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Should You Walk or Run in the Rain?

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The question whether to walk slowly or to run when it starts raining in order to stay as dry as possible has been considered for many years—and with different results, depending on the assumptions made and the mathematical descriptions for the situation.

BBC reports that Franco Bocci, publishing in the European Journal of Physics, now asserts that both wind direction and a person’s stature figure into the answer:

In most cases, the general answer is to run as fast as possible; but the answer changes in a tailwind, or for the thin.

As for wind direction – and again, in general – you should run as fast as you can unless the wind is behind you, in which case the optimal speed will be exactly the speed of the wind.

In summary, if you want to stay the most dry in the rain: it’s better to run fast. Unless you’re thin. And there’s wind.

J.D. Roth on the Power of Personal Transformation

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J.D. Roth gave the closing keynote at this year’s World Domination Summit (WDS). I’ve followed J.D. Roth’s Get Rich Slowly blog for some time, but I wasn’t familiar with J.D.’s story. At WDS, Mr. Roth gave a remarkable speech titled “The Power of Personal Transformation“:

One day in algebra class, the girl behind me — Janine was her name — the girl behind me wrote something on the back of my shirt. I kept turning around to ask her to stop, but she kept writing. The other kids kept snickering. After class, I went to the bathroom to see what she’d written. There, in big block letters, was the word DICK. She’d written DICK on the back of my shirt.

That’s who I was. I was the bottom of the junior-high pecking order. I was a nerd. A geek. A loser. The other kids thought I was a dick. And slowly but surely, I began to believe them. In fact, as eighth grade progressed, I sank into a deep depression. I missed school. I withdrew. I became suicidal.

I remember coming home from school after one particularly horrific day — maybe even the same day Janine wrote the word DICK on the back of my shirt — I remember coming home to our trailer house, searching the cupboards for something to eat. I opened one of the kitchen drawers, and there I found a sharp knife. I took it out and sat at the table. For maybe five or ten minutes, I sat staring at the blade. I ran it over my wrist once or twice. “I could kill myself,” I thought. “I could kill myself and this would all be over.”

Fortunately, I didn’t have the guts.

Instead, I put the knife away and went to my bedroom to read X-Men comic books.

That was a turning point for me, a key experience in my young life. As I sat at the table with knife in hand, I made a decision. I knew I wasn’t a dick. I knew I was a good guy. Why didn’t other people? I decided to change. I decided that the next year, when I started high school, I’d do new things. I’d make new friends.

And so I did.

I am happy for J.D.:

After I paid off my debt, I began to wonder how I could apply the lessons I’d learned to other parts of my life. If I could transform my personal finances, could I transform my fitness? My personality? My relationships? Turns out, the answer is “yes”. In fact, it’s a resounding yes.

But the biggest change of all, and the most important one, is that today I’m happy. That’s probably the defining facet of my existence. A decade ago, I was unhappy. Even a year ago, I was unhappy. Not today. Sure, there are things I want to change, but have no doubt: I have an awesome life.

J.D. talked about the three components for making a striking personal transformation:

  • The power of yes. Yes is an open mind. Yes is a willingness to try new things. Yes is allowing yourself to be vulnerable.
  • The power of focus. The ability to focus only on those things that are most important.
  • The power of action. The strength to work hard, to get things done.

It was an incredible speech. I think the video might be available eventually, but for now, the best thing you can do is read J.D.’s speech on the Get Rich Slowly blog. It’s a must-read.

The Fake Sounds at the Olympic Games

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We marvel at the video quality of sports events, but often the sound engineering goes unnoticed. Alexis Madrigal, writing for The Atlantic, considers the sound quality at the Olympic Games. Dennis Baxter, an audio engineer at the Olympic Games for twenty years, says in the BBC documentary, The Sound of Sport:

“In Atlanta, one of my biggest problems was rowing. Rowing is a two-kilometer course. They have 4 chaseboats following the rowers and they have a helicopter. That’s what they need to deliver the visual coverage of it,” Baxter explains. “But the chaseboats and the helicopter just completely wash out the sound. No matter how good the microphones are, you cannot capture and reach and isolate sound the way you do visually. But people have expectations. If you see the rowers, they have a sound they are expecting. So what do we do?”

Well, they made up the rowing noises and played them during the broadcast of the event, like a particularly strange electronic music show. 

“That afternoon we went out on a canoe with a couple of rowers recorded stereo samples of the different type of effects that would be somewhat typical of an event,” Baxter recalls. “And then we loaded those recordings into a sampler and played them back to cover the shots of the boats.”

The real sound, of course, would have included engine noises and a helicopter whirring overhead. The fake sound seemed normal, just oars sliding into water. In a sense, the real sound was as much of a human creation as the fake sound, and probably a lot less pleasant to listen to.

I like Madrigal’s coinage of “sonic fiction”:

So, in order to make a broadcast appear real, the soundtrack has to be faked, or to put it perhaps more accurately, synthesized. We have a word for what they’re doing: This is sonic fiction. They are making up the sound to get at the truth of a sport.

Cal Newport on Building a Remarkable Career

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Last weekend, I attended the World Domination Summit. It’s a brilliant “un-conference” but together by Chris Guillebeau, whose blog and adventures I’ve been following for many years.

One of the speakers at the conference was Cal Newport, who I’ve been following since my time at Georgia Tech. Cal has finished his PhD (and post-doc) studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is now an assistant professor at Georgetown University.

I attended Cal’s breakout session on Saturday afternoon and his main keynote on Sunday afternoon, and I wanted to present some takeaways from Cal’s talks.

“Follow Your Passion” Is Bad Advice

Cal Newport came into the conference professing that his argument might stir up some controversy at WDS, since it’s a bit unorthodox. The gist of his argument about building and leading a remarkable career: “the follow your passion” advice is not only bad, it is wrong. Newport’s claim can further be broken down:

Sitting down to figure out what you’re passionate about and then being disappointed when you try it and it doesn’t work out is a mistake. Instead of following your passion, you should pick something that is of interest to you you and that is going to give you interesting options. Once you get into this interest, build it into a craft with hard work and dedication. Once you are skilled in that arena, leverage your knowledge and skills to prioritize the things that matter to you in life. This is the foundation for what can be a remarkable life.

This isn’t just a hokey hypothesis put on by Newport. He has spent significant amount of his free time (the guy isn’t on Facebook, Twitter, or any social media: any effort that he doesn’t put into his work goes into this other interest of Newport’s, namely, how students think, behave, and choose their careers).

How To Develop a Remarkable Career

Cal Newport summarized the path to a remarkable career (and doing what you love):

1. Get good at something that is rare and valuable. 

2. After you get good, leverage yours skill for things that really matter to you (e.g. a lifestyle with more autonomy, freedom), allowing yourself to focus on the parts of that skill that truly matter, or convert that value into a part of your life you really care about. Understand that you cannot convert anything to what matters to you unless you have first developed necessary and valuable skills, because otherwise you’ve got nothing to leverage.

3. But it is only when you become really good at something and have the opportunity to leverage your skills that you will face the most resistance from outside forces (family, internal struggles, your boss). In other words, at the moment when you can take    the leap and do something extraordinary, you’ll have the greatest resistance to stay complacent (in status quo), continuing on your current path.

4. What you do for your work might be a lot less important than you think. The general traits you leverage are more important than the work itself, as counterintuitive as that might appear. Cal talked about a number of things that Steve Jobs could have done and been successful at, besides starting Apple Computer. In fact, Steve Jobs was successful in leading another company: Pixar.

Case Study: Bill McKibben

To drill down to Cal’s hypothesis, Cal offered the example of one of his favorite authors: Bill McKibben. McKibben went to Harvard University, where he worked for the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. After a strong career at the paper (where he ended up becoming an editor), McKibben went on to write at The New Yorker. He spent six years working at The New Yorker, developing his career and honing his skills as a writer.

But then McKibben did something unexpected. Instead of taking a promotion at The New Yorker, he quit his job and moved to Adirondocak Mountains in upstate New York to write a book called End of Nature. The book became a critical success, cementing McKibben as one of the authorities on environmentalism. What’s important to realize here is that McKibben used his leverage that he developed pursuing his writing career to go out on his own. At perhaps the apex of his career, instead of choosing to continue on his path at The New Yorker, he had enough attention (and skill) to know that he can go out on his own and write this book. When he quit his job, he already had an “in” with various publishers and other notables in the publishing industry such that he could get a big advance and go out and write End of Nature. Had McKibben not paid his dues, so to speak, at The New Yorker and decided to write this book right out of Harvard, he would have probably been ignored. At the same time, McKibben faced massive resistance from those around him when he decided to go out on his own and spend time writing End of Nature.

Conclusion

The key to building a remarkable career isn’t following your passion, necessarily. It’s doing something interesting, developing valuable skills, and then leveraging your opportunities. On Saturday’s conclusion to his keynote, Cal offered this brilliant advice to the audience: Do as Steve Jobs did, not as he said.

Cal Newport has written about his experience speaking at World Domination Summit in this post.

If you are interested in this topic, then I recommend giving Cal Newport’s upcoming book So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love a closer look. It comes out in September.

Italo Calvino on Classics

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What is a classic? In his collection of essays on classical literature titled Why Read the Classics?, Italo Calvino produces the following 14 definitions of a “classic”:

  1. The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading…’, never ‘I’m reading….’
  2. The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.
  3. The classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconscious.
  4. A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
  5. A classic is a book which even when we read it for the first time gives the sense of rereading something we have read before.
  6. A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.
  7. The classics are those books which come to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture or cultures (or just in the languages and customs) through which they have passed.
  8. A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.
  9. Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.
  10. A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.
  11. ‘Your’ classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.
  12. A classic is a work that comes before other classics; but those who have read other classics first immediately recognize its place in the genealogy of classic works.
  13. A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without.
  14. A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.

To this day, one of my favorite books by Calvino remains Invisible Cities. If you’ve never read it, well… it’s a classic.

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(via Reddit Books)

Reading the Masters

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Federico Pereiro from Argentina offers this advice: read the Masters. 

Some time ago, I came across the Wikipedia article of Niels Henrik Abel, and something there burnt its way into my mind.

Abel changed the face of mathematics, despite dying at 27. And here comes the thing – I give the mic to Wikipedia now:

When asked how he developed his mathematical abilities so rapidly, he replied “by studying the masters, not their pupils.”

By studying the masters, not their pupils.

The proposition is a bit like trying to climb a wall instead of a stair. Already I found straining to follow the gist of the textbooks of the subject I was interested – how could I deal with the masters?

Click through the post to see his suggestions on reading the Masters of Computer Science.

World Domination Summit 2012: Readings

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This past weekend, I attended the World Domination Summit. This was my second #WDS (I blogged about last year’s experience here, here, and here). I will post thoughts of my own about this year’s event a little bit later, but I wanted to highlight these five posts by other attendees that have resonated with me so far:

1) “10 Things I Learned at the World Domination Summit” by Elana Miller:

There is no great time to create, so you learn to keep creating, even if you don’t feel like it. If you wait around for the creative well to flow before you start doing anything, you might be waiting for a long time. People who learn to put in the work even when they don’t feel like it are able to chip away at their goals, one small step at a time.

2) “The $100 Bet” by Rami the Gutsy Geek. Everyone in attendance at #WDS this year received a $100 gift (investment) as the event concluded on Sunday afternoon. Chris Guillebeau, the founder of World Domination Summit, encouraged us to do something unique and inspiring with the gift, with the underlying themes of community, adventure, and service. What kind of story will you tell? So I liked the bet that Rami proposed:

More importantly, when you trusted me with $100 in cash to kickstart a goal, well, I couldn’t let you down. But I’m a competitive guy, and “here’s $100, go live a dream” doesn’t work for me as well as putting my pride on the line.

Instead, I’ve opted to turn the money into a bet, with 10-to-1 odds in your favor.

Here’s the deal: I bet you $100 that by July 5th 2013 [editor’s note: July 5th 2013 will be the opening night of WDS next year], my book will be ready for publishing.

I may not have an agent or a publishing deal, but I will have a fully finished manuscript.

3) “Don’t Stop Believing” by Brandon Sutton. Brandon provides some detail on how he was chosen to go on stage and sing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” to a crowd of 1,000 attendees:

As surely as I write this, the music started, and Journey’s massive hit song, Don’t Stop Believing began to play. Chris got the crowd started as the rest of us provided backup. A few lines into the song, Michelle nudged me forward and Chris turned around and handed me the microphone.

This is probably a good time to mention that I’m not a fan of karaoke, have never sung karaoke, and haven’t sung in front of people since I was a little kid in church.

But there I was, on stage with a live microphone and 1,000 people singing along to one of the songs that defined an entire generation. After the initial shock wore off, I embraced it and really got into the groove. The music carried me away to a place I never knew existed, and the inner performer in me assumed the role.

Lunging forward to reach out to the crowd, the words and emotions poured out of me like a raging river. It was something I never in a million years expected, but wow did it kick off the weekend with a bang. Talk about vulnerability!

Brandon also gave a heartfelt presentation about Kids of the Gulf, a documentary film featuring two kids that are determined to have a positive impact in the Gulf coast region in the aftermath of the BP oil spill in 2010. I encourage you to check it out.

4) “World Domination Summit 2.0 and 8 Ways to Take Action on the Inspiration” by Farnoosh. I wanted to highlight this passage, which rang true for me last year and might happen again this year (and I have the feeling for others as well):

Oh yes, the stories. Inspiration was at the heart of every story. Stories like overcoming breast cancer and living to play it in a humorous song on the guitar, or building a water charity that helps deliver clean water to the poorest villages of Africa after wasting away the first part of life as a night-club promoter. Stories of waking up to a miserable career after 20 years of service to a company and turning things around because it’s never too late. Stories of starting businesses and making sacrifices and building something that makes a difference in this world.

Stories of not taking no for an answer and not playing by the conventional rules and systems, stories of finding solutions rather than playing a victim all your life.

Stories of believing in the infinite power of your dreams, and the true potential within your reach.

Inspiration is the easy part. You just have to be open to receiving, to hearing stories, to watching and observing and listening, and you will be filled to the brim with inspiration.

What comes after inspiration, now that’s not so easy. That’s the part where things stop looking sexy and shiny and sweet. That’s the day after the conference. That’s the long afternoon when you are home alone staring at your monitor and trying to re-capture the moments.

5) “What 1,000 Boomer’s Kids Did This Past Weekend” by Ken Solin at the Huffington Post. I really enjoyed Ken’s perspective on the event:

I don’t recall any speakers talking about making money beyond following your dreams and hopefully making a few bucks. The speakers preached being doers, not talkers. These young men and women already know something I only discovered in my sixties: Life isn’t just about stuff. They could teach their parents something about that.

For the first time in a very long while, I felt hopeful about America’s future. With men and women like those attending the WDS Conference, perhaps there’s hope after all. Their global approach to problems on a very personal level feels like a huge shift from the apathy that abounds in America regarding Third World people.

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If you’ve found any other inspring/interesting posts recapping the event, please leave a comment below. Thanks!

Anderson Cooper on Being Human

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This is one of the best things I’ve read today. Anderson Cooper writes to his friend, Andrew Sullivan, about his life and public image:

Even though my job puts me in the public eye, I have tried to maintain some level of privacy in my life. Part of that has been for purely personal reasons. I think most people want some privacy for themselves and the people they are close to.

But I’ve also wanted to retain some privacy for professional reasons. Since I started as a reporter in war zones 20 years ago, I’ve often found myself in some very dangerous places. For my safety and the safety of those I work with, I try to blend in as much as possible, and prefer to stick to my job of telling other people’s stories, and not my own. I have found that sometimes the less an interview subject knows about me, the better I can safely and effectively do my job as a journalist.

I’ve always believed that who a reporter votes for, what religion they are, who they love, should not be something they have to discuss publicly. As long as a journalist shows fairness and honesty in his or her work, their private life shouldn’t matter. I’ve stuck to those principles for my entire professional career, even when I’ve been directly asked “the gay question,” which happens occasionally. I did not address my sexual orientation in the memoir I wrote several years ago because it was a book focused on war, disasters, loss and survival. I didn’t set out to write about other aspects of my life.

Recently, however, I’ve begun to consider whether the unintended outcomes of maintaining my privacy outweigh personal and professional principle. It’s become clear to me that by remaining silent on certain aspects of my personal life for so long, I have given some the mistaken impression that I am trying to hide something – something that makes me uncomfortable, ashamed or even afraid. This is distressing because it is simply not true.

I’ve also been reminded recently that while as a society we are moving toward greater inclusion and equality for all people, the tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible. There continue to be far too many incidences of bullying of young people, as well as discrimination and violence against people of all ages, based on their sexual orientation, and I believe there is value in making clear where I stand.

The fact is, I’m gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud.

I have always been very open and honest about this part of my life with my friends, my family, and my colleagues. In a perfect world, I don’t think it’s anyone else’s business, but I do think there is value in standing up and being counted. I’m not an activist, but I am a human being and I don’t give that up by being a journalist.

Since my early days as a reporter, I have worked hard to accurately and fairly portray gay and lesbian people in the media – and to fairly and accurately portray those who for whatever reason disapprove of them. It is not part of my job to push an agenda, but rather to be relentlessly honest in everything I see, say and do. I’ve never wanted to be any kind of reporter other than a good one, and I do not desire to promote any cause other than the truth.

Being a journalist, traveling to remote places, trying to understand people from all walks of life, telling their stories, has been the greatest joy of my professional career, and I hope to continue doing it for a long time to come. But while I feel very blessed to have had so many opportunities as a journalist, I am also blessed far beyond having a great career.

I love, and I am loved.

Using Neural Networks, Finding Cats on the Internet

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You’ve gotta love neural networks. Google certainly does, as scientists at the secretive Google X laboratory taught 16,000 computers to recognize cats:

The neural network taught itself to recognize cats, which is actually no frivolous activity. This week the researchers will present the results of their work at a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Google scientists and programmers will note that while it is hardly news that the Internet is full of cat videos, the simulation nevertheless surprised them. It performed far better than any previous effort by roughly doubling its accuracy in recognizing objects in a challenging list of 20,000 distinct items.

The research is representative of a new generation of computer science that is exploiting the falling cost of computing and the availability of huge clusters of computers in giant data centers. It is leading to significant advances in areas as diverse as machine vision and perception, speech recognition and language translation.

Although some of the computer science ideas that the researchers are using are not new, the sheer scale of the software simulations is leading to learning systems that were not previously possible. And Google researchers are not alone in exploiting the techniques, which are referred to as “deep learning” models. Last year Microsoft scientists presented research showing that the techniques could be applied equally well to build computer systems to understand human speech.

Don’t miss the accompanying video in the article.

The 13 Types of Players in the NBA

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Is there a term for Sabemetrics of basketball? What Muthu Alagappan, a Stanford undergrad, is doing in his spare time could qualify. His new super-nerd study suggests that there are really 13 positions in basketball—not just five.

The first thing to know about the thirteen NBA positions—Muthu labeled them offensive ball-handler, defensive ball-handler, combo ball-handler, shooting ball-handler, role-playing ball-handler, 3-point rebounder, scoring rebounder, paint protector, scoring paint protector, role player, NBA first team, NBA second team, and one-of-a-kind—is that the idea of thirteen NBA positions is a misnomer. Anyone who’s ever watched basketball knows that there are more than thirteen positions, and not even Isaiah Thomas would put together a team based solely on five positions. Indeed, the best basketball players are like soccer midfielders: They can function anywhere on the court, they make their teams better, and they’re not defined by position. But Muthu’s positions weren’t all that rigid. Tony Parker is an offensive ball-handler, which separates him from John Wall, considered a combo ball-handler, not based on anything stylistic but solely because of their statistics. Tyson Chandler, the NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year, is a paint protector who specializes on one side of the floor. Kevin Love and Blake Griffin are actually scoring paint protectors. Some players are in a league of their own: Kevin Durant and LeBron James, for example, are NBA first-teamers. Derrick Rose and Dwight Howard are one-of-a-kinders whose statistical combinations make them NBA outliers.

The graphic representation of the 13 players looks like something out of a molecular biology textbook:

The thirteen types of players in the NBA

Read the rest of the piece here.