On Predicting the Person You’ll Be

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John Tierney offers a summary from a recent study published in Science about our ability to predict our future tastes and personality changes:

[W]hen asked to predict what their personalities and tastes would be like in 10 years, people of all ages consistently played down the potential changes ahead.

Thus, the typical 20-year-old woman’s predictions for her next decade were not nearly as radical as the typical 30-year-old woman’s recollection of how much she had changed in her 20s. This sort of discrepancy persisted among respondents all the way into their 60s.

And the discrepancy did not seem to be because of faulty memories, because the personality changes recalled by people jibed quite well with independent research charting how personality traits shift with age. People seemed to be much better at recalling their former selves than at imagining how much they would change in the future.

And another interesting bit:

When asked about their favorite band from a decade ago, respondents were typically willing to shell out $80 to attend a concert of the band today. But when they were asked about their current favorite band and how much they would be willing to spend to see the band’s concert in 10 years, the price went up to $129. Even though they realized that favorites from a decade ago like Creed or the Dixie Chicks have lost some of their luster, they apparently expect Coldplay and Rihanna to blaze on forever.

An FAQ: The Trillion Dollar Coin

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A good FAQ explainer at The Atlantic on the trillion dollar coin idea that’s floating around Congress (and the blogosphere):

What’s this nonsense I’ve been hearing about a trillion-dollar coin? It’s got to be some kind of elaborate —
 
Stop. It’s no joke. At least no more than voluntarily defaulting on our obligations by refusing to lift the debt ceiling would be. It sounds like something out of the Simpsons, but thanks to a crazy technicality the Treasury really can create a trillion-dollar coin, which would let us keep paying our bills if the debt ceiling isn’t raised. It’s an absurd solution to an absurd problem, but a solution nonetheless. As they say, when in Washington….
 
No, I’m pretty sure this is from the Simpsons.
 
Almost. That was a $1 trillion bill, which Fidel Castro tricked out of Monty Burns, but this is real life, so it has to be a $1 trillion coin. A platinum coin, to be exact.
 
I’m almost afraid to ask, but why does it need to be a coin? And why platinum?
 
We don’t make the loopholes. We just find them. The Treasury can’t print money on its own, because the money supply is supposed to be the strict purview of the Federal Reserve … but that might not be quite so strict after all, thanks to a coin-sized exception. Congress passed a law in 1997, later amended in 2000, that gives the Secretary of the Treasury the authority to mint platinum coins, and only platinum coins, in whatever denomination and quantity he or she wants. That could be $100, or $1,000, or … $1 trillion.
 
Read on to find out: what happens if the coin is stolen?

Tide Detergent: For Stains and Crack

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This New York Magazine story profiles the popularity of Tide detergent. It’s such a hot product that it’s used by criminals in the drug trade. Since the bottles aren’t easily traceable, they aren’t a nuisance to steal and then resell in the black market. The money paragraphs:

The criminal cost-­benefit ­analysis of a bottle of Tide is more straightforward. Most of the people stealing the detergent, Sergeant Thompson points out, are the same criminals who used to break into houses or mug pedestrians—male addicts whose need to feed their habits can foster a kind of innovative streak. “They are smart. They are creative. They want high reward and low risk,” he says. Theft convictions can come with a maximum fifteen-year prison sentence, but the penalty for shoplifting is often just a small fine, with no jail time. For the most active thieves, says Thompson, stolen Tide has in some ways become more lucrative than the drugs it’s traded for. “It’s the new dope,” he says. “You can get richer and have less chance of doing jail time.”

For stores, stopping Tide shoplifting presents unique challenges. Most frequently stolen goods—GPS devices, smartphones, and other consumer electronics—are pricey, light, and easily concealed. They’re also not routine purchases, which means they can be locked up until buyers ask for them. Bulk goods like detergent are harder to run off with, but they’re also bought by dozens of customers daily—lock those products up, and a store manager adds more time to his customers’ errand runs, potentially sending them to shop elsewhere. “Any time you secure something, it impacts the sale of that item at some level,” says Jerry Biggs, the director of Walgreens’ Organized Retail Crime Division.

 Nor is relying on clerks to head off suspected thieves a realistic option. Cashiers and stockists, working for low pay, are often disinclined to confront a potential criminal. “People at the cash register don’t stop you,” says one of Thompson’s informants, an ex-con who shoplifted for years. “They just let you go past.” What’s more, stolen bottles of Tide aren’t easily traceable. Many merchants don’t record the lot and batch numbers for most grocery-store products, because that takes precious man hours. And Procter & Gamble has not made its own database of that information publicly available. Some stores have tried attaching tracking stickers to bottles to establish their provenance, only to find that thieves just wash them off.

Interesting throughout.

As an aside, I am loyal to the Tide brand (the NY Mag feature touches nicely on brand loyalty). The current version I use to do my laundry is the high efficiency Tide with Febreze.

“Be Wrong As Fast As You Can”

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An editor of New York Times Magazine, Hugo Lindgren, comes to terms with his sense of mediocrity and the constant pull of “putting pen to paper”:

I recently saw a Charlie Rose interview with John Lasseter, a founder of Pixar, about the creative process behind his movies. Pixar’s in-house theory is: Be wrong as fast as you can. Mistakes are an inevitable part of the creative process, so get right down to it and start making them. Even great ideas are wrecked on the road to fruition and then have to be painstakingly reconstructed. “Every Pixar film was the worst motion picture ever made at one time or another,” Lasseter said. “People don’t believe that, but it’s true. But we don’t give up on the films.”

Hugely successful people tend to say self-deprecating stuff like this when they go on “Charlie Rose.” But I heard something quite genuine in Lasseter’s remarks, an acknowledgment of just how deep into the muck of mediocrity a creative project can sink as it takes those first vulnerable steps from luxurious abstraction to unforgiving reality.

This sentiment echoes deeply with Neil Gaiman’s wish for us in 2013. The year of making mistakes.

The Exclusive Lives of Dogs, NYC Edition

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I enjoyed reading this piece in The New York Times about Ruff Club, a social place for dogs. Not every dog gets in, and the interview process can make the dog owners anxious.

Over-the-top dog spas are not all that new, of course. And the focus on exclusivity suggests the same competitive urges of urban parents obsessed with getting their toddlers into the right schools. And just as the nursery-school-age population in Manhattan has surged since 2000, particularly among wealthy white families, the pet population in New York City is now estimated at 1.1 million, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation, with a 30 percent increase in the pet care industry from 2000 to 2010.

At any rate, it wouldn’t be the first time that dog care has been compared to child-rearing. “Treating your dog as a person can be a kind of aesthetic error, albeit one that’s becoming ever more common,” writes John Homans in “What’s a Dog For?” which explores the history and sociology of human-canine relationships.

The Ruff Club seizes upon this zeitgeist. “But we won’t infantilize dogs the way other spas do,” Ms. Simon Frost said. “We won’t give out report cards or talk in high-pitched voices.” She makes a point of calling her place “dog” day care not “doggy.” And unlike other high-end dog spas, the Ruff Club, which costs a competitive $29 for day boarding and $49 for overnight, doesn’t offer yoga, massage or any forms of coddling.

I think NYC is a prime spot for dog catering services like this to take off. What other cities have something similar to offer?

On an unrelated note, what kind of dog name is Zoloft? Depressing, no?

Quantum Gas Dips Below Absolute Zero

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I’ve always been taught that it’s impossible for a system to drop in temperature below absolute zero, but I guess I’ve been taught wrong:

Wolfgang Ketterle, a physicist and Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who has previously demonstrated negative absolute temperatures in a magnetic system, calls the latest work an “experimental tour de force”. Exotic high-energy states that are hard to generate in the laboratory at positive temperatures become stable at negative absolute temperatures — “as though you can stand a pyramid on its head and not worry about it toppling over,” he notes — and so such techniques can allow these states to be studied in detail. “This may be a way to create new forms of matter in the laboratory,” Ketterle adds.

If built, such systems would behave in strange ways, says Achim Rosch, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cologne in Germany, who proposed the technique used by Schneider and his team. For instance, Rosch and his colleagues have calculated that whereas clouds of atoms would normally be pulled downwards by gravity, if part of the cloud is at a negative absolute temperature, some atoms will move upwards, apparently defying gravity.

Another peculiarity of the sub-absolute-zero gas is that it mimics ‘dark energy’, the mysterious force that pushes the Universe to expand at an ever-faster rate against the inward pull of gravity. Schneider notes that the attractive atoms in the gas produced by the team also want to collapse inwards, but do not because the negative absolute temperature stabilises them. “It’s interesting that this weird feature pops up in the Universe and also in the lab,” he says. “This may be something that cosmologists should look at more closely.”

Fascinating.

A Reflection on Loving a Schizophrenic

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This is a beautiful reflection by Kas Thomas on how he met and has fallen in love with a woman suffering from schizophrenia:

I stay with her not only because I understand her problems and want to be there for her, but because I’m totally taken by her (a polite way of saying I’m madly in love with her) and have been since the day we met. She’s truly a beautiful person inside and out. Guileless, straightforward, self-aware, good-hearted, open-minded, always truthful, always kind; the type of woman I’ve always wanted to meet and fall in love with. I could never say anything bad about her. (How could I? There’s nothing bad to say.) I could never do anything but love her, and want to take care of her. And I want what we have to last forever. 

I’ve told Sally many times, I never want to go on a first date ever again. I’ll never be interested in another woman. I’ll throw myself in front of a bus for her if she wants it. I’ll run naked through the streets if she says to. (I pray she never becomes that crazy, of course.) There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for Sally.

Such courage to write so openly. Highly recommend reading in entirety.

Wright’s Law, and the Power of Love

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Jeffrey Wright is a well-known teacher at Louisville Male Traditional High School in Louisville, Kentucky. He is known for his antics teaching physics, which include exploding pumpkins, fireballs, hovercraft, and a bed of nails with a sledgehammer.

But it is a simple lecture, one without props, that leaves the greatest impression on his students each year. The talk is about Mr. Wright’s son and the meaning of life, love, and family.

In the video below, Mr. Wright gives a lecture on his experiences as a parent of a child with special needs. His son, Adam (12 years old) has a rare disorder called Joubert syndrome, in which the part of the brain related to balance and movement fails to develop properly. Visually impaired and unable to control his movements, Adam breathes rapidly and doesn’t speak.  Find twelve minutes in your life and watch this film:

 

Perhaps the biggest testament of Mr. Wright’s message is that the film was created by a former student of Mr. Wright’s named Zack Conkle. Said Zack: “I wanted to show people this guy is crazy and really amazing.”

An incredible story. And what a way to start 2013. Love. Pay it forward.

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(via New York Times; hat tip: Jonathan Fields)

Neil Gaiman and The Year of Making Mistakes

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Thank you, Neil Gaiman, for this wish for 2013:

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.
 
So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.
 
Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.
 
Make your mistakes, next year and forever.
Wishing you a joyous and healthy new year, dear reader. Thanks for reading.

The Best Longreads of 2012

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This is my third year compiling the best longreads of the year (see the 2010 best longreads and 2011 best longreads). As usual, I will highlight the top five longreads of 2012:

(1) “Battleground America” [The New Yorker] — this piece was published in April of this year, but I highlight it first because of its relevance after the Sandy Hook tragedy. In this exhaustively researched piece, Jill Lepore discusses the history of guns, the Second Amendment, and the course of gun control in America.

(2) “The Personal Analytics of My Life” [Stephen Wolfram] — this blog post by the founder of Mathematica personally resonated with me because I made a strong point to track a number of things in my life this year (weight, diet, sleep habits). While I wasn’t as hardcore about the process as Stephen Wolfram (he’s been collecting data for more than 20 years!), this blog post served as further motivation that if you want to understand how to change your habits, you first have to become good at tracking them.

(3) “The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever” [D Magazine] — Just as the title says, this is the most amazing bowling story I’ve ever read (and I am not a fan of bowling). Bill Fong is 48 years old and almost did what no bowler has done before: bowl three consecutive perfect games. Read the whole thing, because there’s an amazing twist at the end of the story:

Aside from bowling, Bill Fong hasn’t had a lot of success in life. His Chinese mother demanded perfection, but he was a C student. He never finished college, he divorced young, and he never made a lot of money. By his own account, his parents didn’t like him much. As a bowler, his average in the high 230s means he’s probably better than anyone you know. But he’s still only tied as the 15th best bowler in Plano’s most competitive league. Almost nothing in life has gone according to plan. 

(4) “A Vintage Crime” [Vanity Fair] —  Michael Steinberger write a fascinating piece about Rudy Kurniawan, a 31-year-old Indonesian transplant living in the United States and producing counterfeit wine. It’s a story of a slow rise and an astronomical fall:

No one moved the market more than a twentysomething West Coast collector named Rudy Kurniawan. He first surfaced on the wine scene in the early 2000s. He was reportedly the scion of a wealthy ethnic-Chinese family from Indonesia. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, in 2006, he explained that Kurniawan was an Indonesian surname his late father had given him to protect his identity. He said that his family had business interests in Indonesia and China, but refused to elaborate.

(5) “Louis C.K. and the Rise of the Laptop Loners” [Los Angeles Review of Books] — as I explained in September when I originally profiled the piece, I hadn’t even heard of Louis C.K. until the Internet hyped his no-strings-attached $5 comedy show. Since then, I’ve watched the first two seasons of Louie’s show, and I must say, I’ve become an even bigger fan. If you haven’t heard of the guy, read Adam Wilson’s brilliant profile (and then purchase the TV series and become a fan like I have)

For comedians, a healthy dose of fatalism is a job requirement. In one of his funniest standup routines, C.K. complains that even the most ideal life will end in the deaths of you and those you love. But Louie’s fatalism is balanced out by an occasional idealism that’s almost shocking in its earnestness. Louie isn’t jaded. When he asks the annoying stoner who lives across the hall to “just be a neighbor, a human being,” it feels as if he’s addressing the world writ large, that basic human decency is something he believes in. We get the sense that he actually cares about other people.

*BONUS*

“Cold Pastoral” by Marina Keegan (published in The New Yorker). All the pieces I highlighted above are works of journalism (non-fiction). “Cold Pastoral” is an exception. I can’t remember how I stumbled upon this incredible short story, but without a doubt, it’s the best piece of short fiction I’ve read in 2012. Tragically, Marina Keegan died in a car accident in May of this year, at the age of 22. She passionately argued in The New York Times that college students should resist the allure of high-paying jobs and go after their dreams. Ms. Keegan’s also wrote an impassioned address to the class of 2012, titled “The Opposite of Loneliness”:

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.

But it is “Cold Pastoral,” published in The New Yorker for the first time, which I think unanimously showcases her craft and beautiful, deep insight into human behavior and emotion. “Cold Pastoral” is the only piece of writing which I’ve read this year which left tears in my eyes after finishing it. Marina Keegan (1989-2012), RIP.

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You can check out the best 2012 longreads from other contributors on the Longreads blog. You can see what other longreads I’ve read throughout the year by checking out the longreads category.