Tips for Conquering the Gym

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If you’ve made it a resolution to hit the gym in 2012, how do you stay motivated and go through with your resolution? Jason Gay provides some fun, humorous tips:

1. A gym is not designed to make you feel instantly better about yourself. If a gym wanted to make you feel instantly better about yourself, it would be a bar.

2. Give yourself a goal. Maybe you want to lose 10 pounds. Maybe you want to quarterback the New York Jets into the playoffs. But be warned: Losing 10 pounds is hard.

3. Develop a gym routine. Try to go at least three times a week. Do a mix of strength training and cardiovascular conditioning. After the third week, stop carrying around that satchel of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies.

4. No one in the history of gyms has ever lost a pound while reading The New Yorker and slowly pedaling a recumbent bicycle. No one.

5. Bring your iPod. Don’t borrow the disgusting gym headphones, or use the sad plastic radio attachment on the treadmill, which always sounds like it’s playing Kenny Loggins from a sewer.

6. Don’t fall for gimmicks. The only tried-and-true method to lose 10 pounds in 48 hours is food poisoning.

7. Yes, every gym has an overenthusiastic spinning instructor who hasn’t bought a record since “Walking on Sunshine.”

8. There’s also the Strange Guy Who is Always at the Gym. Just when you think he isn’t here today…there he is, lurking by the barbells.

9. “Great job!” is trainer-speak for “It’s not polite for me to laugh at you.”

10. Beware a hip gym with a Wilco step class.

11. Gyms have two types of members: Members who wipe down the machines after using them, and the worst people in the universe.

Jason writes: “Exercise, like dark chocolate and office meetings that suddenly get canceled, is a proven pathway to nirvana.” Read his entire 27-item list here.

On Intelligence vs. Motivation

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One user on Reddit writes:

I’m a senior in high school this year, and will be graduating come June. I have had all A’s throughout high school except for last year when I got my first B. If it weren’t for that B, I would have been valedictorian.

I like to think that I deserved to be valedictorian; that I am truly the smartest in my class. However, this past year has shown me that I’m really not that intelligent, and that there are many others who are much smarter than I.

Also, I’m kind of an asshole about how smart I am, at least to myself. I’m always telling myself that I was cheated out of an A, but deep down I know I deserved that B. Not only that, but I should have gotten B’s in several other classes as well, but I somehow managed not to get them.

Recently I took the SATs as well, which I got a 1900 on. I figured I was just being lazy, and could have gotten a much better score if I tried. So after taking them a second time, I thought I did much better, but I only got roughly 40 more points than last time.

When I was younger I always believed I could get into MIT, but it has become painfully clear that I stand next to no chance of getting in. I now realize that I am probably going to go a lame local college and stick with my family.

Many people offered their thoughts, but perhaps this response from user Inri147 that was accepted and enrolled to MIT is particularly enlightening:

Term rolled in and I was getting crushed. I wasn’t the greatest student in high school, and whenever I got poor grades I would explain them away by saying I just didn’t care or I was too busy or too unmotivated or (more often than not) just cared about something else. It didn’t help that I had good test performance which fed my ego and let me think I was smarter than everyone else, just relatively unmotivated. I had grossly underestimated MIT, and was left feeling so dumb.

I had the fortune of living next to a bright guy, R. R. was an advanced student, to say the least. He was a sophomore, but was already taking the most advanced graduate math classes. He came into MIT and tested out of calculus, multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, real analysis (notoriously the most difficult math class at MIT), and a slew of other math courses. And to top it all off, he was attractive, engaging, sociable, and generally had no faults that would make him mortal.

I suffered through half a semester of differential equations before my pride let me go to R. for help. And sure enough, he took my textbook for a night to review the material (he couldn’t remember it all from third grade), and then he walked me through my difficulties and coached me. I ended up pulling a B+ at the end of a semester and avoiding that train wreck. The thing is, nothing he taught me involved raw brainpower. The more I learned the more I realized that the bulk of his intelligence and his performance just came from study and practice, and that the had amassed a large artillery of intellectual and mathematical tools that he had learned and trained to call upon. He showed me some of those tools, but what I really ended up learning was how to go about finding, building, and refining my own set of cognitive tools. I admired R., and I looked up to him, and while I doubt I will ever compete with his genius, I recognize that it’s because of a relative lack of my conviction and an excess of his, not some accident of genetics…

From my personal experience studying at Georgia Tech and Caltech, I think one of the most important lessons I had to learn was how to ask for help. And that it was okay to do so. There is nothing humiliating about asking for help if you are truly trying to make an effort to understand the material.

MIT has an almost 97% graduation rate. That means that most of the people who get in, get through. Do you know what separates the 3% that didn’t from the rest that do? I do. I’ve seen it so many times, and it almost happened to me. Very few people get through four years of MIT with such piss-poor performance that they don’t graduate. In fact, I can’t think of a single one off the top of my head. People fail to graduate from MIT because they come in, encounter problems that are harder than anything they’ve had to do before, and not knowing how to look for help or how to go about wrestling those problems, burn out. The students that are successful look at that challenge, wrestle with feelings of inadequacy and stupidity, and begin to take steps hiking that mountain, knowing that bruised pride is a small price to pay for getting to see the view from the top. They ask for help, they acknowledge their inadequacies. They don’t blame their lack of intelligence, they blame their lack of motivation. 

Very worthwhile advice.

File-Sharing as Religion

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Well, this is interesting. File-sharing has been declared an official religion in Sweden:

Since 2010 a group of self-confessed pirates have tried to get their beliefs recognized as an official religion in Sweden. After their request was denied several times, the Church of Kopimism – which holds CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols – is now approved by the authorities as an official religion. The Church hopes that its official status will remove the legal stigma that surrounds file-sharing.

All around the world file-sharers are being chased by anti-piracy outfits and the authorities, and the situation in Sweden is no different. While copyright holders are often quick to label file-sharers as pirates, there is a large group of people who actually consider copying to be a sacred act.

This is from their official press release:

For the Church of Kopimism, information is holy and copying is a sacrament. Information holds a value, in itself and in what it contains, and the value multiplies through copying. Therefore, copying is central for the organisation and its members.

Being recognized by the state of Sweden is a large step for all of kopimi. Hopefully, this is one step towards the day when we can live out our faith without fear of persecution, says Isak Gerson, spiritual leader of the Church of Kopimism.

The Missionary Church of Kopimism tripled its members from 1,000 to 3,000 in the second half of 2011. I just have one question: who (or what) is their God?

Why Do All Movie Tickets Cost the Same?

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Derek Thompson over at The Atlantic has some great answers this basic question: why do movie tickets cost the same, regardless of the budget of the film? After all, shouldn’t supply and demand dictate prices? Why should you pay the same $12 to see a low budget Indie film vs. a Hollywood blockbuster? He offers the following reasons (emphasis mine):

1) Theaters do price discriminate already, kind of, but they do it with space. At the multiplex, not all theaters are alike. Bigger movies get more theaters with better technology. Smaller movies get older theaters with smaller screens.

2) You can’t consistently cut prices after a successful opening weekend. If people knew that ticket prices would fall after a big opening, many more would wait until the second or third weekend to see it, which would, ironically, destroy the meaning of opening weekends.

3) Price can repel as easily as it attracts, because it’s a signal of quality. If your a theater showing one movie for $6, one movie for $10, and another for $12, perhaps fewer people will see the $6 movie because they assume it’s garbage.

4) Cheaper tickets lead to higher policing costs. I’m a cheapskate, so I might buy a ticket to see cheap, cheap Iron Lady and sneak into Sherlock Holmes. This would create a fascinating incentive for art-house studios to release smaller, cheaper films the same weekend as blockbusters, knowing that thousands of canny consumers might buy fake tickets to their show to sneak into the more expensive blockbuster.

5) Price discrimination offers more opportunities for other movie theaters to steal each others’ audience. Once again, I’m very cheap, so I don’t mind taking the metro way across town to see Sherlock Holmes for significantly less money if one multiplex starts to mark up its blockbusters.

Full post here.

Ansel Adams and Group f/64

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On November 15, 1932, at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, eleven photographers announced themselves as Group f/64: Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Preston Holder, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke, Brett Weston, and Edward Weston.

The name f/64 derives from the smallest aperture available in large-format view cameras at the time, and it signaled the group’s belief that photographs should celebrate, rather than disguise, the medium’s capacity to present the world “as it is.” As Edward Weston phrased it, “The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.”

The group’s effort to present the camera’s “vision” as clearly as possible included advocating the use of aperture f/64 in order to achieve the greatest depth of field possible, thus allowing for the entire scene photographed to be sharp and in focus (by comparison, modern day lenses for SLR cameras usually taper off at f/22 or f/32 aperture).

Following is the manifesto of Group f/64:

The name of this Group is derived from a diaphragm number of the photographic lens. It signifies to a large extent the qualities of clearness and definition of the photographic image which is an important element in the work of members of this Group.

The chief object of the Group is to present in frequent shows what it considers the best contemporary photography of the West; in addition to the showing of the work of its members, it will include prints from other photographers who evidence tendencies in their work similar to that of the Group.

Group f/64 is not pretending to cover the entire of photography or to indicate through its selection of members any deprecating opinion of the photographers who are not included in its shows. There are great number of serious workers in photography whose style and technique does not relate to the metier of the Group.

Group f/64 limits its members and invitational names to those workers who are striving to define photography as an art form by simple and direct presentation through purely photographic methods. The Group will show no work at any time that does not conform to its standards of pure photography. Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form. The production of the “Pictorialist,” on the other hand, indicates a devotion to principles of art which are directly related to painting and the graphic arts.

The members of Group f/64 believe that photography, as an art form, must develop along lines defined by the actualities and limitations of the photographic medium, and must always remain independent of ideological conventions of art and aesthetics that are reminiscent of a period and culture antedating the growth of the medium itself.

As far as the how the group acquired its name, the story isn’t 100% clear. Per Wikipedia:

There is some difference of opinion about how the group was named. Van Dyke recalled that he first suggested the name “US 256”, which was then the commonly-used Uniform System designation for a very small aperture stop on a camera lens. According to Van Dyke, Adams thought the name would be confusing to the public, and Adams suggested “f/64”, which was a corresponding aperture setting for the focal system that was gaining popularity. However, in an interview in 1975 Holder recalled that he and Van Dyke thought up the name during a ferry ride from Oakland to San Francisco.

The history of the group is fascinating. And while we may agree that Ansel Adam’s photograph has withstood the test of time as some of the best landscape photography the world has ever seen, the group’s definition of pure photography as defined by “possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form” would face opposition from many modern-day photographers. That’s because the process of choosing aperture, composition, ISO, and so on may considered an artistic process. If I choose to shoot a long exposure of a waterfall in the daytime, have I misrepresented reality? If your eyes can’t envision a blurring of water but the camera can, am I deceiver the viewer? While there are technical points that one must understand as a photographer, the actual application of the technical process process is unique.

George Orwell’s 1984 by Any Other Name

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What if George Orwell’s novel 1984 was titled differently? According to a letter he wrote to his publisher, Frederic Warburg, in 1948, Orwell was considering two names for his novel: 1984 and The Last Man in Europe:

You will have had my wire by now, and if anything crossed your mind I dare say I shall have had a return wire from you by the time this goes off. I shall finish the book, D.V., early in November, and I am rather flinching from the job of typing it, because it is a very awkward thing to do in bed, where I still have to spend half the time. Also There will have to be carbon copies, a thing which always fidgets me, and the book is fearfully long, I should think well over 100,000 words, possibly 125,000. I can’t send it away because it is an unbelievably bad MS and no one could make head or tail of it without explanation. On the other hand a skilled typist under my eye could do it easily enough. If you can think of anybody who would be willing to come, I will send money for the journey and full instructions. I think we could make her quite comfortable. There is always plenty to eat and I will see that she has a comfortable warm place to work in.

I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied. I first thought of it in 1943. I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB. I haven’t definitely fixed on the title but I am hesitating between NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR and THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE.

So who knows how things would have turned out differently if we came to know 1984 by another title. Certainly, we wouldn’t ever see the premise behind this Apple commercial, which introduced the Apple Macintosh personal computer for the first time:

On the Placebo Effect and Dieting

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There’s nothing spectacular in this Wall Street Journal piece on the magic of placebos, but I thought this was an interesting paragraph concerning dieting:

Another study, published earlier this year in the journal Health Psychology, shows how mind-set can affect an individual’s appetite and production of a gut peptide called ghrelin (GREL-in), which is involved in the feeling of satisfaction after eating. Ghrelin levels are supposed to rise when the body needs food and fall proportionally as calories are consumed, telling the brain the body is no longer hungry and doesn’t need to search out more food.

Yet the data show ghrelin levels depended on how many calories participants were told they were consuming, not how many they actually consumed. When told a milkshake they were about to drink had 620 calories and was “indulgent,” the participants’ ghrelin levels fell more—the brain perceived it was satisfied more quickly—than when they were told the shake had 120 calories and was “sensible.”

Hence, the reasoning that the notion of dieting is altering our mindset, and we end up consuming more (since we know we aren’t getting enough food).

This reminds me of how using a bigger fork can help you eat less. Also, smaller plates and contrasting colors can dampen your appetite:

[Participants] were served different-sized plates filled with food. Those who were given larger plates filled their plates with more food than those with smaller plates. Those who were served food on tables with a higher color contrast between the plates and the tablecloth also ate more than those who were served the same amount of food without a noticeable contrast.

The problem with all of these studies is that by becoming conscious of how you’re trying to beat the system, you begin to override the placebo effect. In other words, if you made an effort to eat with a larger fork and using smaller plates, you can’t trick your brain for long: eventually, you’ll just compensate by eating more food (or more frequently). Show me a study where dieting is proved to conclusively work, and I’ll show you a millionaire.

What’s a City Without Advertising?

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What would happen if a major metropolis made it a law prohibiting all advertising? That means no billboards, no flyers, no ads on trains or buses.

That’s exactly what São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil with a population of 12 million people (20 million in the metro area), did in 2006:

In 2006, Gilberto Kassab, mayor of São Paulo, Brazil, passed the “Clean City Law.” Citing growing concerns about rampant pollution in his city, Kassab decided enough was enough. But this was no ordinary piece of pollution legislation. Rather than going after car emissions or litterbugs, Kassab went after the billboards. Yes, you read that right: Kassab wanted to crack down on “visual pollution.”

Saying that visual pollution was as burdensome as air and noise pollution, Kassab banned every billboard, poster, and bus ad in São Paulo with the Clean City Law. Even business signage had to go. Within months, city authorities had removed tens of thousands of ads both big and small—much to the dismay of business owners, who said the ban would surely ruin them.

What’s amazing is that the ban has forced business to improvise and create novel ways to interact with potential customers. São Paulo started having a lot more guerilla marketing [unconventional strategies, such as public stunts and viral campaigns] and it gave a lot of power to online and social media campaigns as a new way to interact with people.

Makes you wonder: what other major city will take this cue and follow through with this idea?

 

Are Stradivarius Violins Really Worth Millions?

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Is beauty in the ear of the beholder? A new study suggests that the classic (and expensive) violins such as those made by Stradivarius aren’t so remarkable in producing their magical sound. Is it, then, all in our heads?

Claudia Fritz, an expert on the acoustics of violins at the University of Paris, has arrived at a different explanation for the secret. Despite a widespread belief in the old violins’ superiority and the millions of dollars it now costs to buy a Stradivarius, the fiddles made by the old masters do not in fact sound better than high-quality modern instruments, according to a blindfolded play-off she and colleagues have conducted.

The conclusion of her experiment:

Despite a general belief among violinists that Stradivari and Guarneri violins are tonally superior, the participants in Dr. Fritz’s test could not reliably distinguish such instruments from modern violins. Only 8 of the 21 subjects chose an old violin as the one they’d like to take home. In the old-to-new comparison, a Stradivarius came in last and a new violin as the most preferred.

Unfortunately, the experiment was carried out in a hotel room, leading some critics to downplay the study.

This appears to be a placebo effect in action: those playing the more expensive violins perhaps actually internalize these thoughts and end up playing better. It’s similar if you were told you were drinking expensive wine (i.e., more than what it was actually worth), and so it would taste better to you.

Is It Possible to Reassemble Shredded Documents?

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I’ve always wondered how secure it was to shred documents, and if there was a feasible way for someone motivated enough to reassemble the pieces. Well, it turns out that there is a way.

According to BBC, a team of computer programmers from California have developed software they say shows that computers can, in theory, do most of the hard work in re-assembling shredded documents:

It works by matching up individual shreds based on minuscule clues in each shred – the contour of the tears, a barely-visible watermark, and traces of writing, for instance – and can work incalculably faster than a human undertaking the same task.

It was the successful entry in a document shredder competition launched this autumn by the US military, in an attempt to encourage research on what is essentially a maths problem – how to assemble a puzzle efficiently.

In October, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon’s research arm, offered $50,000 (£31,961) to the first team to reassemble five shredded hand-written documents and answer the puzzles contained in each of them.

There were more than 9,000 (!) entries to the DARPA competition. The winning team name? All Your Shreds Are Belong to US, an obvious riff on All Your Base Are Belong to Us. If you’re interested in finding out more, NPR has a soundbite with Octavio Good, the software developer of the team that won the DARPA challenge.