A committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing, but who, as a group, can meet and decide that nothing can be done.
– Fred Allen
Quote of the Day
Two days off, but otherwise mostly correct:
The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.
– John Adams, 3 July 1776
Flash Fiction Redux
One year in college I signed up to take a photography class. It satisfied my arts requirement, and I had absolutely no proclivity towards drawing, sculpture, or music. Photography was the obvious out. The camera would do everything for me, I would just have to press a button. The class was mostly full of students like me. There were a few who were serious about photography as art, but most just wanted to make do with a B or C doing the least amount of work necessary. We had many group projects and because it was hard to get models we’d usually just take photos of each other. We would make a game of it, sneaking around campus with our cameras and trying to catch another student in an embarrassing or amusing situation. Our professor would show some of the photos turned in each week to the class. When one of our “special” photos was chosen we’d score points based on the amount of laughter we could get. Only once was I a victim of our pranks. I had been riding my bike right after it rained, and went too fast around a turn. My bike slid out from under me and I flew to the ground. I wasn’t seriously hurt, but when I got up and turned around there was my classmate Ray waving his camera at me. I got to see the result the next Monday. He had somehow managed to take the photo as I was in midair. My arms were raised in front of my face and my eyes were agape in horror. But few in the class laughed; most winced instead. So he didn’t get to score any points for that masterpiece. At the end of the semester we added up the scores and I had won over Ray by a single point. It was the first time in my life I’d tried so hard at something and succeeded. I don’t remember what grade I got in the class.
Flash Fiction
It was hard to think of anything else as I fell to Earth. I would have though that I would be more depressed about my impending doom. Instead I felt giddy. I was smiling. They say your life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die. For me it was just one event that I kept thinking about. It was the last time I had the same sort of smile. It was ninth grade and Linda’s hazelnut eyes gazed at me from beneath her glasses. We were about to have our first kiss. For me it was the first real kiss I’d ever had. The buildup to that moment was the most intense feeling I’d ever had. I wasn’t sure when it would finally happen, or what I should do to hasten the moment along. Linda seemed content just to look at me, our faces inches apart. I thought I might move in closer but I didn’t do anything. I just sat still. I was too scared. We hadn’t said anything to each other for what must have been hours. Finally, I was about to speak, when Linda beat me to it. “It’s hard to kiss while wearing glasses,” she said. She smiled slightly and reached to take her glasses off. It must be that smile that keeps only this memory in my mind. It made me realize that girls aren’t so mysterious. We’re all just people. I hoped that Linda remembered that moment too. Otherwise the memory would end its existence in seconds. I didn’t know what to say to her but my grin must have sufficed. She leaned in towards me. It’s finally happening, I thought. Our lips touched and–!
Favorite Books of 2012
Last year I read 153 books (totaling some 50,090 pages). So it was not completely trivial to come up with my favorite 121 of them. These are in no particular order.
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East of Eden by John Steinbeck
I had some misconceptions about this novel before I read it, but it’s a moving family saga about three generations of two families, mainly in the Salinas Valley2. The characters are very interesting; many of them are clearly references to characters from the Bible. But the religious allusions are essentially philosophical, they reference stories like that of Cain and Abel by casting them in a modern frame. The results are not at all what I expected, but they make for an engrossing book. -
Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold
This is something like the tenth3 novel in Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, a space opera. They’re all good to varying extents, but this is my favorite. It’s a marked departure from earlier books, which are much more action heavy. But this one instead focuses on character development and dialogue. The plot is more of a mystery novel and has but a single action scene. Without giving away too much, it’s a good look at how sometimes we want to keep doing something past the point where it makes sense, and how it can be hard to give it up. - The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton
This novel is perhaps Wharton’s most satiric, with one of the best lead characters in all of fiction. Undine Spragg is a young woman that knows what she wants and ably manipulates those around her to get it. She justifies her actions by her desire for happiness, but is this legitimate? And can she truly be happy in this way? It’s an interesting comparison to The House of Mirth, where Lily Bart takes a somewhat different path when faced with these questions. - Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
My most interesting takeaway from this biography was how exceptional a personality Steve Jobs had. He didn’t really care about making money; he just wanted to succeed enough to achieve his vision4. - The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbauch
This is a beautiful novel about five people in a small college town in the Midwest, and how their lives intersect in surprising ways. A major part of the story is baseball5 and happiness. - Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi
This is Scalzi’s “reboot” of the sci-fi classic Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper. In a story reminiscent of many others, humans are exploiting a planet’s resources, while unbeknownst to them there are intelligent indigent species on the planet that aren’t thrilled about this. What makes this novel terrific is Scalzi’s humor and warmth in portraying the “fuzzies” and the not exactly heroic main character. - The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
This is perhaps the saddest book I’ve ever read, a story of kids that have cancer. It’s heartbreaking when they just want to have a normal life, but aren’t able to. - The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
This novel takes a look at the traditional “marriage plot” wherein two characters eventually overcome difficulty and get married at the end6. The characters (three college students) in the book follow a similar arc, with plenty of metaliterary references to their own situation. It’s much lighter and funnier than Eugenides’s previous novels, and the ending, while not exactly a twist, is still fairly unexpected (but very appropriate). - Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
Scalzi’s breakout novel is a fairly straightforward space opera/military sci-fi book reminiscent of Starship Troopers. There’s nothing particularly innovative in what he does, but he does it so well that the net result is one of the best in the genre. The premise is that retirees on Earth can join the military, in exchange for a new healthy body. The change from having a military composed of young people to those with a full life behind them is quite interesting, and although Scalzi doesn’t spend too much time philosophizing about the implications, he does enough to interest the reader in the characters. - 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
This is my favorite Murakami novel. It’s similar to a lot of his other books, particularly The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but it takes the themes that he always comes back to. At its heart it’s a love story, but the way in which boy meets girl is hardly linear, and very epic. - Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
There have been many books written on various “cognitive biases”, but this is by far the strongest one. It takes a broader view of the general causes for bias: the two modes of thinking that we have7. There is the “fast thinking” mode, which applies heuristics that often work, but sometimes lead us astray. One classic example is the “availability heuristic”, in which we judge probability by how easy it is to think of examples. Thus we overestimate the probability of dying in a plane crash (since those are memorable) compared to a car crash. The “slow thinking” mode involves actual calculation and thought, but it’s very energy intensive. The book goes on to discuss various experiments that get people to switch into one or the other mode and compare the results. It’s great both as a summary of what is known about cognitive biases and as a description of how they all relate. - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
I decided to start reading more mysteries. This one is often considered one of the best ever, and it didn’t disappoint. The twist is very clever, although it does seem like there’s very little in the way of clues for the reader to get to it significantly before it is revealed. I also had some issues with the logistics of how the crime was allegedly carried out.
The Case of the Cryptic Communication
Wednesday, 12:23 PM
Beth was having a very mediocre day. It was yet again one of those researchers. They just never seemed to follow the rules. While Beth was at the reference desk, he had been looking at the Chiang Kai-shek diaries and had tried to take a photo of one of the pages. This was something they explicitly didn’t allow. When she confronted him, he claimed not to have known, though Beth thought that rather unlikely. They allowed taking notes, so there wasn’t much advantage to making a copy. Unless you were lazy.
Beth put down the grilled cheese sandwich she was eating for lunch. It would be so much easier if everyone could just follow the rules. She certainly did not enjoy policing behavior; she’d much prefer to just answer questions and be helpful. I just need to get a ‘bad cop’ to partner with, she thought.
After lunch it was back to processing the Edward Teller papers, all six hundred boxes. Teller had been a fellow at the Hoover Institution for over thirty years, and though he was most famous for his work on the Manhattan Project and the hydrogen bomb, the bulk of the papers were from his later career working on energy and defense policy. Boring political stuff. Beth had been working on it for over a month now, and she was more than ready for something new. At least she didn’t have to deal with unruly researchers. There was something to be said for working by yourself.
Vonnegut’s Creative Writing 101
In the introduction to his short story collection Bagombo Snuff Box Kurt Vonnegut talks about some of his early career, before he became successful and critically acclaimed (only after the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five). This included teaching creative writing at City College in New York (along with Joseph Heller). But for those that missed the chance, he gives us the essence of it in eight easy rules:
- Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
- Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
- Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
- Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
- Start as close to the end as possible.
- Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
- Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
- Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Of course he then says that great writers break all but the first.
Chocolate Improves IQ
A recent article describes an experiment from the 1970s that found that low-performing students score higher on IQ tests when they are given chocolate for each correct answer:
A few years later, two researchers from the University of South Florida elaborated on Edlund’s experiment. This time, after the first, candy-less IQ test, they divided the children into three groups according to their scores on the first test. The high-IQ group had an average IQ score on the first test of about 119. The medium-IQ group averaged about 101, and the low-IQ group averaged about 79. On the second test, the researchers offered half the children in each IQ category an M&M for each right answer, just as Edlund had; the others in each group received no reward. The medium-IQ and high-IQ kids who got candy didn’t improve their scores at all on the second test. But the low-IQ children who were given M&M’s for each correct answer raised their IQ scores to about 97, almost erasing the gap with the medium-IQ group.
The M&M studies were a major blow to the conventional wisdom about intelligence, which held that IQ tests measured something real and permanent—something that couldn’t be changed drastically with a few candy-covered chocolates. They also raised an important and puzzling question about the supposedly low-IQ children: Did they actually have low IQs or not? Which number was the true measure of their intelligence: 79 or 97?
It’s not surprising that motivation (and chocolate) plays a large part in success. But it is interesting that the difference between the bottom group and the average group is entirely a motivational one. Unfortunately for them, many things in life do not come with extrinsic rewards, so we have to somehow develop their intrinsic motivation. There is some evidence that this is possible–some charter schools have found tremendous success with traditionally low-performing students primarily by increasing motivation.
Parallel Lines
Note: This is a short story I wrote back in 2007. I still think it’s kind of cute.
Joseph Sylvestre woke up one morning to the satisfying sound of a car slowly driving away outside his third-floor apartment window. It was 11:30 AM. He cleverly chose a robe from the eight or so forming his bedroom floor, threw it on, and immediately checked his e-mail. Lo! He quickly found what he sought, and as a mysterious force began to play upon his heartstrings he read.
Dear Joe,
Thanks for suggesting the film “The Parlor”. I enjoyed watching it very much, and the ending in particular was a surprising twist. It reminded me of an O. Henry short story. I know you don’t like to read very much, but perhaps you could try “The Plutonian Fire”–one of my favorites. I’ve found that our communications–these e-mails in particular–have become an increasingly important part of my life. I am still uncomfortable meeting you in person–many of my other friends are unaware of my situation–but perhaps we can arrange something for next Saturday?
Your friend,
Leonard
The last sentence was the instantiation of Joseph’s most heartfelt desires. He immediately sent a reply to Leonard, noticed that he was characteristically tired, and decided to go back to sleep.
Happy to Live a Shorter Life
Calorie restriction is the idea that eating about 30% fewer calories than normal prolongs life. Since the 1930s, various studies have tested calorie restriction on yeast, insects, fish, mice, and dogs. All have found that calorie restriction increases average lifespan, by around 30-40%. Although there has never been a study of calorie restriction on humans1, some people still believe that this offers them a good chance of living much longer than average.
Recently a 1987 study on calorie restriction in primates released their results. They found that “the skinny monkeys did not live any longer than those kept at more normal weights”, casting serious doubt on whether it works for humans. Of course this is just one study, but we would expect strong real effects to persist. Indeed the researchers were “surprised” by the result, for they had expected calorie restriction to work. We can return to eating Twinkies en masse with no regrets.
I find more interested my reaction to the news. I was happy to learn that calorie restriction doesn’t work. But why? After all, wouldn’t it be good news to learn that there is a way to live 30% longer? I can only suppose it is cognitive dissonance. Since I had already decided that I will never eat a calorie-restricted diet, I was happy to learn that I can do so with no regrets.
- This is difficult for the two reasons that humans live very long and are unlikely to reliably follow the diet their entire lives. [↩]