Outliers

Just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's newest book, Outliers, and I was totally impressed with it. I haven't read Tipping Point yet but I did enjoy Blink, so I was looking forward to this one, especially after seeing the subject matter was ironically about successful individuals and the book came out at the time when so many American success stories are being exposed as frauds.

His thesis is that innate ability is not enough to get you to success, however you define it, which means that telling a child how smart he or she is constantly as a kid will actually do more to harm their future character and chances of success than not telling them at all what their real intelligence level is. Instead he cites example after example of people we all know of as huge successes, like Bill Gates and Bill Joy and the Beatles, and dig deeper into their background to find a crucial combination of unbelievable hard work - Gates and Joy would spend nearly all their time outside of class working on computer software, and the Beatles spend a few years playing for 6+ hours a night in Germany before they ever hit it big, getting more time playing shows together than most bands ever get in their entire careers -- and one more thing: luck. Joy and Gates, for all their hard work, didn't work anywhere near the orders of magnitude harder than a lot of young programmers to follow them to justify their success. Rather, they happened to be probably the very first people in the entire world who got to program interactively on a time sharing computer system, the first to come along after punch cards, and not have to pay for their time or compete with other members of a computer centre for precious little hours on the machine. So they had a massive head-start over their would-be peers, and were helped every step of teh way by fortuitous events. This isn't a bad thing, it has to happen that someone is the first to come along and do the pioneering work when a new field opens up, or a new genre of music in the case of the Beatles.

But the thesis of the book is that these are not extra-ordinary people who would have risen from any background to become the people they were just by their nature. That is the way the American individualist hero myth would tell the story. Instead, whenever you dig in and really see the breaks and good timing of birth and circumstances that allowed these people to have their hard work be meaningful hard work, that is what creates these great success stories. The last part of the book explains how other societies have ingrained meaningful work into their cultural psyche stemming from farming methods, and how cultural background can and should be actively studied and we should see what good and bad effects it has on one's ability to succeed.

The last section of the main text is yet another go at trying to address what's wrong with the education system in America, and I don't really buy his proscription that students should be put into super-intensive year-round schooling to keep them from forgetting anything they have learned. Perhaps a glance toward successful education systems in Europe would be a better place to look than radically extending the time a child must spend in school and doing homework.

Leaving aside criticisms of rote learning in Asian education, Gladwell is only talking specifically about math scores, and in that area Asian students are measurable, undeniably better.

I don't want the fact that Asian education is also far from perfect to obscure the fact that we can learn a lot from other cultures' approach to knowledge, though. My favourite bit from the book was something that reminded me of my own experience studying math, when he described a video of a woman figuring out using a graphing program that it is simply impossible to graph a straight vertical line.. that it is undefined. It took her a long time, 22 minutes, but eventually the idea came to her and she will have an understanding of how graphing, and division by zero, works than she ever could have gotten in the usual time teachers allow students to struggle with a problem. For me in University I had a very difficult time in the classroom with some concepts, so I had to take them home and I ended up graphing every single problem assigned to me, whether it was called for or not, out on paper, sometimes doing slight variants as well. In the end it took me a lot longer to do my math homework, but I could eventually just look at an equation and instinctively tell how it should look if it was graphed out.

That's the main key to success that Gladwell says is within all our grasps, if we just learn to work and work until we actually come to a meaningful step in understanding. Probably why I love tackling a difficult programming problem, even if I know I won't have the accident of timing of a Bill Gates.

Here's a CBC interview with Gladwell about the book, let him tell it better than I can: Link.

Labels: Books, Gladwell, Outliers, Reviews

Memos: September ember ember

A few things I've been up to lately..

• A few friends and I went to the Dayboat restaurant on Wednesday and all decided to go for the tasting menu. We were told by the chef before-hand to skip lunch and wear loose pants. I'll say after just the second course, which was goat cheese stuffed into little baby tomatoes, I was sure it was going to be in my top meals I've had my whole life. The wine we had recommended was Teddy Hall chenin blanc 2007. Next, they brought some teasingly delicate shrimp and scallops in a light batter and garnish that complemented it just about perfectly. There was also a beet salad that, just like most of the rest of the ingredients, apparently all were grown within about 20 minutes of the restaurant. The main course was a pork dish made au torchon, not sure what that means but it must have something to do with it being the softest, tenderest cut of pork that is physically possible to make. I'll say pretty confidently that the Dayboat is now the best restaurant on the island, ,hands down. Last year I never checked it out mostly because the menu, while all the local ingredients sounded amazing, just didn't have any dishes that I could get excited about. This year they've kept the focus on local food but the new chef has jazzed up the dishes considerably.
  
  The funniest part was while we were all enjoying the great food we kept coming back to talking about comfort food we all liked as kids and still do, like lipton noodles and which kind of no-name chocolate chip cookies were the best to the utter pointlessness of 'golden oreos'. Perhaps it was the pleasure in eating such good food that brought back genuinely pleasant memories of food taht wasn't fancy but still had pleasing qualities to it.
  
  
• My thought about the US financial crisis is that the one thing Republicans know how to do well, and that helps them win elections, is to destroy hope. And they're shooting the moon on this one. The wave of Obama's enthusiastic supporters must have been so scary that nothing short of destroying the entire economy was enough to put a stop to it.
  
  
• I just re-read Infinite Jest. Sad that it took the tragic occasion of David Foster Wallace's suicide to get me to do it but I am glad I did. The themes of sadness and human struggle in the face of addictoin and bleak societal cynicism leave me shaking my head but feeling hopeful at the same time. The quest for genuine experience and expression, he seems to be saying, is what leads people to ever more harmful behaviour patterns. There's a 30-some-odd page sequence near the beginning of the book where a character overthinks himself into a state of paralysis while waiting for his pot dealer to show up that grabs you by the gut and forces you to experience the powerlessness of addictoin and the mental acrobatics we try to do to deny it.
  
  I want to some day either find or perhaps take some time and write a comparison of DFW's depiction of Americans and that of Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut's insitence on small words and straightforward sentences would seem to be anathema to DFW's embracing of esoteric technical terms, unapologetic use of precise jargon when talking about the progression of a tennis match or how a radio transmission works, but I had the same feeling when reading the two that this was the truly most expressive and full-bodied expression I had ever read. I want to find waht it was in both of them taht triggered my empathetic reaction in that wawy.
  
  
• I just got some paintings I ordered from art.com back from the framer today, I'm very pleased with them, The Studio on Queen St. Sure I could have crazy glued and ebay'd my way to framing them myself but these are going to be on my wall for years so I think having an expert do the framing is probably the best way to go for me.
  
  
• I spent the last couple of days adopting some pretty heavy JavaScript code to work on IE 6. And, while I still fully embrace the new movement to just plain drop support for the ancient browser in favour of more standards-compliant browsers, I am still glad I did it as it at least forced me to go over the code again in the same way a rejected article should proof-read every sentence of his work before re-submitting it. So the work is better in the end, even though my cruel master of an editor is the browser world's senile, stuck-in-his-ways boss who makes you write for an audience of reality-TV enthusiasts.
  
  
• Heroes season 3 premier verdict: I'm still gonna watch, but the writers better break out of the arc they seem to be heading in and not repeat the same inter-character and internal struggles of the first season's main characters. I hope they still go ahead with the prequel series that they were talking about towards the end of the first season. Sylar is still my favourite character. "Eat your brain? Claire! That's disgusting!" : best one liner of the whole series so far.
  

Labels: Books, Food, JavaScript, Restaurants, Television

Librivox - Great Idea, Spotty Talent

OK, new rule: I think it's really great if you want to volunteer to read for the Librivox project - Free audio book version of public domain books - but you have to be at least as steady and talented a reader as Mac OS X's new "Alex" voice. Because otherwise you're just wasting a whole lot of time, disk space and bandwidth.

I just finished listening to The Antichrist by Nietzsche (I need to occasionally re-fuel my polemic tank). The first reader (mp3) was this poor lady with a voice like a balloon being rubbed way too hard on a table. Poor girl, while listening I am imagining that this voice of hers has left her isolated and lonely and maybe that's why she reads books out loud in her spare time.

It's a good thing I've gotten used to such things, though, because otherwise I'd have missed the fantastic piece of performance art that is the last section (mp3) - read by a chap who really, really gets into the text. The energy and emotion makes it sound like he's trying to impress upon Nietzsche's ghost just how much he hates Christianity, too. This is what a fundmentalist atheist sermon would probably sound like. A great piece of unexpected entertainment.

Still, I made up a hotkey macro to dictate out a selected block of text using the Alex voice, and I think I'll end up using that rather than actually listen to the voices of those internet nerds who probably spend the rest of their online time in revert wars on Wikipedia and blogging about their cats' health problems. And yeah, there's also the huge number of commercial audiobooks on Bittorrent sites, but the overwhelming number of self-help books and dime-a-dozen fantasy novels who's print versions are the size of phone books makes finding something worth listening to take as long as the download itself. And I still read old-fashioned paper books, too, but I can't play Tetris at the same time which is a pretty great selling point for audio books.

Labels: Books, Librivox

Madeleine L'Engle, 1918-2007

Wow, what do I even write about Madeleine L'Engle? I remember that her books were the first truly engrossing novels I ever read, at an age when teachers made reading into a chore and an obligation rather than what it really could be.

A friend of my mothers whom I'm still close to read me A Wrinkle in Time when I was ten. A chapter or two a day and we'd talk about it and really get into what she was writing about and what it might mean. My favourite experience with a book by far.

I don't even remember the overarching plots of the Murray trilogy, only a few very powerful and sometimes very freaky individual scenes, when Meg had to interrogate her school principal and his exact double to find who was the real one, getting into her head and trying to understand her reasoning. Or any description of Charles Wallace, the young boy who always seemed not of this world.

The fact that she wrote about young kids who were not sports stars or tough streetwise kids that you see in movies, but who were the socially awkward children of briliant scientist parents and unsure of themselves and mistrustful of authority but unsure of what to look to instead, was what made me start to feel like I wasn't so ill-fitting and maybe there were other people like me out there.

She spoke to the reader in exactl the way the person who read me A Wrinkle in Time speaks to kids, like they're people, fully capable of understanding the world around them, but without the baggage and prejudices that tangle up the paths of adults.

Tesser well, Ms L'Engle.

Labels: Books

Memos: Hey Pussycat, Smile a Bit

• Felt really gross today at work, exhausted even though I had 8 hours of sleep, and stuffed up and my stomach felt weird. I feel better now, though, which is good because I'm giving anotehr course at work tomorrow.
  
  
• Finished re-reading Breakfast of Champions today. What I love most about the book is Vonnegut's way of mentioning an object or a concept and the ngiving a humourous description of waht is is, as if the reader was fro manother planet and was unfamiliar with things like pornography or fast food. The thing I am most fascinated by with him ersonally is his stated unconditional love for music. He says even a military marching band, who's purpose is to celebrate the thing he hates the most, violence and obedience, can bring a tear to his eye.
  
  
• Somethi9ng I love about the show Heroes: when Hiro and Ando are speaking in Japanese to each other, the subtitles don't just appear at the bottom of the screen, rather they are all over the place, and it reminds me of a comic book's speech bubbles. Man I am agitating waiting for NBC to show another new episode. The last of April can't come fast enough. Same goes for The Office.
  
  
• What is with CBC radio on PEI's right-wing, pro-business content? It just seems so out of place. Who's pulling the strings there, anyway? I think I'll write a longer post about this next time Michael Hlinka spews his horseshit and I'm not fortunate enough to be out of radio earshot and I'm consequently worked up.
  
  
• I went out to dinner with my dad today at Pizza Delight in the 1911 Jail. It was pretty good for what it is, but I noticd that the pizza I ordered was pretty much exactly the same quality as what you can buy in the grocery store nowadays. I remember as a teenager how awful frozen pizza was. But the best was still when I was on a made-from-scratch pizza kick. You could get really good fresh dough from the Sobey's in Saint John, where I was living at the time, when I worked at Point Lepreau, and I'd cook up sausages and use canned pineapples and good little red onions.. I should do that again. I just don't seem to enjoy cooking as much these days, though. I think what happened was that when I was working at Lepreau I would get home at 4:30, watch Win Ben Stein's Money, then start to make supper. And by the time I had everything prepared and cooked, had eaten, and then cleaned up after everything, it was rolling up on 8:00pm, and since we had to get up so early to get on the road for the 45 minute to an hour commute, that meant it was nearly bed time. I like it on the weekendss, though, when I can relax and cook and not feel like I'm taking up too much time.
  
  
• Recently every time I'm out in public at a restaurant or someplace, and there's a lull in my own conversation, and I overhear the people at the next table over talking, about 50% of the time they're talking about facebook. Ugh.
  
  
• Book question: I thought The Da Vanci Code was very very overrated, but I seem to hear better things about Holy Blood, Holy Grail. To anyone who's read both: Is Holy Blood Holy Grail any better than the other one? Or should I just skip it?
  

Labels: Books, Memos, Restaurants, Work

Memos: Hot Action Edition

• I've been loving A/V's Hot Action CD lately. It's the perfect thing to play loudly through my AirTunes to get me moving more quickly while I do laundry or pick up around the house.
  
  
• Last night I watched a bunch of episodes from Season 2 of "The Office" (UK) and then watched a documentary that came with my DVD set. The funniest part about the documentary was the rest of the cast saying that the reason the atmosphere worked so well was because they were genuinely annoyed by Ricky Gervais almost all the time. I can completely understand this. I'm sure I wouldn't be able to stand the guy in real life, either.
  
  
• So the Apple TV is apparently only Component Video or HDMI only. Is there a similar box already out there that will work with regular TVs and can grab video from a computer on the lan and display it on the TV, hopefully with a remote and decent UI? Any suggestions would be welcome. What about XBox Media Centre? I've heard contra Ming's doubts that it's still perfectly alright for playing modern compressed videos.. I should read more about people's real life use of it.
  
  
• Almmost certainly getting an iMac this week. Was on the phone with the Little Mac Shoppe on Friday and am going to go in either Monday or Tuesday to make the order.
  
  
• Everything electronic that Sabrina has purchased has failed to work for one reason or another. So apparently I'm now re-purchasing everything, and they all seem to work. Odd. Who knew that a "Magnasonic" DVD player wouldn't be quite up to scratch? Seriously - Magnasonic. They don't even try anymore.
  
  
• Currently reading The Changing Face of China by John Gittings. It's rather slower going than I had thought. There is a rather unpredictable rhythm in the narrative switching between illustrative anecdotes which can be read rather quickly and more concrete information that needs to be read more slowly if one wants to retain a proper timeline of causes and effects. The book also manages to stay neutral on the verdict of the rightness or wrongness of China's current path and simply presents the events as they occurred, noting deviance from Mao's philosophies and goals but not passing judgment. I'm still only about halfway through, perhaps I'll write more when I've finished.
  
  
• I haven't had any desire to write about politics lately. Not sure what changed, I used to always have something to say about whatever was in the news. I still read my usual political blogs, Daily Kos, Crooks and Liars, Hulabaloo being the best ones. But perhaps I just don't think I have much to say that isn't just reiterating some brilliant piece by Digby or Tristero or whatever super talented writer has decided to tackle a subject before I've gotten to it. Canadian politics perhaps is just in a lull at the moment, but at the same time there isn't quite the level of absurdity pervasive in our politics as exists in America which makes reading about it so entertaining.
  
  On that note, Raul Duke at The Immortals Co-Opt has been kicking all sorts of ass lately. Go read the last few entries.
  
  
• I couldn't leave the house yesterday because I was waiting for the oil man all day, and today I slept in into the afternoon. I needed to catch up since I was not getting much sleep through the week, just lying in bed unable to even begin to feel tired, as happens with me from time to time. So other than some house cleaning I haven't really done much this weekend. And now I'm looking down the barrel of my alarm clock going off tomorrow and having to go back to work again. Not pleased. *sigh*
  

Labels: Blogging, Books, China, Memos