Category: Uncategorized

Categories
Uncategorized

One revealing question

B & JYou’ll always be better off avoiding  people who are just rat poison. So how can you throw on the brakes of the crazy train before it leaves the station? I saw an interesting idea online about one question you can ask that reveals more than you might think.

It’s a rule of thumb, a quick and dirty (but scientifically validated) way for assessing the presence in another of a certain personality trait.

“If you want to know if someone displays a certain characteristic, just ask if he or she thinks other people often display that characteristic.”

“(it’s) a powerful hack for evaluating others people’s character, if you want to know if they display a trait, just find a way to ask how common they think it is in others. The more of a quality they see around them, the more they probably possess themselves.”

Categories
Uncategorized

Who knew?

tallboyWhen you’re talking about the ways people are treated differently in society, sometimes you stumble onto interesting tangents.

Usually, people don’t discuss public toilets. But the subject comes up now because some people are trying to restrict transgender folk to using restrooms for the sex into which they were born.

Over the long run, it’s not really a big problem, it’ll soon be forgotten. But that’s why the subject of urinals came up at a party I was at.

It turned out, that out of four guys at that party, three of them, including me all had a preference for the old school, floor to rib height urinals. The ones that are nowadays generally found in older buildings. For women who’ve probably never seen one, most of them look like the one pictured above.

And the guy who didn’t have a strong preference did think the tall urinals were cool. Three out of four is a pretty strong endorsement.

I don’t think about the issue unless I go into a restroom that’s equipped with the tall urinals, so it just never come up because guys don’t chitchat in public restrooms. It’s hard to imagine a stranger saying, “Damn I miss these old style tall urinals!”

Who knew? May those older style urinals are iconic in some way, remind men of a different time, or are a bit easier to use.

If I ever need to build a public restroom, I know what I’m putting in the men’s room.

Categories
Ideas Uncategorized

Self-driving vehicles

follow the leaderSelf-driving vehicles are already here. Now they’re expensive but the technology will be in cheaper cars soon and then in all cars not long after.

But what about motorcycles? Generally, in affluent societies, motorcyclists seem to be an independent lot. Why would someone buy a self-driving motorcycle? The thrill would be gone but you’d be wet when it rained and have bugs in your teeth when you smiled.

Motorcycles can be dangerous. That’s part of their appeal. Why do you think bikers hate helmet laws?

So what happens when motorcycle riding gets so safe you won’t even need to wear a helmet?

Categories
Ideas Uncategorized

Don’t worry

anxietySometimes, you have to be willing to play the long game, and to possibly be misunderstood for long periods of time. A  prerequisite to inventing or creating art is having the willingness to fail and hang in there.

In any sort of a mental or physical quest it’s an enormous advantage to have opponents who quit easily or who’ve found it useless to even try. So don’t give up your day job and don’t worry too much. It’s never too late to achieve your dream – consider the path of these people you know:

At 23, Tina Fey was working at a YMCA.

At 23, Oprah was fired from her first reporting job.

At 24, Stephen King was working as a janitor and living in a trailer.

At 27, Vincent Van Gogh failed as a missionary and decided to go to art school.

At 28, J.K. Rowling was a suicidal single parent living on welfare.

At 28, Wayne Coyne ( from The Flaming Lips) was a fry cook.

At 30, Harrison Ford was a carpenter.

At  30, Martha Stewart was a stockbroker.

At 37, Ang Lee was a stay-at-home-dad working odd jobs.

At 39, Julia Child released her first cookbook, and got her own cooking show at age 51.

At 40, Vera Wang designed her first dress.

At 40, Stan Lee released his first big comic book.

At 43, Alan Rickman gave up his graphic design career to pursue acting.

At 46, Samuel L. Jackson got his first movie role.

At 52, Morgan Freeman landed his first movie.

At 57, Kathryn Bigelow reached international success with The Hurt Locker.

At 76, Grandma Moses started painting.

Louis CK said, “I definitely have huge benefits to how well I’m doing, but you do find yourself missing the climb. It’s a little like Mount Everest. When you summit, you spend about 20 minutes up there, and you do a little dance. But if the 20-minute dance was really it, would you really risk your life for the amount of work it takes to get up and down? So every time I feel like I’ve found a clearing, I try to find something else that I don’t know how to do yet. That’s just much more interesting to me.”

Categories
Uncategorized

Compressing time

abandoned bldg being grown overWe see old buildings, visit museums with ancient artifacts, and read about eventful moments in history, and usually feel the things and events from the past are so removed from our lives today. Then you read something linking us to the past:

“Private Mose Triplett was 19 when the Civil War ended in 1865. Later in life, he married a woman 50 years younger than him and, in 1930, they had a daughter Irene. Irene Triplett is now in her mid-eighties (in 2014) and gets a monthly benefit check from US Department of Veterans Affairs for her father’s service so many years before.”

It’s a link to a time we can’t really imagine. But there it is. A connection to our current time from two centuries ago.

Categories
Ideas Uncategorized

Just wondering

bernard hopkinsThis is an idea I had about small people, short men in particular.

If sex and violence are two of the most popular themes in human experience, why don’t we see more small people, particularly men. There seems to be a bias toward bigger men in both areas.

Look at boxing revenues and you see people generally prefer the heavyweight matches. Maybe the bigger guys are more intimidating? They’re harder hitting, and get more knockouts. Most spectators watching a heavyweight boxing match realise that as a “normal person” they couldn’t go toe to toe with a heavyweight boxer. But with the lighter class boxers, spectators might feel they could hold their own against that guy (even though they couldn’t).

So watching the lighter classes of fighters isn’t as compelling (unless you’re an aficionado) because they’re perceived as not intimidating like the big guys are. When Mike Tyson was describing his life before it spun out of control, he said something like, “If there’re seven billion people in the world, think how you feel when you know that you can beat anyone of them in a fair fight.”

And consider mass market porn, and you’ll see the stature of the men tending to be bigger and taller. There don’t seem to be many shorter male porn stars.

For men, pornography is about sex. Whereas for women, romance trumps sex. But in both pornography and romance novels, the lead male character tends to be handsome, confident, and tall.

Visual pornography is generally catering to the evolved sexual preferences of men for low-investment sex with different partners. Romance novels cater to the evolved sexual preferences of women, the sex happens later in the book, after building tension and a “getting to know the partner” has occurred.

I guess you could make the claim that really tall men aren’t being represented in boxing and pornography. But there’re fewer really tall men than there are short men.

I was just wondering.

Categories
Clutter Uncategorized

Food for thought

old stadiumIn our car the other day, we wanted to know the price difference between the US dollar and the Australian dollar ten years ago. A quick internet inquiry on our smart phone gave us the answer. It would’ve been a pain in the ass tracking down that obscure tidbit of info a few years ago.

There’s so much food for thought sloshing around the internet. I realized this past week I’d collected some interesting snippets of information. They’re unrelated to each other except that they’re weird ideas gleaned from cyberspace. Here are some of them.

When the system is evil people will do evil things. A recently published book called “The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry” points out a disturbing commodification of humans when they’re bought and sold: “The price of a slave peaked in his or her late teens. There was another price spike upwards at about age eight, when child mortality declined.”

Okay, maybe an argument can be made that this falls under a similar category – when the system is bad people will do bad things. In an article about how rapidly marriage is changing the author made an interesting point, “If monogamy were natural we probably wouldn’t need to have so many rules about it.”

A happiness study looked at two factors characterizing basic differences between ancestral and modern life, population density and frequency of socialization with friends. Population density is negatively associated, and frequency of socialization with friends is positively associated with life satisfaction – except that “More intelligent individuals experience lower life satisfaction with more frequent socialization with friends.”

Sometimes making a change can be upsetting, consider this snippet about education, “The access to teacher training in Finland is highly competitive; there’re ten applicants for every training place to become a primary schoolteacher. It doesn’t seem  to dawn upon those in Britain and the US who want to implement the Finnish system that it’d mean firing something like three-quarters of the current teachers.”

Then there was this bridge between prehistoric and current times, “Tusks from dead mammoths, found in the frozen Siberian tundra, have risen to account for as much as 20 percent of all ivory production. Crunching the numbers, the researchers concluded, ‘Mammoth ivory trade may be saving elephants from extinction.'”

Categories
Uncategorized

Exchanges

luche masksIntimates and strangers are at opposite ends of our personal interaction spectrum.

We just got back from Mexico City, one of the largest cities in the world, where we were surrounded by 25 or so million strangers.

In transactions between strangers, cash scales. We paid a cab driver to take us to the airport. Cash enabled us to interact with people we don’t know and probably won’t see again.

In environments built on personal interaction and trust among intimates, like in the little town where we live, transactions based on money don’t increase efficacy, they degrade it.  We’d never pay a friend to take us to the airport, nor would we consider charging  friends for taking them to the airport. In small groups, money corrupts.

It’s a big world and cash helps us operate among people we don’t know. But if you want to build an intimate circle that lives on favors and gift exchange, don’t bring cash. Bring generosity.

Categories
Happiness Ideas Uncategorized

The endgame

you are hereI was talking to a friend the other day about how he invests his money.

There’re lots of ways to invest. There’s value in the easiest and simplest. Put your money in an S&P 500 fund with the lowest maintenance cost and leave it alone. The stock market will go up and down. Ignore the rollercoaster ride and over time you’ll come out ahead.

Don’t believe me, Warren Buffet says that’s what he’s doing with 90% of the money he’s leaving his wife.

Some “early retirement” websites tout this investment strategy. I like jlcollins, Mr. Money Mustache, or Early Retirement Extreme. Before they get to investing though, they devote a lot of ink to the preliminary stuff, like getting out of debt, reducing your expenses, and saving more of your money. Kant said, “We’re enriched not by what we possess, but by what we can do without.”

Most people don’t like working for someone else and they’d like to pursue their own agenda, so getting your finances in order means your livelihood will no longer depend on the demands of possibly irrational people. Unfortunately, most people have taken on debt, continue buying things they don’t really need, and save very little. That’s why all that has to be addressed first

Ultimately, happiness is the  underlying sense of well-being  you wish will continue indefinitely. High status and high income probably aren’t what you need for a happier life. If you think that’s true, why end up trading your precious time for things that deliver little value to you. Unless you want those things. Some people, successful or not, never label what they go through as bad, simply taking it as a given.

Circling back to investing, You’ll contribute to your happiness by not having to worry much about what your money is up to. The most basic formula requires:

figuring out what your yearly expenses are,

saving at least 25 times that amount,

all the while investing your savings in a low-cost S&P 500 index,

and then you can withdraw 4% every year for the rest of your life.

That’s the endgame in a nutshell.

Categories
Exercise Uncategorized

Is grip strength important?

petting the dogIt depends, but It turns out that your grip strength is probably more important than you’d imagine.

I heard a discussion between two guys from TV shows that strip participants of almost everything modern, forcing them to live primitively. Both participants were struck by how important strong hands were. Describing their time surviving as primitive humans might have, they said it was a constant grind. And also, that contrary to what you might think, surviving in primitive circumstances requires a lot of grabbing, holding, and twisting, but not much running or lifting heavy things.

That reminded me of a comment by Pavel Tsatsouline who has trained both Russian and US special forces. When he was asked what are the most important body parts to train, he said there were two, grip strength and abdominal strength.

Even in cultures that have specialization, sometimes grip strength is still important. In the Merriam-Webster dictionary under “dentist,” part of the definition said that “During the Middle Ages extractions were carried out by barbers and blacksmiths, or sometimes by specialist tooth-drawers, some of whom would spend hours pulling nails out of planks of wood as practice for extracting teeth with their fingers.” That’s grip strength.