Two things you need to know about elephants

(1) Their trunk is 7 feet long, weighs 392 pounds, and contains 100x more muscles than we have in our entire bodies. Not only can a trunk suck up 8 pints of water, it also functions as an arm, hand, snorkel, and a weapon. It is powerful enough to kill a lion with a single blow, yet the fingerlike lobes at the end can pick up a grain of rice.

(2) I learned a lot about elephant communication from this 60 Minutes segment, but I didn’t know this: Males and females can't understand each other's calls. And the female vocabulary is much larger.

Both come from The Book of Animal Ignorance, which, I’m not ashamed to say, has been the best book I’ve ever read on the pooper. It is 223 pages full of fascinating facts like this, with about 2 pages for each animal.

That second fact about males and females not being able to understand each other makes me really itchy. I tried, unsuccessfully, to learn more with a web search. Wikipedia says nothing about it, nor did any other site on the first page of Google search results (yeah, I’m lazy).

On the one hand, it makes me wonder why the eff evolution would have designed—or even allowed for—such a development. On the other hand, it makes me feel a little better that I don’t understand women at all.

Virtual. Reality. Pornography.

Each generation has different things that force them to grow up. Maybe for our grandparents it was World War Two. For us it’s going to be Virtual Reality Pornography.

Well, maybe not Virtual Reality Pornography exactly, but David Foster Wallace talks about that in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself and I think it is a beautiful metaphor for the problem of being passively entertained to death. The challenge is that with the barrage of pleasurable bits from our various electronic devices we need to develop some machinery for being able to defend against pure unalloyed pleasure so that we can, ya know, go out and grocery shop.

Here is a pretty seriously revised passage from the book that talks about how passive entertainment like TV and even email is comparable to masturbation or candy, and how it could, in a meaningful way, kill us:

Passive entertainment is not bad or a waste of your time any more than masturbation is bad or a waste of your time. It’s a pleasurable way to spend ten minutes. But if you’re doing it twenty times a day—or if your primary sexual relationship is with your own hand—then there’s something wrong. I mean, it’s a matter of degree.

What you’re doing is running a movie in your head, and having a fantasy relationship with somebody who isn’t real in order to stimulate a purely neurological response.

I think one of the reasons that I feel empty after watching a lot of TV, and one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people. It’s a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn’t require anything of me. I can see them, they can’t see me. I can receive from the TV. I can receive entertainment and stimulation without having to give anything back except the most tangential kind of attention. And that is very seductive.

The problem is it’s also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that I’ve gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up, but there’s something nourishing about it because I think, as creatures, we’ve all got to figure out how to be in the same room.

And so TV is like candy in that it’s more pleasurable and easier than real food. But it also doesn’t have any of the nourishment of real food. And as the Internet grows, it’s going to get better and better and better. It’s going to be easier and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to be alone with images on a screen. Which is all right in low doses. But if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, then you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.

DFW goes on to predict that eventually companies are going to face the ingenious double bind that they are going to have to make their stuff less entertaining because their customers’ absenteeism from work is going to hurt their revenues.

I think that’s half-right economic logic, and maybe in some rare corners of certain markets we will see companies trying to make their products less good, but the thing is that the companies are competing with other companies and so, while they might like to, they cannot afford to make their stuff less good.

The tobacco companies are a good example. Tobacco companies have a huge incentive to prevent their products from hospitalizing or killing their customers, because that hurts revenues in a pretty serious way. But if a tobacco company all of the sudden decided to make their stuff less potent, their revenues are going to be hurt even worse because people will switch to competing tobacco products.

There’s a similar story for World of Warcraft, which, if I may get a little drippy on your ass, has probably taken a not insignificant number of people’s lives, albeit in a very different way than the tobacco companies. World of Warcraft cannot afford to make their product less pleasurable because then their customers will switch to other, more pleasurable games.

That’s why I honestly think it might make sense from a policy perspective to have a tax on certain forms of (or all?) entertainment. But hot damn I can think of nothing more useless than me sitting behind my keyboard and thinking “from a policy perspective.”

The best we can do is get back in our bodies and build up some machinery to defend against the various forms of Virtual Reality Pornography. How we do that, I’m not sure. Do we read self-help books about “Enhancing Willpower Now!!”? Do we do some mental strength training exercises? Do we just try to surround ourselves with the right influences, or at least the people who won’t let us get too deep into the wrong influences? That’s the challenge of growing up, says DFW.

But I’ll use my last paragraph to say that I’m not necessarily sold on the underlying philosophical argument that giving one’s life away to passive entertainment is necessarily bad. I grant that it goes against our ancient need of real companionship, or else manipulates that ancient need in a significant way. I grant that something feels existentially empty about it. I know that I, personally, at least as a second-order desire, would rather have the “nourishment” than the Virtual Reality Pornography. But that’s just the thing: whenever we hint at something being “addictive” or in some crucial ways “bad,” we are almost always talking about a conflict between first- and second-order desires, i.e., wanting something (e.g., a cigarette or World of Warcraft) vs. wanting as a second-order desire to not want those things. So the issue is not ultimately about good or bad but about resolving conflicts between first- and second-order desires.

Creatures

OK. Here’s the thing: We live on this largeish orbiting rock, the goofy naked apes we are, inhabiting it along with all the other animal species and the five other kingdoms of organisms. On the one hand, these organisms seem to have this madly various, utterly perverse diversity of forms and behaviors, and on the other hand, we share the same biological fundamentals. We’re not only built using the same cellular tools, we also share with other organisms—and not just the ones closest to us on the tree—an eerily similar set of genes.

What, then, do we make of all these other creatures? What is the most accurate way to conceptualize our relationship to other organisms?

You might be surprised to learn that I don’t know the answer to those questions. (A blogger who doesn’t know something? What?)

But here is one view from naturalist Henry Beston that I found deserving of its own post:

They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.

I am not a unified developed character in a linear narrative

David Foster Wallace talking with David Lipsky in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself:

Life seems to strobe on and off for me and to barrage me with input. And so much of my job is to impose some sort of order, or make some sort of sense of it. Unlike the way that—maybe I’m very naïve—I imagine Leo Tolstoy getting up in the morning, pulling on his homemade boots, going out to chat with the serfs whom he’s freed, sitting down in his silent room overlooking some very well-tended gardens, pulling out his quill and, in deep tranquility, recollecting emotion.

Stuff like that I enjoy reading, but it doesn’t feel true at all. I read it as a relief from what’s true. I read it as a relief from the fact that I received five hundred discrete bits of information today, of which maybe twenty-five are important, and now I’ve got to try and sort those things out.

My life and self doesn’t feel anything like a unified developed character in a linear narrative to me. I think a lot of people feel overwhelmed not by the amount of stuff they have to do but overwhelmed by the number of choices they have, and by the number of discrete, different things that come at them—the number of small insistent tugs on them, from a number of different systems and directions.

In summary: Life is messy; beware of stories.

I remind you again of Tyler Cowen’s beautiful articulation and defense of the same point.

My economy has a higher transactional heat quotient than yours

I like my indices as much as the next nerdy economist, but I think Mark Kingwell has a point when he says this in The Idler’s Glossary:

Economists get worried when the rate of GDP growth falls below some notional standard of ‘health.’ This is exactly the wrong issue to consider. How is growth measured in the first place, and even more important, what is growth for? Those are the questions on which their attention should linger. Of course, that lingering would entail asking them to become philosophers instead of economists.

The economists' likely response: We’re not telling you how the world should be; we’re just telling you how it is. (Economists get very defensive about this.)

My response: Fine, but then can we get rid of any measure that purports to measure economic ‘health’? Either that or get down in the shit with philosophers and decide what ‘health’ might mean.

Hey, that’s MY idea!

About a year before On the Origin of Species was published, Darwin received a creep-o letter from a gent named Alfred Russel Wallace. Here is Janet Browne describing the letter and Darwin’s reaction in his biography (emphasis added):

What the packet enclosed was a short handwritten essay which, line by line, spelled out virtually the same theory of evolution by natural selection that Darwin believed was his alone. Isolated in the jungle for four years, Wallace had independently hit on the same argument as Darwin. All of Darwin’s main ideas were repeated. To Darwin’s agitated mind these ideas seemed to hang together in Wallace’s essay far better than they did in his own unpublished writings. Wallace wrote clearly—so clearly that no one could mistake his meaning. The struggle for survival among animals and plants; competition and extinction; the improvement of domestic races by selection; the divergence of species into different forms; all these were included. Wallace demonstrably removed the divine Creator and proposed an entirely natural origin for species. His words indicated that he fully understood the significance of what he was saying.

Darwin was stunned. “I never saw a more striking coincidence,” he moaned helplessly. “If Wallace had my MS sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract!”

He was well and truly forestalled. It was impossible to pretend otherwise. All his originality was smashed, all his years of hard work suddenly useless. For a moment the news hit him like the death of a child. Then, his mind churned with painful emotions—not anxiety or panic, he confessed afterwards, but much baser feelings of mortification, possessiveness, irritation, and rancour, each flaring up one by one after the first unaccountable, humiliating surprise. Hour after hour they returned, making him cross and edgy. These were probably the most lonely hours of his life, facing the knowledge that what mattered to him now was not so much the long-gone moment of discovery but the possession, the ownership, of his theory. Wallace’s easy brilliance forced him to confront the focus of his entire working life. Had it all been a waste of time? Those years he had spent laboring over barnacles, the deterioration of his physical health, the endless attention to notes and letters, and the huge manuscript so close to completion?

In summary: Hey, that’s MY idea!

Two and a half points I’d like to make:

Point 1: The absurdity of *owning* an idea.

Congratulations, your neurons have stumbled upon a novel-seeming combination of old concepts! It must’ve been some mix of God-granted destiny and your inherent brilliance that led to this personal epiphany. Clearly, then, if God doesn’t want you to carry the torch for this idea, then there can be no denying that you EARNED it through sheer force of brilliance. This is why we have intellectual property. What happens in my head belongs to me and me only, and is forbidden to happen in other people’s heads. SO GET YOUR DIRTY NEURONS OFF MY IDEA.

Point 2: Ownership of an idea is not what matters.

Darwin felt that all was lost when he learned that someone else’s neurons were touching “his” idea, but, of course, it wasn’t. Ideas are cheap. No, really. If you don’t believe me, try to sell one. I’ve tried. I’m currently raking in $0.005 per idea. I’m hoping that one day my lifetime’s sum of creative brilliance might be able to buy me lunch.

Marketing people know that packaging matters. Corporate executives know that who you know matters. (1) Packaging, and (2) who you know—that’s at least 85% of what it comes down to.

Alfred Russel Wallace may have brought the idea to the public (i.e., intellectual elites) first, and he may have even articulated it better than Darwin, but we don’t call it the Darwinian Theory of Evolution for nothing. Wallace did not write tens of thousands of letters to people who could help polish or publicize his idea. Wallace did not obsessively test the theory, turning even his lawn into a laboratory. Wallace did not publish a giant manuscript after decades of self-funded research.

And let us not discount that Wallace probably didn’t have the $$ that Darwin had.

Point 2.5: The narcissism and possessiveness might not be all bad.

You might be thinking that I’ve been leading up to a grand conclusion of “Free Ideas” and “Hard Work.” I’m not.

It’d be nice to suppose that Darwin’s drive was a matter of truth-seeking and the thrill of discovery, and I’m sure that’s partially true. But his reaction to Wallace’s letter is evidence that there was a not insignificant force called narcissism involved, too. As I see it, from a policy perspective, we have two options: (1) Pretend that narcissism doesn’t exist and hope that noble forces win out, or (2) use narcissism to our advantage. You can probably guess which option I support.

I’m not saying I support IP law – from what little I know about IP law, it makes me grumpy – all I am saying is that the feeling of possessiveness and ownership of an idea, while clearly absurd and misguided, is probably largely to credit for many of the best theories and businesses we’ve got.

More science should be done this way

Best. Abstract. Ever.

The full paper.

The man deserving of our praise:

(Hat tip: Ken Wehr [no relation except in our mutual awesomeness])

The miracle of remembering to buy toothpaste

There ought to be a congratulatory society for grown ups:

You had to do more—go to college, pick a major, get a boyfriend, a job, an interesting scar, a dream house, an educated position on the death penalty. Suddenly you had more mail, more keys, more passwords, more toiletries. And all for less praise. People are less quick to applaud as you grow older. Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there. If you stop and think about it, it’s a miracle that we get out of bed every day and brush our teeth and remember to buy toothpaste. We all deserve to be congratulated.

— Sloane Crosely in I Was Told There’d Be Cake

If Charles Darwin had email

I started reading Janet Browne’s biography of Charles Darwin and one fact immediately sent me grabbing for my calculator.

Darwin wrote or received some 14,000 letters that are still in existence in libraries the world over, and there must have been as many again now lost to posterity.

Holy smokes. 14,000 is roughly equal to the total number of emails – spam or otherwise – that have populated my Gmail inbox since I started the account in 2006.

If you send a letter every single day, it would take 38+ years to reach 14,000.

My back of the envelope calculation tells me that in the 23 years between when he returned from the Beagle voyage to when he published On the Origin of Species, he was sending or receiving on average about 3-4 letters per day. Not only that but he was also writing a manuscript that would exceed 300,000 words (the final, trimmed-down version of On the Origin of Species was 200,470 words), equivalent to about five full blown novels.

Darwin was spending as much on his postage as he was on his butler: about $1,500 per year in today’s dollars.

Who the heck was he writing to? Browne says that by far the largest number of letters were exchanged with his five closest scientific friends. Otherwise, the largest group of his correspondents were German-speaking naturalists, more than 100 different individuals(!). And there’s more:

He hunted down anyone who could help him on specific issues, from civil servants, army officers, diplomats, fur-trappers, horse-breeders, society ladies, Welsh hill-farmers, zookeepers, pigeon-fanciers, gardeners, asylum owners, and kennel hands, through to his own elderly aunts or energetic nieces and nephews. Many of his letters went to residents of far-flung regions—India, Jamaica, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, China, Borneo, the Hawaiian Islands.

This is humiliating. I live in the age of instant and free messaging and I am put to shame by a reclusive scientist who died 130 years ago.

I feel better, though, knowing that his prolific letter-writing was a significant part of what made Darwin Darwin.

Systematically, he turned his house into the hub of an ever-expanding web of scientific correspondence. He relied on letters for every aspect of his evolutionary endeavor, using them not only to pursue his investigations across the globe but also to give his arguments the international spread and universal application that he and his colleagues regarded as essential footing for any new scientific concept. They were his primary research tool. Furthermore, after the Origin of the Species was published, he deliberately used his correspondence to propel his ideas into the public domain—the primary means by which he ensured his book was being read and reviewed.

This has made me curious to compare the correspondence statistics for folks like Darwin, Einstein, Newton, Freud, Pavlov, and LeBron James. I just might be geeky enough to do it.

It also makes me wonder, how would a modern day Darwin have used email? Would he have been shooting off emails like the 4th of July? Or would he have used it at all?

Of course email can be used however you like, but maybe it is too noisy of a medium to transmit Darwin-esque intellectual signal. I wonder if email suffers from the same curse as blogs in that the culturally-assumed informality constrains it to something less than “serious.”

The problem may not even be cultural. I read a lot of blogs – my number of Google Reader subscriptions currently stands at a ridiculous 1,042 – but despite the quality of the signal many of these blogs produce, I find that I am still more influenced by books, even the relatively crappy ones. There is something considerably different about the experience of sitting down in a quiet place, just you and the book, with no blog posts to turn to next, and no free Internet porn just a click away. For whatever irrational or rational reason, the printed page in a quiet room allows me to absorb the material much more fully than anything I read online, no matter how well it is presented.

But how well the material is absorbed is just one aspect of the intellectual progress equation, with other ones being things like speed, cost, and signal. And so maybe, despite its downsides, email may still have been Darwin’s medium of choice. I don’t know.

I just hope for the sake of romanticism it wouldn’t’ve been Facebook.

###

See also:

1. The evolution of the book on evolution

2. Charles Darwin contemplates marriage

How a writer’s brain is like a movie star’s waistline (plus a bonus existential rant)

Writers eye and measure the celebrity world and don’t know how to deal with the portion that falls to them; because what they’re selling is not their features, physique, or their charm; it’s more personal, it’s their brain, their them, and so they get as anxious about that as a starlet would about nose or waistline. How do I husband this thing that’s earning me praise and money? How do I protect and expand it? And what is it people like about me anyway?

That’s David Lipsky in his book Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself about his road trip with David Foster Wallace.

I’d quibble and say that your brain is not fully or maybe even mostly your you. At least not the brain that shows up in your writing. The brain that shows up in your writing is every bit as artificial and surface-y as the starlet’s charm.

If there exists such a thing as a You (and I’m skeptical there does) then I think it’s probably best viewed not through your thoughts and certainly not through your published writing but through your actions (and maybe to a lesser extent your intentions). But the topic of personal identity is sufficiently inscrutable that I can’t think about it without the uncomfortable feeling that I’m grasping at vapor.

The broader point I think he’s going for, though, is that your identity, whatever it is, ought to be steeled against the information of how other people regard you.

Here’s David Foster Wallace, slightly revised: (sacrilege, I know)

Something happens in your late twenties where you realize that how other people regard you does not have enough calories in it to keep you from blowing your brains out. That you’ve got to make some other détente.

Well, I haven’t quite made it to my late twenties yet, so maybe I just haven’t yet reached that realization, but for now I can’t help but disagree with what I think is the main point: “who cares what other people think?”

I get that constructing a self-worth exclusively out of your interpretation of others’ regard for you is a fabulously flimsy if not counterproductive venture, but I think it makes just as little sense to [attempt to] completely ignore external information. What are you going to do, look in the mirror and repeat to yourself that you are an awesome and lovable Gift To This Earth despite what any external information says about you? (Ahem, the Stuart Smalley approach.) That seems equally as flimsy and counterproductive.

I’d suggest that the best existential détente is keeping your strivings for self-worth and self-improvement and godliness in the healthy perspective that what the external information says about you is mostly true – you do suck; you are a fabulously flawed human just like all the other fabulously flawed humans – and, as Stuart Smalley would say, and that’s okay. Try to become less sucky, if you want, but recognize that about the only thing that is going to incontrovertibly define you as a human is that you are always going to retain some non-trivial level of suck.

It’s okay to suck because the self needn’t have worth for life to have worth. We’re all unique if incontrovertibly sucky snowflakes helplessly bound to one another just trying to make it through this mess of a life before our time is up. That should be reason enough to get up in the morning.

OK. That felt 38% too deep for a blog post, so have a puppy in a basket:

Psst, click me.

The absurdity of *not* counting to infinity on canvas

I have a two-part problem: (1) I can’t/won’t give up NFL football, and (2) I can’t watch a football game while sitting still.

I get antsy. I start pacing around and trying on different seats and fiddling with objects of varying sanitaryness. I can’t help shake the feeling that I am spending three+ hours of my life watching unusually large men in tight clothing give each other concussions. But I also can’t look away.

So when I heard of this project – a guy counting to infinity on a canvas – I felt like I got hit in the mouth by a lineman.

Why didn’t I think of that? This makes me so jealous. It requires only minimal hand-eye coordination and almost no thought, and yet given a free hand and enough investment (like, ahem, Sunday afternoons of NFL football) it turns into something completely awesome.

This would have soothed all of my in-game anxieties because, for one, what could be more meditative than counting to infinity?, and for another, with the amount of hours that I have dumped into sport spectating, I could have my “work” featured in several museums by now. Ironically, counting to infinity on a canvas somehow feels much less absurd than spending my Sunday afternoons watching 350 pound nose tackles employ the swim move. But the wonderful thing is that I can do both at the same time!

I can’t do the counting thing, however, because that’s already been done. Damn it.

I need something like it. Something meditative. Something that requires almost no skill or attention. Something that has no end point but that keeps getting better with time. Something so awesome that people will think highly enough of me to want to buy my poop.

I considered, briefly, knitting. I dunno, maybe I could knit to infinity or something. But I thought better of it when I realized that no one would want to buy a knitter’s poop.

Eventually I arrived at a solution that satisfies me: I am going to non-judgmentally write whatever strange word or phrase or sound floats to the surface of my mess of a brain.

The results, so far, have been pretty interesting. I suggest you try it. Just open up your favorite word processor and start transcribing as best as you can the noise in your mind.

Here is what my brain burped up after 14 minutes:

Theo Epstein; thigh bones; pendulums; navbars; countercyclical assets; skeeter bites; fingernail dandruff; cortico winslett; junebegga; Na’il Diggs; scuppernong, or however that grape is spelled; baritone silhouettes; McAfee defense systems; white peaks; apple turnover; contemplated barley; Didion’s first symphony orchestra; cheap gadgetry; Brunswick Green pool tables; ciabata; Kanti; steno pad; dirkshire; comfitz; kraun; süble; ingracious; capitalization; spectacles; hectares of landfront; slashdots and serif font; Farm Bureau golden rod; Victory Jones automobiles; capital makers’ earsets; filings and paperworks; Nash Coliseum; first generation golddiggers; paintstrokes, condensed; rectums in the wall; peg meet hole; goblins and fairytales; Gene Gupshaw; castration; nincompoop; flabberjack; the meaning of a frog-like existence; comupetance; Boj (pronounced bowdge); Jack Crenshaw; Burt Calloway; I feel like I’m naming 1950’s NFL/AFL players that may or may not have existed; pencil sharpeners; flowbrains; council of Coolidge; nevermore hereafter; countenance; troublesome flowerbuckets; nabbed in the buttsack; that one just made me laugh a little; tart weenies; pilfered oats; trendsetting sportswear; I should stop now.

A little weird, I know, but also kind of amusing. If I did this for three+ hours every Sunday afternoon, I might end up with a collection of stuff so large and so bizarre that some PhD student in Psychology might want to use it as a case study for her dissertation, which is almost as good as someone wanting to buy my poop.

Let me know if you have better ideas I can steal.

Dear (nerdy) Diary

Almost every day for the past 3 years I have written a paragraph before I go to bed with the most salient thoughts and events of the day – like a diary but 58% nerdier because I enter it into a spreadsheet program.

The average entry is only 152 words but in total it adds up to 171,000 words, or about 3 full blown novels. (This is not, mind you, novel-quality material. This is hardly even message board-quality material.)

Until today I hadn’t done anything with the data other than use it on rare occasions to win arguments against people with faulty memories. The value in doing this every night is not the data that come out of it but just the act of collecting my thoughts and experiences at the end of another messy day. The data are just the mint on my pillow.

But if there’s a mint on my pillow, you better believe I’m going to ingest that sucker, i.e. get my geek on. My first move was to do a word count analysis:

The only observation worth mentioning about this chart is that the word count tended to be higher at times when I had more thoughts to think through (surprise, surprise).

Geek note: There is no word count function in Excel but there is a way around it with this formula (just sub out the red text with the cell you want a word count for): =IF(ISBLANK(B2),0,LEN(TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(B2,CHAR(10)," ")))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(B2),CHAR(10),"")," ",""))+1)

More interesting was an analysis of the trends and frequencies with which I mention people and creatures in my life. Here is a chart of the 27 humans and creatures that have figured most prominently into my end of day thoughts the past three years. Each tiny square represents a person (or dog) who was mentioned at least once that day – this includes family members, friends, colleagues, Khan the dog, and other people who worked their way into my life for whatever reason. The mentions are typically uninteresting things like “hung out with Person X today,” but sometimes they are juicier than that. I’ve omitted the legend so as to minimize I’ve-been-thinking-about-you weirdness, but some of you might still be able to figure out which line is you.

Maybe the most surprising thing about this to me, which you can’t easily discern from the chart, is how often I don’t mention people in the entries. On average, one day a week I don’t mention any of the 27 most prominent people or creatures. My ex, for example, was mentioned in barely half of all entries. I don’t know what that says about me, but it probably isn’t good.

The general feeling I get looking over the chart is unease and maybe a little regret. I have the feeling that some people I should have been thinking about more, and others maybe less. But if I didn’t spend my nighttime thoughts on irrational crushes instead of the people most important to me, then it wouldn't really be a diary, would it?

Geek note: In Excel, the way to count whether someone is mentioned in an entry is by this formula: =IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("khan",B2)),1, "")

Bucket List

College Football is for cool people

It’s official: You should be giving me wedgies. I am such a nerd.

But I am a nerd who is going to win you MONEY!

I was sitting here in my jammies last night until almost 4 AM analyzing the results of all 373 games played this season by a Division 1 college football team. I was creating a power ranking of sorts that can predict the pointspread for any pairing of the 120 teams.

Here are the re$ult$:

The way to interpret this is that if Oklahoma played Alabama on a neutral field, then [given what has happened in the season so far] Oklahoma would be expected to win by 4 points. For home-field advantage, you can add about 2.5 points to the spread (so the pointspread would become 6.5 points if the game was played in Oklahoma and 1.5 if the game was played in Alabama).

This does a nice job of retroactively predicting results. Using this ranking, if a team is favored by at least a touchdown, then, historically-speaking, they have about a 94% chance of winning the game.

I could explain how I came up with this, but then you’d be almost morally obligated to give me a wedgie.

If these results can be trusted – and of course they can be, I mean consider the source – then it suggests that the current polls are, for some teams, wildly off the mark.

In particular, these teams are hugely overrated:

Nebraska
Clemson
Arkansas
Georgia Tech
Louisiana State (aka LSU)
Oklahoma State

And these teams are hugely underrated:

Notre Dame
Tennessee
Temple
Cincinnati
Penn State
Missouri
Toledo

Also, it tells us that Memphis is really, really bad.

So now you know where to put your life savings. You don’t need to thank me. You can just slip the check for 50% of the winnings under my door.

In all seriousness, please don’t be stupid. I trust that these rankings are better than the ones in the super-political AP and Coaches polls, but they stand no chance of reliably beating the Vegas pointspreads.

Of all the things to love about the suburbs…

Of all the things to love about the suburbs, maybe the one that most embodies the American work ethic is the suburban farmers’ devotion to their staple crop: grass.

Life may be meaningless, but try telling that to a suburbanite whose lawn needs his attention.

For lawn enthusiasts like me, what keeps us awake at night – and what gets us up in the morning – is the fear that today may be the day that some native plant species tries to invade my otherwise pristine grass farm. Not over my dead body. Nor over my assortment of lethal chemicals and clipping appliances.

Some people have called the devotion of us grass farmers “silly.” I’ll tell you what’s silly. What’s silly is neglecting your history. Your ancestry. Your humanity.

Your patriotism. What could be more American than a man on a riding lawn mower with a Milwaukee-brewed beer in hand?

Grass farms – otherwise known as lawns – have been a part of our heritage as a suburb-dwelling species for thousands of centuries, or at least since 1897, when a USDA report was published and read by several people. The report specified that lawns should be grown from a single grass species and plucked of any intruding invader. [Fact.] This was a sensible request seeing as how, in the suburbs, a man’s home was his castle, and so the arbiters of fashion rightly urged that our castles ought to be miniature cutesy versions of Monticello and Mount Vernon. (That’s fine – good, even – just please stop calling my regal lawn “cutesy.”)

Even today, in the age of unlimited free Internet porn, grass farming remains a tried and true American pastime. More $$ are funneled into keeping our laws full of fresh and untainted grass blades than on any crop we grow for a reason, like to feed people. [Fact.]

More to the point, grass farming is part of who we are. To neglect that would be a disservice to your nature and to Mother Nature. Just as Momma Nature designed squirrels to plant trees, she designed us primates to populate the Earth’s otherwise barren surface with new strains of drought-resistant and brightly-pigmented grass seeds, thereby sprucing up the surroundings for aesthetically-challenged creatures and preserving precious water, allowing it to be funneled to more important uses, like rinsing the layer of bug goo off of our vehicles.

So to any hippie environmentalist who tries to whine at you over his organic tea, just tell him you’re trying to let Nature run its course.

Little known fact: Grass farming has environmental benefits, too. It has the positive unintended consequence of allowing biodiversity to flourish, such as two or three varieties of Drought Resistant Grass®-loving deer which by the way make excellent meals after they’ve been shot down by either a rifle or a Nissan. (Allow six hours to emotionally recover from gutting the animal immediately after it gazed at you with its dying eyes.)

But beyond environmental reasons, I think we can agree that the most important function of grass farming is adding a verdant, beatific touch to Earth’s otherwise homely surface. It gives us a colorful, orderly, uniform sheet of beauty on top of which we can grill our hamburgers and kick our soccer balls. It gives us and Nature’s other creatures something pleasing to look at, like one of those modern paintings where the canvas is all one color. Ooo, what a nice Emerald Green that is.

You can thank us later, aesthetically-challenged creatures.

5 Secret Ways to Improve Your Technique and Revolutionize Your Efficiency underpants

Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten – and if you don’t know him, man can this dude write, both seriously and hilariously (although I hate that a distinction needs to be made) – was recently asked (ahem, by me) what is the most important humor writing advice he’s heard. His answer was so simple that I can’t stop thinking about it.

Here it is verbatim:

It's mine. I stole it from Dave Barry and claimed it for myself with a simple modification at the end:

"Always try to put the funniest word at the end of your sentence underpants."

At first blush, and probably even at fifth and fiftieth blush, this seems clever but non-revolutionary. I’m not going to argue that there is some deeper hidden truth in the statement, but I am going to argue that what makes this advice deserving of the honor “Most Important” is its very simplicity and obviousness.

It reminds me of my 5th grade teacher Mr. Boost. Mr. Boost was memorable for four reasons:

1. his temper
2. his thick mustache
3. his bright orange suspenders
4. motivating his class to win the school’s giftwrap selling competition every freakin’ year.

Those four are more related than you might realize.

The first day of class you knew this giftwrap selling competition was no small thing. (I don’t remember for sure that it was giftwrap, but it was something lame like that. Maybe canned tuna.) He literally hung championship banners from the ceiling in the style of a college basketball team whose proudest achievement was selling lots of festive paper products. He expressed optimism that we – the formidable homeroom class of 1996 – would add our own banner in that conspicuously gaping hole of the ceiling. Legacy was on the line.

And if that wasn’t motivation enough, he told us that the prize for winning the competition would be that, on the last day of the competition, when the winner was announced, right there in front of everyone he would sit at his desk, pull out a razor, and proceed to shave the rodent above his lip. He had our full attention.

He looked over the 20-something championship banners lovingly and confided in us that there was a reason for this success. There was a SECRET. A secret that would be revealed to us when/if we were ready.

Holy smokes. A secret! To a 5th grader’s brain, this is like learning that you are going to see boobies.

In subsequent classes as he was trying to explain the War of 1812 or some shit, I was still trying to figure out what this secret was going to be and when we would finally hear it. How am I supposed to sell giftwrap at a championship pace without The Secret?

The possibilities raced through my mind. Maybe he’s going to teach us to exaggerate the cuteness of our requests with something like, “Buy my giftwrap, pwww-eez.” Maybe he’s going to teach us about up-selling, the foot-in-the-door technique, and the subtle but powerful psychological effects of physical and verbal mimicry. Maybe he’s going to teach us about pyramid schemes and racketeering. Maybe he’s going to tell us where adults secretly hide their money, and how we can trick them by asking for a cookie and then running and emptying the stash.

I couldn’t be sure, but I was confident, given the looming presence of the banners above my head, that it would be revolutionary.

One day toward the end of class, just as he was finishing up lecturing about something to do with Frenchies, he leaned in and said softly that he thinks we’re ready for it. All month long the students had been biting their lips so hard in anticipation that some of us needed band-aids. And now the time had finally come. The Secret would finally be revealed. Doors would be opened and epiphanies would be reached.

“The Secret is this: If you knock on someone’s door and they’re not home, come back later.”

The air instantly vacated the room. I’ve been wearing band-aids on my lip for THIS?! That’s the most underwhelming damn secret I’ve ever heard.

And yet, it worked. Our class won the competition for the 22nd consecutive year or some ridiculous number. We got to see him shave his rodent.

It bothered me for many years (as you can tell) that it actually worked. Sure, I can see how championship banners and rodent shaving can help light a little fire under 5th graders’ butts, but what good does it do to introduce a stupid “secret” after much build-up?

It occurred to me many years later that maybe the reason why The Secret was an important part of the formula is because it reminded you of a simple thing that everyone else was neglecting. Maybe all the other classes were focused on things so heady like “strategy” that they overlooked the basics. When your competitors are a bunch of stupid humans, the most reliable way to beat them is not by improving your technique or your efficiency. The most reliable way to beat them is by remembering to do the simple shit.

I learned in high school that you can beat a lot of people in tennis – at one point I was top-ranked on my team and was playing against some of the top players in the state – by just remembering not to double fault on your serves and by trying more than anything to keep the ball in play, relatively deep, and to their backhand. The basics. Some people called my style “playing defensively.” Others called it “playing smartly.” I called it “not playing stupidly.” But one thing is for sure: People HATE playing against guys like me. Nothing frustrates hotshots more than being beat by a guy who dinks his second serve over the net like a girl with a bummed shoulder.¹

This also reminds me of watching professional sports when they take you Into the Huddle or Into the Locker Room and you get to actually hear what sophisticated strategy the coach is sharing with his elite athletes. Usually the grand epiphanies have something to do with “grabbing the rebound” or “running hard” or remembering to “look both ways before crossing the street,” which has kept me under the frustrating illusion that I can coach professional sports. I am not quite prepared to say that even at the highest levels of professional achievement the optimal type of advice is stuff like “tie your shoes,” but I’m closer to that opinion than I was when I started writing this post.

I conclude that, at least when the competition is less skilled than LeBron James, the most important kind of advice is probably the kind that reminds you of the basics. The kind that is so simple and so obvious that most stupid humans are forgetting to do it: Keep the ball in play, come back later if they’re not home, and put the funniest word at the end of the sentence underpants.

***

[1] I liked to call my dinky second serve The Feminine Bulldozer. It’s possible that I may own the record for most second-serve aces of anyone in the Raleigh-Durham metro area, and they were all the really lame kind where the serve was hit so softly that it bounced twice before it reached the opponent. To this day, it is my proudest unverified achievement.

Today’s topic is: Frozen semen

Lucky #9 in the series:

***

Attn: Carolyn Hax

In the last email I alluded to frozen semen. I’ve been thinking about that topic more than you probably care to know, but I could really use your help on this one.

[Mom, this is a good place for you to stop reading. Everyone else can continue reading after the fold.]

Dealing with the death of our protagonist

#8:

I think this post might need a preface: This is taking a jab at some people's opinions or perceptions of Steve Jobs. It is NOT taking a jab at Steve Jobs, whom, like seemingly everyone else on the Internet, I irrationally adored.

***

Carolyn,

I’m having a hard time dealing with the death of Steve Jobs.

I’ll admit, I didn’t know him terribly well – like you, he wouldn’t return my phone calls – but I felt I knew him about as well as you might know the protagonist of a novel you read the back cover of.

Protagonists aren’t supposed to die.

From what I gather, he was no ordinary protagonist. He not only embodied the virtues of a 21st Century moderately liberal individualist society, he also made black jeans + a turtleneck look cool.

Bigger still is that he was our existential protagonist. He had this knowing smile that said, “I know stuff about life and death that you don’t.” It left me simultaneously itchy and inspired.

He taught us with his actions that life can be meaningfully lived if you just shoot for going to bed satisfied every night.

That’s why I’m trying my darndest to follow in his footsteps and become the head of a publicly-held consumer products company.

Think Different.

Make Valuable Consumer Products.

I don’t fall for all the hoopla surrounding his aura. I recognize that, like any good protagonist, he wasn’t perfect. He had some flaws. He made some poor decisions.

His worst decision? Not selling vials of his frozen semen.

Could have made a fortune.

Could have populated small countries with his progeny.

As it turns out, there is a non-trivial chance that he will be out-reproduced by me! That seems absurdly unfair, and demonstrates a lack of forward-thinking on his part.

But they say that love is finding perfections in imperfections.

Well then, he was perfect.

The hardest part for me might be figuring out how to honor him.

Should I get one iPhone 4S, or two?

Dear Frenchies, my language is better than yours

An article in The American called English: The Inescapable Language (hat tip: The Door) gave me a big boost in appreciation for this crazy language I speak.

English grammar, I learned, is quite unlike any other language in the world, and is ridiculously easy to master. As the article discusses, English has only one conjugation, it has no subjunctive mood, no second person singular (thee and thou), English nouns have no gender, and unlike some languages (I'm looking at you, French, German, and Greek), written and spoken forms of English are the same.

That doesn't mean, however, that English is easy for a non-native to learn. But what makes it hard to learn is probably also its greatest advantage:

English abounds in synonyms, each with its own slightly different nuance or meaning. That’s why the thesaurus and the dictionary of synonyms are standard reference works in English but seldom found in other languages. Learning the subtle differences in meaning and tone between, say, “penniless,” “broke,” and “impecunious,” is, to put it mildly, a chore for foreigners.

The advantage of the huge vocabulary of English, of course, is that it makes English a superb literary and scientific language, able to express fine and precise shades of meaning far more easily than other tongues. This is no small part of the reason English has become the near universal language of science. It also makes English more efficient. The English version of a lengthy text is always substantially shorter than versions in other languages.

I checked Wikipedia for some stats on number of words and learned that in December 2010 a joint Harvard/Google study analyzing 5,195,769 digitised books found that English contains 1,022,000 words and that it is expanding at the rate of 8,500 words per year (or about one new word every hour!). Comparing the number of English words to other languages, however, is a difficult if not semantically impossible task because what is meant by a given language and what counts as a word do not have simple definitions.

Vocabulary matters because the more words you know, the better able you will be to communicate experiences to others and to yourself. Linguistic vocabulary is synonymous with thinking vocabulary, so the more words you know, the deeper your understanding of the world around you.

Praise economic forces, then, that English is winning:

English dominates the Internet. It is the only language used in air traffic control. It is the overwhelmingly dominant language of science. (Even the premier French scientific organization, the Institut Pasteur, publishes its papers in English first and only later in French). Sixty percent of all students studying a foreign language today are studying English. It’s a required course in school, starting early on, in an increasing number of countries.

###

Other lingual interestingness:

1. Different languages are spoken at varying speeds but thanks to correlated differences in data-density, the same amount of information is conveyed within a given time period (TIME via Kottke):

For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable is, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second -- and the slower the speech thus was. English, with a high information density of .91, is spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, rips along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edges past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information.

2. While both English and American accents have changed over time, it’s actually British accents that have changed more drastically since the colonial days. Early Brits, then, sounded more like modern Americans than vice versa. (Nick Patrick via Harrison)

Explanations are for wussies

In case you haven’t been paying attention, I’ve been trying to get Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax to respond to my emails. Here is attempt #7 in the series:

***

Carolyn,

People seem concerned about my sanity. I keep writing these creepy emails to you and posting them on my blog and no one is sure why, least of all me.

What the eff are you doing?, they ask in various ways.

Gosh, life would be so much easier if I knew the answer to that.

When people ask me why I am doing a certain thing or why I feel a certain way – and really that’s the same question – once I get over the shock of them honestly expecting that I know the answer, I ease in, reach behind me, and begin to pull reasonable-sounding explanations out of my butthole, just like a Republican. What’s funny is that they often treat my explanations as something more than an ink blot test, evidence that they overestimate my omniscience. Suckers.

I want to give them explanations because explanations make them feel better. Heck, explanations make me feel better. It makes it seem as if I am in control – that what I do is understandable and sensical and therefore predictable and capable of being changed. I prefer to conceptualize my behavior as the result of a little friendly man in my brain pulling levers. That seems way more intuitive than conceptualizing it as an immaculately complicated network of electrical and chemical responses mucked up by all the billions of tiny creatures that live on me and in me.

I’ve considered telling them that I’m just trying to find answers to life’s messy problems from someone who seems more than willing to tackle everyone’s messy problems but mine. I could elaborate that you are paid to do this as a service to your loyal fans who indirectly pay your salary by reading your shit. But I don’t want to sound trite.

I could tell them that I am obsessively driven to have someone in the Galifianakis family draw a cartoon inspired by me so that I can hang it on my wall and light candles around it. But I don’t want them to know that I hold comedic vigils in my living room.

I’m aware, though, that you’re probably not even reading my emails. I’ve made peace with that. I’m optimistic that my emails have been and will continue to be surprising and bizarre enough that it will make the screener reading the emails crack a smile and maybe a soft chuckle just before hitting the delete button. That’s not nothing.

I’ve considered telling them that I’m not doing this for you. That I’m doing it for them. That I’m using you as an excuse to write about ideas in a different way where instead of trying to reason-it-out as I used to, I employ healthy amounts of sarcasm and mockery to make my points.

But the truth is probably more along these lines: I’m really just hoping to attract hotties by more or less advertising, “Hey, look at how clever I am! I’ll give you clever babies!”

Let me tell you, fellas, it’s worked marvels. Chicks are so hot for bloggers.

-- Pulling Levers

Her negative attitude is bringing us all down

#6:

***

Carolyn,

I love my lover and her many desirable qualities like her long, flowing hair, her cute butt, her fondness of call-in radio programs, her use of first-person plural pronouns, and many other such things – and here is where I negate everything I just said: – but she is bringing me down with her negativity.

I have a lot to offer the world, you know. Given the right support system and a positive attitude, there is hardly any limit to the size and staying-power of the dent I can make in the Universe. I’m confident that if I just get the right mix of people around me then I will be able to have an influence that extends beyond even the cruelest mass extinctions and supernovae.

Point being that I can’t afford – nay, the world can’t afford – to have my potential vacuum-sucked dry by a spouse high on negativity quotient.

So, I need your help. You don’t need to respond to this email, you just need to agree to lock yourself in a room with my lover until she agrees to come out with a positive attitude.

Do it for the Universe.

-- Your one-way pen pal

If writing is a science, we're the rat

The first part of Dan Harmon's latest post:

While I’m sure all bad writers probably have a hard time writing, I’m equally certain that not all people having a hard time writing are bad writers (thank God).

The term “writer’s block” is, itself, the beginning of a self-defeating syndrome. The idea that something is “in our way” presumes we know where we’re going, which presumes “we” are responsible for our failures and successes, which only paralyzes us more.

I won’t presume to call writing “art,” but I will say this: if it’s science, we’re the rat. We are not the one with the plan or the map, we are down in the shit, learning through mistakes that are not our fault, cruising for rewards which are sadly therefore not to our actual credit. But let’s not get nihilistic right when I’m about to activate you.

A rat would never get through a maze if it thought a rat’s job was to know which way to go. The dead end is not the problem in need of solving, the hunger is, and the way to solve the hunger, the way to get the cheese, is to respect a wall for a wall. To receive each obstruction as a message from the laboratory: ”You’re not going this way. Period. Change direction.”

I currently follow exactly 0 TV shows but I've contemplated multiple times picking up Community just because I'm pretty sure this man knows what he's doing.

The ultimate compatibility criterion: "Are we laughing at the same shit?"

Attempt #5 in the series:

***

Carolyn,

I’ve heard it said that all the competing compatibility criteria can be boiled down to the question of, “are we laughing at the same shit?”

This scares the poop out of me. If it’s true, I’m worried that I may be destined for a lifetime of lonely nights wearing unfunny clothing like pajama pants and eating unfunny foods like Honey Dijon sandwiches and chuckling at unfunny things like my pooch’s assortment of postures and noises.

I don’t want to say that I have a unique sense of humor, but by saying that I don’t want to say that I have a unique sense of humor, I’ve kind of already said it. So there it is. My cards are on the table.

But the challenge of finding a lady with a similar sense of humor is not what scares me. I’m confident that if I looked under enough rocks or in enough middle school classrooms I’d find a single girl who laughs at the same shit.

What scares me are the consequences. Imagine what might happen if I got together with a girl who gets giddy looking at the cover of Trout Fishing in America or who thinks this is the funniest thing ever. I just shuddered a little.

I mean, yes, of course, it would be quite nice to have the company of a lady who finds humor in similarly weird shit. I’d quite like that. But would we be able to reliably feed and clothe and bathe ourselves? I’m worried about our ability to function as independent adults if one of us is always laughing at poop jokes.

Scarier still, if a guy and a girl hang out for long enough then there is a non-trivial chance that they will produce a human or three. That seems dangerous. Nobody would like that, least of all the Universe.

So I guess the question to you, Carolyn, is a philosophical one: Is it unethical for two people to start a relationship knowing that the end result could likely be more humans who find Sarah Silverman humorous?

-- Worried and Unfunny and Possibly Unethical

###

In case you have a similarly twisted sense of humor, here are nine things that recently gave me a good chuckle:

1. Brilliantly smart-ass responses to completely well-meaning signs (hat tip: the Door)

2. CoedsWithColds.com

3. “People say ‘I’m taking it one day at a time’. You know what? So is everybody. That’s how time works.”

4. “I was playing chess with my friend and he said, ‘Let’s make this interesting’. So we stopped playing chess.”

(Both of the previous lines come from here.)

5. Scott Adams on early humans

6. DanHarmon.com

7. An alternative to this effing online dating business

8. Really bad analogies

9. How Steve Martin ended his stand-up routine:

Well, we’ve had a good time tonight, considering we’re all going to die someday.

---

Update: Thanks to Anna for reminding me of quite possibly the awesomest taxidermy commercial ever made.

This could be a deal breaker

Still no word from Carolyn Hax, even after submitting 5 questions during her live chat yesterday. Here is attempt #4 in the series.

***

Carolyn,

OK, a serious one this time:

How can I gently tell my lover that she’s been using a disproportionate amount of Honey Dijon?

I’m pretty fussy about what condiments I use on my sandwiches, and she knows that!, so I feel like she should be more respecting of my needs as an eater of sandwiches. Especially when them shits are like $3 for the tiny bottles.

We’ve only been together for a few months, and I’m concerned that this could be a sign of bigger problems to come. Like, you know, gluttony with regard to an assortment of condiments.

I’ve tried leaving notes. For example, just the other day I scotch-taped one to the bottle saying, “What we have is too precious to let delicious spiced condiments get between us. Quit hogging.”

The next morning I found her using it as a napkin.

I don’t want to lose her. I’m trying to look at this as just one of those early hurdles that young couples must leap over or else let it smack them in the genitals. But on the other hand, I don’t want to live in a household with unequal division of Dijon!

-- Desperately Seeking Solutions