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.
As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?
What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert.
Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.
The most intriguing thing about this theory, if it's right, is that it explains not merely which kinds of discussions to avoid, but how to have better ideas. If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
---
What made, for instance, James Baldwin and Margaret Mead’s superb 1970 dialogue about race and identity so powerful and so enduringly insightful is precisely the fact that it was a dialogue — not the ping-pong of opinions and co-reactivity that passes for dialogue today, but a commitment to mutual contemplation of viewpoints and considered response.
---
"As a Christian, my whole philosophy in life is pull up the unfortunate," Bohon said, a comment that drew verbal affirmation from others in the room. "The individual mandate: that's what it does. The healthy people pull up the sick."
---
This passage has 3,316 underliners:
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within 30 seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.So it’s like watching Meet the Press, basically.
---
“Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not… No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”
---
The phrase was extensively described as Orwellian; by Thursday 26 January 2017, sales of the book Nineteen Eighty-Four had increased by 9,500 percent, becoming the number one best seller on Amazon.com.
---
the thing about 1984- the government was very well-run
---
What Orwell failed to predict is that one day we’d carry those around in our pockets and fill them with compromising personal information willingly. Is there an Arcade Fire song on this topic? You bet.
---
It's not a good look to repeatedly and self-righteously defend your own self-interests.
---
That note got MBTA Fiscal and Management Control Board member Brian Lang to mention a conversation he had recently with college students who told him they have found that UberPool costs about the same as the T and provides a better service.
---
Uber was on track to lose $3 billion or so globally last year based on its performance from the first three quarters.
---
In the startup world, most good ideas seem bad initially. If they were obviously good, someone would already be doing them.
---
Meanwhile, Uber's biggest competitor, Lyft, took a decidedly different stance. The company emailed customers Sunday morning, condemning Trump's order. Lyft called the executive order "antithetical to both Lyft's and our nation's core values." Lyft also said it was donating $1 million to the ACLU over the next four years.
---
In 2016, Lyft generated about $700 million in sales, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the financials are private.
---
As one of my medical school mentors would say, true – true and unrelated, or two problems can co-exist and our tendency is to try to get them into the same basket for a neat and tidy explanation.
---
First, the goal of your resume is to get you an interview for the job. You may believe your resume has other purposes:
-To showcase your every achievement
-To mention when you received promotions, awards, or recognition
-To describe the size of your organization, team or budget
Trust me, none of those are the goals of your resume.
---
A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.
That sounds right, but is it simply a description of how to be successful in general? I don't think so. This isn't the recipe for success in writing or painting, for example. In that kind of work the recipe is more to be actively curious. Resourceful implies the obstacles are external, which they generally are in startups. But in writing and painting they're mostly internal; the obstacle is your own obtuseness.
Being relentlessly resourceful is definitely not the recipe for success in big companies, or in most schools. I don't even want to think what the recipe is in big companies, but it is certainly longer and messier, involving some combination of resourcefulness, obedience, and building alliances.
---
But though I can't predict specific winners, I can offer a recipe for recognizing them. When you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that's merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you're probably looking at a loser.
---
Before Google, companies in Silicon Valley already knew it was important to have the best hackers. So they claimed, at least. But Google pushed this idea further than anyone had before. Their hypothesis seems to have been that, in the initial stages at least, all you need is good hackers: if you hire all the smartest people and put them to work on a problem where their success can be measured, you win. All the other stuff—which includes all the stuff that business schools think business consists of—you can figure out along the way. The results won't be perfect, but they'll be optimal. If this was their hypothesis, it's now been verified experimentally.
---
What super-angels really are is a new form of fast-moving, lightweight VC fund. And those of us in the technology world know what usually happens when something comes along that can be described in terms like that. Usually it's the replacement.
---
The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If Yahoo merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less.
---
Good programmers want to work with other good programmers.
---
Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results.
---
What people wished they'd paid more attention to when choosing cofounders was character and commitment, not ability. This was particularly true with startups that failed.
---
This is the city of Houten, just South of Utrecht and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. You can’t get around the city by car, because the roads don’t connect in the middle. A car would have to drive out to the ring road, and then back in the other side. As a result, 66% of in-town trips are by bike or on foot. Also, a central train station whisks you to other cities if desired. One of my life goals is that we – quite literally you and me – build a city like this here in the USA.
---
Every time you drive within a town, you destroy a bit of the feeling of community. Every single time you walk, you build the community, and advertise the idea of walking to every person who sees you.
---
It’s a real puzzle to me why most Americans won’t consider a scooter as an alternative to a second car. It seems to be some sort of cultural prejudice. In most third world countries the scooter is the most popular form of urban transportation – the streets are filled with them. I think scooters hit the sweet spot between driving a car and biking in urban areas.
---
The average American gets the most expensive car he can afford, and drives it as much as he can – for virtually 100% of trips out of the house. And yet he has a net worth of nearly zero, and subpar physical health, for most of his life.
---
The Environmental Protection Agency tests and rates each new car model to figure out its fuel consumption in typical use. The funny part about their rating system is that they have to keep changing it because the average US person drives so inefficiently that they end up using even more fuel than the EPA estimates.
---
I think that as long as we keep the government out of businesses that the private sector could provide more efficiently (designing products, for example), but use them in places where the private sector has been proven to suck (preserving groundwater quality, or providing national health insurance, for example), we will come out ahead.
---
The authors noted, however, that previous guidelines going back more than a decade had recommended such remedies, and doctors were still not providing them to more than two-thirds of patients. One study examined how long it took several major discoveries, such as the finding that the use of beta-blockers after a heart attack improves survival, to reach even half of Americans. The answer was, on average, more than fifteen years.
---
To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men.
---
I think most peoples’ financial goals are far too feeble, stuff like “Pay off my $20,000 student loan over the next ten years”.
---
A few days ago I realized something surprising: the situation with time is much the same as with money. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work
---
I believe that life has much more to offer us than doing the same thing every day for the majority of our waking hours. But I’ve read that our brains change if we keep ourselves locked into routines as we age. Over time, people become addicted to the routine of work, and eventually that’s all they know – it becomes impossible to let go or really experience anything else.
---
If you’re writing something other than a nice exciting novel, you should really be able to make your point in 200 pages or less, don’t you think?
---
Now, when coding, I try to think "How can I write this such that if people saw my code, they'd be amazed at how little there is and how little it does?"
Over-engineering is poison. It's not like doing extra work for extra credit. It's more like telling a lie that you then have to remember so you don't contradict it.
---
Because the list of n things is the easiest essay form, it should be a good one for beginning writers. And in fact it is what most beginning writers are taught. The classic 5 paragraph essay is really a list of n things for n = 3. But the students writing them don't realize they're using the same structure as the articles they read in Cosmopolitan.
---
The greatest weakness of the list of n things is that there's so little room for new thought. The main point of essay writing, when done right, is the new ideas you have while doing it.
---
Most "word problems" in school math textbooks are similarly misleading. They look superficially like the application of math to real problems, but they're not. So if anything they reinforce the impression that math is merely a complicated but pointless collection of stuff to be memorized.
---
Two famous authors, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller are talking at a party hosted by a billionaire hedge fund manager. Kurt says to Joseph, “You know, this billionaire makes more money in one day than you made in your whole lifetime from your novel Catch-22“. Joe responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have… enough.”
---
When we were kids I used to annoy my sister by ordering her to do things I knew she was about to do anyway.
---
The core of the philosophy seems to be this: To have a good and meaningful life, you need to overcome your insatiability.
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
words to live by
Hi all,
I was digging through some of my old belongings last month when I discovered a newspaper clipping that I had not seen in years. I tore it out from The Japan Times ("Japan's largest English-language newspaper") back in 2008 and carried it with me back to the USA. The column came from a long-running series called 'Words To Live By'.
In these articles, people from all walks of Japanese life share a few of their basic convictions. It often results in a fascinating mosaic of fact, fiction, and intuition. Some of it is brilliant and some of it is rubbish.
The most important thing, though, is that the reader understands that the profile subject believes in these things. After all, these are the very words that they choose to live by.
So...
We can guess what is coming up, right?
(Ha ha!)
Enjoy.
Tim
------------
*People remember how I made them feel, not what I said.
This is a peculiar realization for a blogger, I suppose. All I have is words!
But in retrospect, most people are unable to quote the words that inspired, motivated, or moved them. With this understanding, I try to speak or write with truth, feeling, and conviction instead of obsessing over diction or grammar.
*I could see myself never working again.
And on the flip side, I could see myself working for the rest of my days. What it comes down to is the nature of my work and how it nourishes my spirit.
*When I glimpse a better version of myself, I return for another look.
Figuring out how I want to live my life is much more challenging than considering what I want to do with my life. Emulating the times I've felt good about myself has been a helpful strategy.
I saw my best self emerge at times as a hospice visitor and always enjoyed my mentoring responsibilities in my first job. That's why I volunteer with hospice every week and why I seek career opportunities where mentoring is encouraged.
*If it worked once, I keep going back until it stops working.
Good things end poorly, which is why they end. I try and take advantage of this natural rhythm instead of wasting energy figuring out how well things are going.
*If I can't swim against the current, I pick a battle on the river bank.
People ease into patterns and rhythms. One day, they look up and realize just how far downstream the current of life carried them.
I don't have a smart phone because nobody tells me they wish they used their smartphones more. In fact, I almost always hear people say they want to use it less. Same goes for TV watching, browsing the internet, and buying expensive consumer goods.
I research carefully before I wade into a new river. There is a 'point of no return' along any journey and knowing where that is helps me make healthy decisions.
*I say what I mean because I don't say what I don't mean.
It is vital to practice expressing thoughts and feelings. The times I've been unable to do this are among my biggest regrets. Like with many skills, avoiding bad habits is just as helpful as cultivating good habits.
*I stopped using capital letters in emails.
it looks like this. life's too short, you know?
*I don't describe people with nouns.
Feedback is about what someone did, not about who they are.
A verb allows a person to feel guilt, which is good. Guilt is a growth tool because anyone can change how they act.
A noun allows a person to feel shame, which is bad. There is no way back from shame because shame is a clear statement- "I don't like who I am."
*I don't talk about politics unless I can separate the policy from the policymaker.
There is a world of difference between someone who opposes medical marijuana use and someone who kicks cancer patients.
*I try to see what's actually going on.
Our uniforms, situations, or inner monologues change the way we interact with the world around us.
I've seen the nicest people I know do some shocking things from behind the wheel of a car. Get out of my crosswalk, little old lady, I'm running a yellow light!
*I suspect most people knew their deepest interests, all along.
I tried to figure this out for myself last February. I thought back to what I gravitated to as a kid, what I turned to when I was really struggling, and what I did when I felt comfortable, safe, or secure.
I realized that, in all three of those cases, I wrote. And so I started this blog.
*I don't think consensus and equality get along all that well.
Treating everyone the same does not mean treating everyone as if they are the same.
Often, I find the effort required to get everyone to agree wastes too much energy. Learning to relate across my differences with others is a much more effective use of my time.
*I care about what other people think.
What I don't care about is whether they agree with what I think.
*I'm always ready to stop.
It applies to many things, of course, but I've found it most useful when running or cycling. A lot of injuries happen when someone tries to squeeze through a tight space, moves too quickly over a slippery surface, or accelerates into an unexpected place. And all that the burnout related stuff- fatigue, overuse, etc- is avoided whenever I keep the big picture in mind.
*I have a physical reaction to bad conversations.
My chest starts to hurt anytime I recognize that I'm involved in such an exchange. What is a bad conversation? It's like a ping-pong game with facts bouncing back and forth, louder and louder, each new volley influenced but ultimately disconnected from the prior. I suppose it doesn't help that I suck at ping-pong.
Good conversations seek out the truth. In these exchanges, the worth of an idea is based on its merits alone. Unrelated concepts such as the accuracy of trivial details, eloquence, technical accuracy of speech, decibel level, or qualifications of the speaker are dismissed unless necessary in furthering progress toward the truth.
*I don't trust people who don't have enough.
I think American income is a useful example. For the impoverished, enough is around $20k per year. For someone with cars, houses, and loans, enough is at least ten times that amount.
Until someone has enough, that's all they'll think about. Well-crafted plans change quickly when someone transitions from 'enough' to 'not enough'. It applies in reverse, as well.
Pundits and policy makers will do well if they remember this. Just the mere threat of not having enough dominates one's thoughts and dictates one's actions.
*If I were told today was my last day on Earth, I would do what I planned on the previous night.
It's not about what I do or when. It's about how. It's much easier to know how I want to live my life than it is to know what I want to do with it. And it's much easier to accomplish this if I find the time to work on it.
I can work on how every single day. If I do that, I bet I really end up with something.
I might even be something, actually.
*If it was my last day, though, I would adjust my schedule for ice cream.
Mint chocolate chip in a waffle cone, if possible. It's my last day, you know?
I was digging through some of my old belongings last month when I discovered a newspaper clipping that I had not seen in years. I tore it out from The Japan Times ("Japan's largest English-language newspaper") back in 2008 and carried it with me back to the USA. The column came from a long-running series called 'Words To Live By'.
In these articles, people from all walks of Japanese life share a few of their basic convictions. It often results in a fascinating mosaic of fact, fiction, and intuition. Some of it is brilliant and some of it is rubbish.
The most important thing, though, is that the reader understands that the profile subject believes in these things. After all, these are the very words that they choose to live by.
So...
We can guess what is coming up, right?
(Ha ha!)
Enjoy.
Tim
------------
*People remember how I made them feel, not what I said.
This is a peculiar realization for a blogger, I suppose. All I have is words!
But in retrospect, most people are unable to quote the words that inspired, motivated, or moved them. With this understanding, I try to speak or write with truth, feeling, and conviction instead of obsessing over diction or grammar.
*I could see myself never working again.
And on the flip side, I could see myself working for the rest of my days. What it comes down to is the nature of my work and how it nourishes my spirit.
*When I glimpse a better version of myself, I return for another look.
Figuring out how I want to live my life is much more challenging than considering what I want to do with my life. Emulating the times I've felt good about myself has been a helpful strategy.
I saw my best self emerge at times as a hospice visitor and always enjoyed my mentoring responsibilities in my first job. That's why I volunteer with hospice every week and why I seek career opportunities where mentoring is encouraged.
*If it worked once, I keep going back until it stops working.
Good things end poorly, which is why they end. I try and take advantage of this natural rhythm instead of wasting energy figuring out how well things are going.
*If I can't swim against the current, I pick a battle on the river bank.
People ease into patterns and rhythms. One day, they look up and realize just how far downstream the current of life carried them.
I don't have a smart phone because nobody tells me they wish they used their smartphones more. In fact, I almost always hear people say they want to use it less. Same goes for TV watching, browsing the internet, and buying expensive consumer goods.
I research carefully before I wade into a new river. There is a 'point of no return' along any journey and knowing where that is helps me make healthy decisions.
*I say what I mean because I don't say what I don't mean.
It is vital to practice expressing thoughts and feelings. The times I've been unable to do this are among my biggest regrets. Like with many skills, avoiding bad habits is just as helpful as cultivating good habits.
*I stopped using capital letters in emails.
it looks like this. life's too short, you know?
*I don't describe people with nouns.
Feedback is about what someone did, not about who they are.
A verb allows a person to feel guilt, which is good. Guilt is a growth tool because anyone can change how they act.
A noun allows a person to feel shame, which is bad. There is no way back from shame because shame is a clear statement- "I don't like who I am."
*I don't talk about politics unless I can separate the policy from the policymaker.
There is a world of difference between someone who opposes medical marijuana use and someone who kicks cancer patients.
*I try to see what's actually going on.
Our uniforms, situations, or inner monologues change the way we interact with the world around us.
I've seen the nicest people I know do some shocking things from behind the wheel of a car. Get out of my crosswalk, little old lady, I'm running a yellow light!
*I suspect most people knew their deepest interests, all along.
I tried to figure this out for myself last February. I thought back to what I gravitated to as a kid, what I turned to when I was really struggling, and what I did when I felt comfortable, safe, or secure.
I realized that, in all three of those cases, I wrote. And so I started this blog.
*I don't think consensus and equality get along all that well.
Treating everyone the same does not mean treating everyone as if they are the same.
Often, I find the effort required to get everyone to agree wastes too much energy. Learning to relate across my differences with others is a much more effective use of my time.
*I care about what other people think.
What I don't care about is whether they agree with what I think.
*I'm always ready to stop.
It applies to many things, of course, but I've found it most useful when running or cycling. A lot of injuries happen when someone tries to squeeze through a tight space, moves too quickly over a slippery surface, or accelerates into an unexpected place. And all that the burnout related stuff- fatigue, overuse, etc- is avoided whenever I keep the big picture in mind.
*I have a physical reaction to bad conversations.
My chest starts to hurt anytime I recognize that I'm involved in such an exchange. What is a bad conversation? It's like a ping-pong game with facts bouncing back and forth, louder and louder, each new volley influenced but ultimately disconnected from the prior. I suppose it doesn't help that I suck at ping-pong.
Good conversations seek out the truth. In these exchanges, the worth of an idea is based on its merits alone. Unrelated concepts such as the accuracy of trivial details, eloquence, technical accuracy of speech, decibel level, or qualifications of the speaker are dismissed unless necessary in furthering progress toward the truth.
*I don't trust people who don't have enough.
I think American income is a useful example. For the impoverished, enough is around $20k per year. For someone with cars, houses, and loans, enough is at least ten times that amount.
Until someone has enough, that's all they'll think about. Well-crafted plans change quickly when someone transitions from 'enough' to 'not enough'. It applies in reverse, as well.
Pundits and policy makers will do well if they remember this. Just the mere threat of not having enough dominates one's thoughts and dictates one's actions.
*If I were told today was my last day on Earth, I would do what I planned on the previous night.
It's not about what I do or when. It's about how. It's much easier to know how I want to live my life than it is to know what I want to do with it. And it's much easier to accomplish this if I find the time to work on it.
I can work on how every single day. If I do that, I bet I really end up with something.
I might even be something, actually.
*If it was my last day, though, I would adjust my schedule for ice cream.
Mint chocolate chip in a waffle cone, if possible. It's my last day, you know?
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