gladwell

I am not a fan of Blink or The Tipping Point, to put it mildly. I have ranted plenty about this before. But it's possible that one reason why this guy gets my dander up is that he's obviously a very smart guy (lazy word choice, I know). So why does he choose to squander his gifts writing dreck like Blink? For the money, I guess. His review in this week's New Yorker of a new book called Free, by Chris Anderson, is really, really interesting. Oh well.

more links

Found this website somehow or other (I forget whose blog I started at). Science-Based Medicine is full of articles about, well, the name should be pretty self-explanatory. They seem to be pretty anti-chiropractic/acupuncture/homeopathy. This is interesting to me because I just had acupuncture for the first time on Saturday morning, with mixed results. Jack has positively loved it, Dad was kind of indifferent to it, and I fell somewhere in between. The guy was quite enthusiastic about some of the same things I've become interested in over the past year (i.e. kinesiology and nutrition), but I'm not really sure the acupuncture helped my toe or ankle in a significant way. The toe actually does feel a little better, even today, than it has for quite some time, but the ankle is back to its stiff self. Not to mention the fact that he "missed" with one of the needles in my toe and I don't know what he hit but it HURT like nobody's business. So the rest of the session was not actually particularly relaxing. Even though the other needles felt fine, I was tense before each one he put in my feet.

Also, Mom has been trying to get her office on the blog bandwagon for a long time now, and just made her first post. Go Mom! It's here. Much bloggier than I expected. Plus it's pretty positive-minded instead of being droll and sarcastic, which is un-bloggy but actually refreshing. There are enough masters of snark out there.

micafone testing one two fee, in da pace to be

UPDATE: table now displays correctly. The HTML just looks hideous.

Wassup evybody my name is Tai Mai Shu, and I am going to wapping fo you today just a wi'w fweesty'w. Fus an fomos I like to thanking wody sty'w beyond compayw fo getting my bewt back an hewping me pomotion my skiws. An in retun I wiw teach them how to make on miyon dollus.

Whew, got a little carried away there. What a great song. I wish today was Sunday...

Anyhow, the themes of this post are testing and goals. I started a thread on JP Fitness Forums for my dearest goal of dunking. Because I currently have the vertical jump of a very athletic 12-year old, this will take a quite a lot of hard work on three major things: strength, power and elasticity. And because I've been working haphazardly on these things for several months, to some but not enough success, I'm going to start with a solid month-to-month plan for the final five months of the year.

So here's a table (the stupid piece of crap won't display right, even though it's unbelievably basic...please scroll down) with my current numbers and goal numbers:

	now	goal
height	5'11"	n/a
weight	165#	165#
dead lift	335#	400#
front squat	245#	300#
vertical jump	28"	36"
overhead press	115#	165#
bench press	185#	245#
pull ups	13	20
10-yard dash	1.68s	1.55s
20-yard dash	2.56s	2.4s
40-yard dash	4.69s	4.5s
dot drill	53s	45s

two unrelated and awesome videos

Saw two great videos this morning. The first is about the difference between running in shoes and running barefoot (or in this case, in socks). The girl in the video had no instructions except to run on the treadmill in shoes and then in socks. The difference is just amazing (slap slap slap...it just hurts to watch when I see people run like that) and I can tell you from personal experience that while I find it easy as pie to run on my forefoot when I'm in my Five Fingers, Vivo Barefoots or, well, just barefoot, it's nearly impossible to run that way in sneakers except at a dead sprint. And even then it just feels wrong: my feet are too heavy, I want to slap slap slap. I went to the track with Jack yesterday and ran a bunch of sprints barefoot and it just felt so good. Yet another article about the advantages of being barefoot (not just for running but for everything) are at iamgeekfit. (How did I not know about this website before!?!? I am geek fit, for crying out loud! It's in the links now, along with a couple of other geeky-ass fitness sites.) Anyhow, here's the video:

And now, for something completely different. H/t to my coworker Dan. Here's "Arlington: The Rap."

computer

Well, I finally sucked it up and bought a new computer and printer. You can see it here. I'll get a rebate for the printer so that part will end up being free. I've been getting by fine with Mom's at home, but I don't really want to be constantly borrowing my new roommate's laptop once I move out. Seems like the wrong foot to get started off on.

Speaking of which, I'm planning to meet up with the guy I'm replacing tomorrow night. This will be kind of a packed weekend. Tomorrow my coworker who's going to Fletcher in the fall is having a good-bye happy hour after work. Following that, the above-mentioned meetup with Jonathan (also, by amazing coincidence, going to Fletcher...they even met at orientation there a month or so ago) and Eyal, my roommate-to-be. Friday there's some kind of post-work happy hour, the details of which I forget. Saturday morning Mom and Dad leave for SFO, I have frisbee from noon until sometime in the afternoon, who knows what Jack and I will do Saturday afternoon/night and then we head to Old Rag for a day of hiking on Sunday.

On a different note, it's been one week since I got back from Chile. I haven't really written about that trip at all, I realize. Don't really have it in me to start right now. Another time I will write about it. I wish I'd taken more pictures.

On still another note, I was having a hard time getting into Notes From Underground, so I'm switching to a book that I had a hard time getting into the first two times around, Midnight's Children. Maybe it's just getting to be hot and sticky, but I feel like Dostoevsky is a bit too old-fashioned and not zippy enough for my state of mind at the moment. I can see why people think Dostoevsky is an all-timer, but honestly I've been knee-deep in heavy stuff for a little while and it's time for a break. Rushdie is a bit better but really what I want is some Ellmore Leonard, some Peter Hoeg. Something less thoughtful, vaguely ridiculous...I don't know.

And on that note, I think I'll go to the library and get me some Ellmore Leonard.

eventful

It's been a busy little while since my last post. I finished 2666 on the way to Chile and started reading Eichmann in Jerusalem. I liked 2666 a lot in the end. It's pretty crazy and all over the place and I completely forgot about the third part by the time I'd finished the fifth (and final) part. The fourth part is extremely, almost soporifically repetitive but I somehow never got bogged down in it past the occasional, "Damn it, not this shit again." And the last part was pretty wonderful. In the end the book made a lot of sense, was full of some very beautiful writing (good job, translator whose name I forget). I will not forget the first and final parts, which are books unto themselves (actually, all the parts are), and the middle was good, too. How's that for repetitive?

Anyhow, a book I will most certainly NOT be forgetting any part of is Eichmann in Jerusalem. I would give just about anything for a few minutes of thinking as clear as Hannah Arendt's while she was writing this book. Who knows, maybe she could barely put her shoes on in the morning but when it came to thinking about ethics, justice and law she was operating on a whole different level from the rest of us. One of the most amazing insights she had was that there is a gigantic gap between ordinary murder and genocide not just in scale but also in kind. Eichmann was NOT a murderer. What he did, which was to participate actively and willingly in the attempted eradication of whole groups of people, was far worse than murder.

Murder is a crime against a person or small (relatively) set of people. There are laws on the books just about everywhere that say you can't just go out and kill someone. But genocide is a crime that takes place as a norm. That is, what Eichmann did was follow not only the law in the Reich, he followed the prevailing mores of his time and place. The fact of the killing is incomprehensibly horrible. But what's really, really scary about it is not that the Nazis killed so many people, it's that they managed to create an environment in which killing millions was all in a day's work for ordinary bureaucrats like Adolf Eichmann. A similar rule applies to the more recent genocides in Rwanda and the Balkans. Things weren't as clinically efficient in those places as in Nazi Germany, but there's no doubt that huge groups of people came to believe that killing off another group or groups wholesale was the thing to do. That conversion of murder into an acceptable act doesn't excuse the participants in the least, of course. It just makes their evilness that much more terrifying.

What a chilling and fascinating story and what a writer!