The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon

Thanks to Elliot for passing this op ed piece my way.

That quality work force was the single biggest reason the U.S. emerged as the economic superpower of the 20th century. Generation after generation, American workers were better educated, more industrious and more innovative than the ones that came before.

That progress stopped about 30 years ago.

On teacher’s unions, universal health care, and how to prevent America from becoming the “France of the 21st century.”

From Deputy Dog (follow the link, there are great photos!):

there are so many reasons to love this beauty that it’s hard to know where to start. it’s got 13 floors which, to me at least, makes it a skyscraper. it’s entirely made of wood, thus making it a wooden skyscraper. it was made by the fair hands of a single crazy russian man (nikolai sutyagin – pictured bare-chested above), thus making it a homemade wooden skyscraper.

This really puts to shame my half-hearted effort to finish my guest bedroom…

Tendinitis sucks. For real.

Back in August, Michelle asked me to run the BAA Half Marathon with her. No problem, I said! We had run the Dublin Marathon in 2005, so 13.1 miles was definitely not intimidating, plus I was starting off with a pretty decent fitness base. I had been playing lots of soccer, walking several miles a day, and running a few miles on occasion, though not as regularly as I once did. The next day, I went for a 5 mile jog. Within 2 weeks I was running 7, and my left knee started hurting. A little at first, it became pretty unbearable, and I found it difficult to go up and down stairs, so I stopped running. I stopped playing soccer. I took short cuts when commuting (I love walking, so take the scenic route when I’m not in a hurry). I started trying to find a seat on the T.

Being out of shape sucks. My energy has been down (for me, which still might be considered manic by some standards). I don’t sleep as well or as long. I can be a little crabby, which is uncharacteristic of me. I honestly don’t know how people do it! All kinds of studies show that exercise helps keep your mind sharp, helps keep your energy up, helps you sleep better, makes you live longer, etc. There’s really no excuse not to be in shape. Even from a purely selfish perspective: you simply feel better! It’s been 5 long months. My knee is weak but no longer hurts on stairs, so it’s high time for my increasingly soft butt to get back into shape.

The problem last time was that I put on too many miles, too fast. My heart and lungs were strong from soccer, but my legs were just not used to the different kind of abuse that long distance running dishes out. Not this time! On my first jog, tonight, I ran a slow less-than-three mile jog, but, for the first time, I brought The Baron! Michelle started out with me but ran ahead with our current foster dog, Henry, a 60 lb. lab-something (pit bull? shepard?) mix that clearly has no problem running Michelle’s near-infinite mileage. Baron’s legs–measured in inches not feet, moving several times for every one of my steps–would be a better match for my slow few miles, I reasoned.

Man, was I wrong! Check out his chiseled physique:

This dog is all muscle. Measuring only 16″ to the shoulder, he is 100 pounds of Alpha dog in a 19 pound bag. I would have been better off latched to him riding a skateboard like an urban dog sled than attempting to keep up with The Baron. I might have burnt more energy holding him back than actually running. My legs were noticably beat when I got home, but he didn’t even lie down; he chewed on some stuff and then wrestled for about an hour with Henry after Michelle returned.

I’m going to take this getting-back-in-shape thing slowly and likely won’t run for two days, but I’ll definitely bring The Baron along with me again.

Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters is perhaps the most insightful article I’ve read about the current presidential race. In a race full of baby boomer politicians–Clinton, McCain, Guiliani–why does Obama seem to stick out so much? It’s not that he’s black. I don’t even think that it’s about the Politics of Hope. It’s certainly not because his policies are dramatically different from anyone else on the left–or the right for that matter.

The divide is still—amazingly—between those who fought in Vietnam and those who didn’t, and between those who fought and dissented and those who fought but never dissented at all. By defining the contours of the Boomer generation, it lasted decades. And with time came a strange intensity.

At first blush, this is a tough line to take in, but the article goes far to making it a believable point of view.

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

The high temperature—Bill O’Reilly’s nightly screeds against anti-Americans on one channel, Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” on the other; MoveOn.org’s “General Betray Us” on the one side, Ann Coulter’s Treason on the other; Michael Moore’s accusation of treason at the core of the Iraq War, Sean Hannity’s assertion of treason in the opposition to it—is particularly striking when you examine the generally minor policy choices on the table. Something deeper and more powerful than the actual decisions we face is driving the tone of the debate.
…
[Hillary Clinton] and Giuliani are conscripts in their generation’s war.
…
Of the viable national candidates, only Obama and possibly McCain have the potential to bridge this widening partisan gulf. Polling reveals Obama to be the favored Democrat among Republicans. McCain’s bipartisan appeal has receded in recent years, especially with his enthusiastic embrace of the latest phase of the Iraq War. And his personal history can only reinforce the Vietnam divide. But Obama’s reach outside his own ranks remains striking. Why?

To me, this strikes home. When I argue with my fellow Republican, baby boomer, conservative, Cuban-American father, I often get the feeling that, even when we agree, which is a great deal of the time, we enter political conversations with different basic assumptions. The difference is one of mild cynicism vs. hope, and it may simply be generational. However, even he may vote Obama in the general election.

If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man.

For a while I’ve known that I’d vote for Obama in the general election should he win the primary (as a registered Republican voter, I can’t vote for him in the MA primary). Now I have a better understanding as to why I was drawn to him from the beginning. His campaign, his election, doesn’t represent better policies, something vague like “hope,” or a radical departure from partisan politics. It reprsents a change in the conversation; a chance for America, in a very real way, to start some important conversations with the rest of the world over again, with a different point of view, a different face. I really don’t believe he’s going to be more of the same, and I really Hope he wins the primary.

Btw – check out this pretty cheesy but slick campaign commercial for Obama.

Extreme Pumpkins in an annual competition in which contestants carve awesome, freaky, and often hilarious pumpkins. Well worth looking through. This one, though not part of the Extreme Pumpkins site, is definitely my favorite that I’ve seen so far!

The Future is Drying Up. A great read from the New York Times Magazine.

In short, population growth is overtaxing the limited supply of fresh water available in the western states, and we really need to do something about it relatively soon.

A post that’s worth a read.

Original image.

In his recent essay, Paul Graham says:

Practically everyone thinks that someone who went to MIT or Harvard or Stanford must be smart. Even people who hate you for it believe it.

But when you think about what it means to have gone to an elite college, how could this be true? We’re talking about a decision made by admissions officers—basically, HR people—based on a cursory examination of a huge pile of depressingly similar applications submitted by seventeen year olds. And what do they have to go on? An easily gamed standardized test; a short essay telling you what the kid thinks you want to hear; an interview with a random alum; a high school record that’s largely an index of obedience. Who would rely on such a test?

and he finishes with:

Indeed, the great advantage of not caring where people went to college is not just that you can stop judging them (and yourself) by superficial measures, but that you can focus instead on what really matters. What matters is what you make of yourself. I think that’s what we should tell kids. Their job isn’t to get good grades so they can get into a good college, but to learn and do. And not just because that’s more rewarding than worldly success. That will increasingly be the route to worldly success.

Hear hear! Some of the smartest and most capable people I know did not attend the elite schools. He also mentions that some parents pick a kindegarden for a child these days based on the likelihood that the specific kindegarden may help their child get into Harvard. Just garbage. It’s pretty sad that people worry so much about something that, honestly, isn’t as important as they think.

“The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.”

-William Gibson