Tuesday, January 28. 2014
Do the clothes make the man (or woman)? Of course not, but they do make a statement and they do make a difference.
When I used to be a slob and tended to dress down, a friend told me to check out this only-slightly outdated text: John T. Molloy's New Dress for Success.
There is also one for women: How to Dress for Success.
It's better to have three good suits or three good work dresses than to have closets full of mediocre stuff. If you have business or professional ambitions, look the part. I own only three good, conservative suits, but plenty of Brooks Brothers ties and shirts for variation. Forgot, also a summer suit. I have three sports jackets for "informal Fridays" and for church, etc. A blazer and two tweeds.
I have just three pairs of expensive dress shoes for work; brown, cordovan, and black. They ought to be good for 20-30 years at least. Somebody once told me that people always check out your footwear, and it is true. I never do that, but other people do.
If you look professional, chances are that you will be treated that way. It sounds shallow, but the way a person presents himself in public, comports himself, grooms himself, speaks, his posture, all makes a huge difference in a world in which people only have time for quick takes and generally are not very interested in you because they know enough people already. After all, how you look is your decision about how you have chosen to present yourself to others. If you look like a schlub, people will assume that that is what you are or what you aspire to. If you look too natty, or whorish, conclusions will also be drawn.
We identify ourselves, introduce ourselves, before we open our mouths. Do I appraise people on their appearance? Of course I do. Everybody does. It's termed "signaling." It's not always accurate for sure, but it's a rule of thumb for people with little time.
Sunday, January 26. 2014
We go back to Arthur C. Brooks' 2007 What Really Buys Happiness? Not income equality, but mobility and opportunity
Most of the studies he discusses avoid defining happiness, and just let people report. At issue, of course, is that as long as one is not in dire straits, happiness and contentment in life depend on non-economic factors: temperament and personality, relationships, family, hobbies and interests, etc.
There is no one "happiness." Some are most happy when taking risks, others more comfortable when they feel more secure. Material gain is not a universal goal.
 When sitting in a duck blind or deer stand, standing on a ski slope watching your grandkids, and winter hiking, it's much more pleasant to have warm toes and fingers. I have had times in duck blinds when my fingers were too cold and numb to pull a trigger, but I have a touch of Raynaud's Syndrome.
Assuming that you wear things to keep toes and hands dry, hand and foot warmers can add plenty of comfort.
This site has aluminum-coated insoles and insoles ("footbeds") with inserts for 6-hour warmers.
They also sell Grabber Hand Warmers for your gloves - or for your pocket.
Saturday, January 25. 2014
I am a fan of online dating, especially for those who are out of school. There is just no other way to interview so many available candidates efficiently, with the advantage of screening them in advance.
When people get divorced, I usually recommend that a person have a coffee with at least 25-30 candidates, at minimum, before deciding to get involved with anyone. That's because the recently-divorced are usually lonely, unhappy, sex-starved; often hurt or angry or worried about the future, and generally prone to poor judgement and poor choices. However, those things may apply to many single people.
Because of this, I found this fellow's love story interesting: How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love
Do guys just want sex? That's a topic for another day. That guy wanted true love, whatever that is.
Friday, January 24. 2014
 Heading up to Killington this morning with some buddies. I am expecting plenty of powder and plenty of Long Trail.
I think I had best bring my heavy-duty winter undies. Maybe get some runs in this afternoon with my new skis, bought (brand new Volkls, in wrapper) on eBay (last year's model, for 1/3 the price).
Monday, January 20. 2014
 Antidepressants fail to help around 70% of depressed patients on the first try.
Antidepressants are now the treatment of choice for anyone with acute or chronic symptoms of "major depression," ie anxiety, disturbed sleep, hopelessness and helplessness, self-hatred, appetite loss, irrational guilty feelings, loss of sex drive, inability to concentrate, sometimes suicidal feelings, and inability to find pleasure or interest in things. In my experience, the vast majority of patients with a fair number of those symptoms feel better with antidepressants, but, in my view, medicine should never be given without psychotherapy of some sort.
Where it gets complicated is that 1. there are many kinds of depression besides major depression; 2., the personality type, and personal strengths and weaknesses can effect the way depression occurs, and whether it occurs at all, and, 3. life circumstances have a real impact on the ability to improve depression with medicine (if your business is going bust, or your child dying with cancer, no antidepressant will make you merry).
I'll try to keep it brief. The generic term "depression" runs the gamut from the heavily-inherited form that occurs in Bipolar Disorder (which is probably a brain-wiring abnormality), to the grief-like depressive reactions to life-events, especially loss, which occur in vulnerable people. In between are sad-sack people with chronic mildy depressed mood, and many people with chronic mood problems due to personality disorders or neurotic problems. My point is that there is not one "depression". The word refers to a group of symptoms, not a diagnosis.
Because depression is not a unitary phenomenon, different forms require different treatment approaches, whether psychotherapeutic or chemical, but the research says preferably both for severe depression.
It is not widely understood that the new SSRI antidepressants are not "mood elevators." They have no effect whatsoever on people without depression, which is why they are never abused.
I will have to follow-up with a Part 2 later, because this is getting too long, according to our blog rules. "Short and sweet." But some subjects are complex and nuanced, as our esteemed French Senator likes to say.
Image is Durer's Melancholia.
I asked one of my two entrepreneurial NYC pupettes what she did for fun on Saturday, since her New Year's decision has been not be be All Work And No Play (All Work is her natural tendency and pleasure, as is mine, so she decided to make one day per week a day for play to maintain a balance). She emailed me this report:
Dad:
Went to dim sum brunch at Hakkasan (one Michelin star). And got peach mimosas and macarons (not macaroons). http://hakkasan.com
We walked through Times Square and got some free chocolates at the big Godiva store.
Went to the MOMA and saw a few special exhibits, which included strange modern art that we didn't entirely understand (for example pile of trash and a man who recorded himself making faces with his belly), a Chinese film with nine screens - you lie on the floor and watch them all - you see each shot from nine angles.
Then we went to Tiffany's on Fifth Avenue to get my Christmas bracelet repaired - we hung out at the customer service lounge on the top floor while we were waiting for a specialist to help us and were served delicious cappuccinos. We wandered around the store afterwards and pretended we could afford everything.
We decided to walk to Columbus Circle along the park. On the way we stopped in a few art galleries and saw more strange art that we couldn't afford. My boyfriend almost got run over by a Central Park carriage horse who was running a little too fast, out of control, and making everyone nervous.
We went to the giant Whole Foods in Columbus Circle and bought a craft beer at the pub in the store - they have hundreds of craft beers on tap. Yum. We bought some craft beers for his roommates.
We walked around the big shopping complex there and I scouted out my business competition. We just did Christmas so no need to do any shopping, just looking.
We walked down through Hell's Kitchen and discovered a little Vietnamese place and decided to try it out - it was amazingly delicious. We got clay pot salmon and beef pho (noodle soup) and Vietnamese beer.
We walked a few more blocks but it was so cold we decided to pop into one of our favorite Korean restaurants (Danji) - they have delicious small plates. We got two orders of Kimchi (pickled veggies), beef tartare and two stiff cocktails (one with whiskey and jujubes) and one that was basically straight bourbon. We were warmed up and feeling pretty silly. We quizzed each other on Middle East country capitals and planned our next adventure to Asia. We loved our Japan adventure in Sept.
Then we ran back to my friend's apartment on 44th - being silly and laughing for no reason. I couldn't stop laughing - think it was the whiskey or maybe just joie de vivre.
Then we hung out with a few friends at his apartment for a bit - and watched a terrifying zombie show. Then we had the last of the macarons we had saved from brunch - they were incredible. Caramel, cranberry, almond. Just one more treat to celebrate our anniversary bc it was midnight at that point.
Ahh, Youth! It must not be wasted.
Saturday, January 18. 2014
As is well-known, at least in New England, the Austrian von Trapp family (they dropped the von in the US) settled in Stowe, VT, where they opened the Trapp Family Lodge in 1950. The family, whose story is that of The Sound of Music, still owns and operates the Lodge.
There was a recent cast reunion in Stowe.
Here's the Trapp Family Lodge website. My family enjoyed this place very much in the winter when I was young. That was before all of the condos.
I'm going between two superb Christmas books right now:
The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
I am happy to have a tall stack left to go. I feel lost without a stack of books to read.
Friday, January 17. 2014
My photo of one of the busy shoe stations came out too blurry to post, but here's a tip: The next time you're in Grand Central Station (Terminal, to be accurate) in NY, and have a spare 15 minutes, indulge yourself in a shoe-shine. It's a strangely-luxurious thing to sit up in the incredibly-comfy leather high chairs - they hand you the day's NY Post to read - to let those guys do a real professional spit shine on your good shoes.
You can even bring them a bag of shoes, and pick them up later. It's not just for guys - the gals do it too.
$4.00 per pair. Given how carefully and how hard these guys work, I usually figure a $4 tip too. It's never wrong to tip them before you pay, not after. Being capitalists, they will do one heck of a job for you. I hate to shine my shoes.
The Station, late-morning after rush hour. How many towns would love to have a grand, busy and fun place like this? Fun food joints on the lower level. They don't make 'em like this anymore.
Tegmark:
Galileo famously stated that our Universe is a “grand book” written in the language of mathematics. So why does our universe seem so mathematical, and what does it mean? In my new book “Our Mathematical Universe”, I argue that it means that our universe isn’t just described by math, but that it is math in the sense that we’re all parts of a giant mathematical object, which in turn is part of a multiverse so huge that it makes the other multiverses debated in recent years seem puny in comparison.
and
My starting assumption, the external reality hypothesis, states that there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans. When we derive the consequences of a theory, we introduce new concepts and words for them, such as “protons”, “atoms”, “molecules”, “cells” and “stars”, because they're convenient. It's important to remember, however, that it's we humans who create these concepts; in principle, everything could be calculated without this baggage.
But if we assume that reality exists independently of humans, then for a description to be complete, it must also be well-defined according to non-human entities – aliens or supercomputers, say – that lack any understanding of human concepts. That brings us to the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, which states that our external physical reality is a mathematical structure.
Thursday, January 16. 2014
He begins:
A colleague who teaches in the humanities at the state college where I work also teaches at a nearby private college. In the colleague’s description, the private college is perpetually in the grip of a panic over the prospect of a drop in enrollment. The college’s administration has therefore instituted an unwritten but implacable policy the upshot of which is that the student is always right, no matter how absurd his complaint, and the consequence of which is that instructors must never tax students beyond an infantile minimum of scholarly exertion. Among the consequences of the consequence are that students refuse to undertake out-of-class reading assignments, fail quizzes related to those assignments, and then lodge complaints with chairs and deans against the instructor.
 JFK drove the nail in the coffin of mens' hats. Trouble is, hats are a good way to stay warm in winter. They say that, if your head and feet are warm, you're warm.
Unless you are bald or wear a crew-cut, hats give you hat hair and you look like a dork when you take it off.
It's a dilemma: comfort vs. vanity.
Do you guys wear hats when it's cold? If so, what hat?
Wednesday, January 15. 2014
"Science has become an international bully." I doubt that I will change my mind about this being the best essay of 2014, by Yale's computer scientist David Gelernter: The Closing of the Scientific Mind.
It's about subjectivity, mainly - being human, and a defense of Nagel in part. The essay is so rich and deadly-serious that it cannot really be taken in in one reading, and it is difficult to select a representative quote so I'll post a random one:
The dominant, mainstream view of mind nowadays among philosophers and many scientists is computationalism, also known as cognitivism. This view is inspired by the idea that minds are to brains as software is to computers. “Think of the brain,” writes Daniel Dennett of Tufts University in his influential 1991 Consciousness Explained, “as a computer.” In some ways this is an apt analogy. In others, it is crazy. At any rate, it is one of the intellectual milestones of modern times.
How did this “master analogy” become so influential?
Well, because we derive our metaphors from the world around us. Freud's first metapsychology was modeled on the steam engine. The essay deserves study. Take a Ritalin and dig into it.
Another:
Many scientists are proud of having booted man off his throne at the center of the universe and reduced him to just one more creature—an especially annoying one—in the great intergalactic zoo. That is their right. But when scientists use this locker-room braggadocio to belittle the human viewpoint, to belittle human life and values and virtues and civilization and moral, spiritual, and religious discoveries, which is all we human beings possess or ever will, they have outrun their own empiricism. They are abusing their cultural standing. Science has become an international bully.
Nowhere is its bullying more outrageous than in its assault on the phenomenon known as subjectivity...
In Search of Time’s Origin
Physicists are not certain that time exists:
Maldacena’s model provides more support than ever for the claim that, when it comes to cosmic ingredients, entanglement is more fundamental than space and time. Time, it turns out, is not present at the most basic layer of reality; it springs from fundamental seeds. But while emerging physics suggests time is an illusion, the forces that conjure it remain at large. “My intuition is that it will take more than just a re-working of quantum physics, it will require a breakthrough that will come totally out of left field,” Seiberg says. “Only time will tell what that revolution will be.”
Tuesday, January 14. 2014
 This was my high chair when I was a kid, used for all of my younger sibs too. My parents had gotten it from their grandparents and kept on using it, and I have no idea how old it is. It has survived many generations of use.
Maybe somebody like Sipp can date it.
It's one of the many items I retrieved from my parents' house. One cool thing about it is that you can climb up it to get into it.
Could this be manufactured today as child furniture? I doubt it. Too dangerous, vulnerable to lawsuits, etc. However, this fine thing will have a long future unless the Feds arrive to charge me with child endangerment.
If a dopey kid falls out of this chair and cracks its head open, it's just Darwinian, isn't it?
Nobody will save your stainless steel and plastic high chairs for posterity, but I think this one has a long future somewhere in the Bird Dog family.
 An amusing exchange
Lots of things are "natural." That's why we need the Ten Commandments - to be more than natural. Any animal can be natural.
Monday, January 13. 2014
Teaching Social Decorum in the US Air Force
"Arms off the table; Sit up straight; Don't talk with food in your mouth; Don't pick your teeth; Don't touch your face or your hair; Don't start before others; You're not a pig at the trough - converse and eat slowly; Don't slurp your soup; Ask people about themselves and don't talk about yourself; Look people in the eye and give a firm handshake; Don't bring up religion or politics, etc., etc." I have it all memorized.
Word to the wise: Please don't tell me about your kids. I only asked out of politeness, not interest. Tell me jokes and lies, be entertaining, and tell me something interesting.
Sunday, January 12. 2014
Samizdata found this gem by Rauch in The Atlantic. A couple of quotes:
"Introverts may be common, but they are also among the most misunderstood and aggrieved groups in America, possibly the world."
and
"Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice? "
Read entire.
The Writing Life: Structure.
McPhee is near the top of my favorite non-fiction author list, so it's a treat to see him explain how he does it. One quote:
Showing in class the structural diagrams of “Travels in Georgia,” I used to recite, more or less, “It’s the story of a journey, and hence it represents a form of chronological structure, following that journey as it was made through space and time. There are structural alternatives, but for the story of a journey they can be unpromising and confusing when compared with a structure that is chronologically controlled.” Et cetera. Et cetera, in an annual mantra about what I thought to be axiomatic: journeys demand chronological structures. That was before 2002, when I went from a truck stop in Georgia to a product delivery elsewhere in Georgia to an interior wash in South Carolina to a hazmat manufacturer in North Carolina and on across the country to the state of Washington in a sixty-five-foot chemical tanker owned and driven by a guy named Don Ainsworth.
Think about it. Think how it appeared to the writer when it was still a mass of notes. The story goes from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States. Has any other writer ever done that? Has any other writer ever not done that? Even I had done something like it in discussing North American geology in “Annals of the Former World.” You don’t need to remember much past Meriwether Lewis, George R. Stewart, John Steinbeck, Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and William Least Heat-Moon in order to discern a beaten path. If you are starting a westbound piece in, say, Savannah, can you get past Biloxi without caffeinating the prose? If Baltimore—who is going to care if you get through Cumberland Gap? New York? The Hackensack River. If you start in Boston, turn around. In a structural sense, I turned around—once again reversing a prejudice. In telling this story, the chronology of the trip would not only be awkward but would also be a liability.
Ainsworth and I started in Bankhead, Georgia, where I joined him, and, as it happened, met him, after five years of correspondence. He had read my “Looking for a Ship,” and had written to me saying that if I was going to go out on the ocean with people like that I should go out on the road with people like him...
Saturday, January 11. 2014
Here's the Russian Folktale.
Why is it always a frog?
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