Life Lessons I Wish I’d Known Earlier June 29, 2008

This post will undoubtedly end up being Part One of a series, unless I just stop learning stuff.  But for now, let me just take a minute to jot down a few key things I’ve learned.  Call it My Life’s Lessons: So Far.

• People give away their beliefs in what they do, not in what they say.  When I wake up each morning my alarm clock is tuned to NPR, and at the time I wake the program that is often on is called “This I Believe.”  It is a program in which they simply ask various people, from all walks of life, what it is they believe.  A while ago, I lay there listening to Sister Helen Prejean, a nun whose work in inner city New Orleans and with death row inmates formed the basis of the book “Dead Man Walking.”  She said, over and over that morning, something that has stuck with me ever since.  She said, “I watch what I do, to teach myself what it is I really believe.” Truer words have rarely been spoken.
• Perfect is the enemy of Good.  Seeking perfection is the world’s fastest road to complete inaction.  It was LeGrand Richards who said: “For every problem under the sun / There is a solution, or there is none. / Where there is one, then hurry and find it, / And where there is none, then never mind it.”  You just do the best you can in this life, I think.  I have often said that my own career amounted to this: I walked into my office every day and did the best work I could until someone finally noticed.  It was just pure, hard work — the same kind of work I did on farms or in a lumber mill growing up.  I never expected perfection, or really even excellence (except of intent and effort).  That attitude has served me very well.
• Wandering is not the same thing as being lost.  I was into my 30s before I really struck on anything you could call a career path, and I’m now a very long way from the one on which I originally started  (teaching and coaching).  I used to worry about that; now it seems to me that I was never really lost, and it seems that almost every experience gained from all that fooling around has helped me more than my masters’ degree ever did.
• Forgiveness of someone who has wronged you is a gift you offer yourself.  Some people act as though forgiving an erstwhile enemy is a noble, tremendous offering to the one who wronged them.  It isn’t even close to that.  They aren’t off the hook, after all, even when we forgive.  They will pay the price eventually, either through anguish of soul or through karma.  All that we do when we forgive is this: we end the misery that the incident has caused us.
• No one wants to listen to your litany of childhood hurts.  Nothing is less interesting than having to listen to someone use incidents, however difficult, from years ago to explain away bad behavior in the present.  The statute of limitations on almost all tragedies is a short few years (at most); then we pack up and move on and try to become better people in the bargain.
• Years from now, you’ll wonder why you were afraid.  Despite all of the time I’ve spent on dreaming up worst-case scenarios, I don’t think one has ever happened.  More interesting (to me) than that: sometimes I thought one was happening, but in retrospect it wasn’t half as bad as I thought it would be.  Pretty much everything can be recovered from.
• You’ll also laugh at once being awestruck.  Awe is a misplaced emotion: one day you’re dazzled to be on an elevator with the Vice President of Marketing; a few (really short) years later, you’re the Senior Vice President of Marketing, and you’re puzzled at why the young guy on the elevator seems so nervous to be around you.
• Unfortunately, the person in charge of any relationship is the one who cares the least about it.  It’s just like a negotiation, where the person who really can walk away from the deal is the almost certain winner.  I guess this isn’t advice that says, “Don’t care,” so much as it’s an observation to guard in your relationships against unevenness.
• Always conform behavior to belief, and not vice-versa.  The most common, and tragic, thing in the world is to watch people we love as they begin to adjust their entire belief system to accomodate their poor choices.  And they’re not even concerned about their own thought processes.  Be skeptical of any system of belief that does not ask you to improve yourself from where you are, and be especially suspicious if you find that your views have changed at roughly the same time your behavior changed.
• If the map doesn’t agree with the ground, the map is wrong.  We create, or we have created for us, a picture of how life should be.  When we reach a point where our mental map just doesn’t resemble anything we see going on around us, we need a new mental map.  Living successfully will almost always require us to adjust, to be nimble.  If we remember what we learned above and are cautious about adjustments based on our own behavior, then we learn that a certain amount of flexibility will lead us to some of our most treasured outcomes.
• When faced with a choice, take the one that opens up more options.  The primary reason that additional education is almost always a good choice (up to a point, of course) is that it tends to open up options for you.  And options are one of life’s most valuable commodities.

What are your best lessons?

How Baking Soda May Save the Environment June 28, 2008

Some of you, my friends, don’t think science is super-interesting.  But you’re wrong.  Human beings are endlessly inventive, and given a good reason (and the promise of enough money in the bargain), smart people will do the most interesting things.

Take, for example, Austin-based Skyonics Corporation.

Somebody at Skyonics is a really creative chemist, because they looked at the by-products of the world’s biggest producers of carbon dioxide (the chief culprit in global warming) and, instead of seeing a mass of pollutants, thought: Hey, I could freshen my refrigerator with that stuff.

You see, (to vastly simplify it) if you add salt and water to carbon dioxide, it produces sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), hydrogen and chlorine.  Seriously.  Totally usable baking soda.  You could brush your teeth with it.

They are in the process of inventing a system called Skymine that does the following:

• First, it captures the emissions of a power plant (and power plants produce 21% more carbon dioxide than all the cars in the world), and directs them into two 50-foot long trailers.
• It uses the heat from the emissions to power the process, so there is no additional energy draw to run their process.
• In the heat-conversion process, toxic chemicals like mercury, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen oxide separate from the rest of the emissions.  Skymine stores these chemicals for later safe disposal.  What’s left is primarily carbon dioxide.
• The carbon dioxide then enters a series of capture chambers into which sodium hydroxide (salt and water) is injected.  This results in a chemical reaction that leaves behind baking soda, hydrogen and chlorine.  The hydrogen and chlorine are separated and stored apart from the baking soda for later sale or disposal.

The process actually extracts between 85% and 97% of the harmful stuff from flue gasses, so it’s pretty effective.  Right now it is projected to cost about the same ($400 million) as the scrubbers that the power plants already have to remove mercury and smog chemicals from their exhaust streams, so it should be fairly economical, in the grand scheme of things.

The biggest problem may be that, if this goes into broad production, the resulting sodium bicarbonate may well outstrip the world’s demand for the stuff.  The upside could be cleaner, whiter teeth, fresh refrigerators, reduced carpet smells, and shiny silverware.

Oh, and no real-life rerun of Waterworld.  I hated that show the first time.

Visualizing Huge Amounts of Data June 26, 2008

Large numbers become quickly unfathomable to us.  There is the old story of the inventor of chess:

When the creator of the game (in some tellings, an ancient Indian mathematician, in others, a legendary brahmin named Sessa or Sissa) showed his invention to the ruler of the country, the ruler was so pleased that he gave the inventor the right to name whatever he wanted as his prize for the invention. The man, who was very wise, asked the king this: that for the first square of the chess board, he would receive one grain of wheat (in some tellings, rice), two for the second one, four on the third one and so forth, doubling the amount each time. The ruler, who was not strong in math, quickly accepted the inventor’s offer, even getting offended by his perceived notion that the inventor was asking for such a low price, and ordered the treasurer to count and hand over the wheat to the inventor. However, when the treasurer took more than a week to calculate the amount of wheat, the ruler asked him for a reason for his tardiness. The treasurer then gave him the result of the calculation, and explained that it would be impossible to give the inventor the reward.

The amount of wheat is over 18 quintillion grains (a quintillion is a billion billion), or approximately 80 times what would be produced in one harvest, at modern yields, if all of Earth’s arable land could be devoted to wheat.

Another example of how quickly large numbers can boggle the mind: suppose you put 25 pennies into a jar, and labeled them 1 to 25.  The probability of reaching into the jar and pulling out the penny marked number one is, of course, one in 25.  Having done that, the probability of reaching into the jar and pulling out penny number two is one in 24, since there are 24 left.  What is the probability of pulling out one and two in order?

This is called a “conditional probability,” and you get it by multiplying the two probabilities together.  So the answer is: one in (25 x 24), or one in 600.  Put another way: while you might get lucky, it will on average take you 600 tries to pull off this feat (without cheating).

Here’s where it gets wild: how long would it take you to pull out all 25 pennies in order?  A long, long time.  One in 25 x 24 x 23 x 22…  It ends up as over 15 septillion, or 15 followed by twenty-four zeros.  To put that in context: the likelihood is, if every person currently living on earth pulled pennies out of jars, all over the world, without breaking for sleep, and averaged about 15 attempts per minute, we would all need to be immortal: it would take us 289 million years before someone hit the jackpot.

In a similar “large number” story, the blog Managed Networks recently devoted a post to helping us visualize the raw size of what Google does every day.  It’s amazing.

In a recent technical paper, Google talked about a programming model, called MapReduce, for processing huge amounts of data.  The size of the datasets handled by MapReduce was revealed, and it was revealed that Google executes 100,000 MapReduce jobs per day.  Long story short: Google processes about 20 petabytes of data every day.

I know.  This doesn’t mean anything to you.  Managed Networks helps you visualize:

One byte is essentially a letter of the alphabet.  Picture that letter as one grain of rice.  One byte = one letter = one grain of rice.

One kilobyte (often referred to as 1K) is 1024 bytes.  It’s a few paragraphs of text.  Picture one bowl of rice.  One kilobyte = a few paragraphs = one bowl of rice.

Next up is the megabyte, or MB.  It’s big enough to contain one novel.  It’s represented by a 50-pound bag of rice, now enough to feed 420 people in a sitting.  One megabyte = one novel = 50-pound bag.

1024 times the size of a megabyte is a gigabyte (GB).  The hard drive in the computer you’re sitting in front of right now is probably many gigabytes — mine is 150GB.  One gigabyte would hold almost anyone’s personal library, over 1,000 books.  In the rice metaphor, we now have two large shipping containers, the kind you put on an ocean-going vessel, full of rice.  So, sitting inside just my laptop is the equivalent of 300 of these shipping containers; to search through my hard drive for a few words of text is exactly as though we dyed a few grains of rice blue, and then sifted through 300 shipping containers to find those grains.

Next up the scale is the terabyte (TB), or 1024 gigabytes.  A terabyte would hold nearly every word of every book in the large library of my alma mater, Brigham Young University.  Amazingly, you can buy laptops with terabyte hard drives.  Continuing our metaphor, that’s 2,028 shipping containers of rice, bigger than a huge container ship, enough to feed a meal to everyone in the European Union.

Finally, we get to the petabyte.  That’s enough storage for over a billion books, or 15 copies of the worldwide stock of books.  In our rice analogy, you’ve now got 210 of the largest container ships ever built, enough rice to feed everyone on the planet 80 bowls, or enough to cover most of the city of New York in three feet of rice.

Now remember: Google processes not one petabyte every day, but 20 — 4,000 ships bursting at the seams, everyone on the planet gets 1,600 bowls, or New York 60 feet deep in the stuff.

Is anyone not amazed at what Google does now?

Ten Books You Might Not Have Read Yet… But Should June 25, 2008

I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I’m an omnivorous reader.  I’ll read about history, physics, math, religion, science, business or technology, and I read gobs of novels.  I was reviewing some of the books I’ve really enjoyed, and thought I’d share ten that you may not have read:

1. A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, by David Fromkin.  I could not put this down, as it described the arrogance and folly that seeded the current middle eastern crises.  It’s a story that’s been told before, but never with the eloquence, erudition, and the telling eye for detail of David Fromkin.
2. Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card.  This, along with perhaps Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, is Science Fiction 101.  Even if you don’t like sci-fi: I defy you not to be mesmerized by this amazing story.
3. When the Game Stands Tall: The Story of the De La Salle Spartans and Football’s Longest Winning Streak, by Neil Hayes.  A truly remarkable true story of a football coach, Bob Ladoceur, who genuinely cares more about teaching young men than he does about wins and losses.  He never… I mean, never… talks about winning or losing.  All that happens as he focuses solely on “doing things right” is: his team does not lose a single football game for over 12 years, despite playing one of the toughest schedules in the nation.
4. Fermat’s Enigma, by Simon Singh.  Singh is an awesome writer about all things science and math, having also written The Code Book (about cryptography) and The Big Bang (about, well, the big bang).  This is the story of a quest stretching over hundreds of years to produce a proof for the last theorem of 17th-century French mathematician Pierre de Fermat.  It is a better story than you could imagine, full of hard work, sleuthing, and luck.  I know you don’t believe me, but this is a great book.
5. Misquoting Jesus: The Story of Who Changed the Bible, and Why, by Bart Ehrman.  Ehrman is the chairman of the department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, and he has written an amazing, accessible book that will teach you a great deal about how our current Bible came to be.
6. The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafron.  What a novel.  A young boy’s bibliophile father introduces him to the single work of an obscure author, Julian Carax.  The boy loves the novel so much that he begins to seek out both the author and any other work of his, only to discover that someone is systematically ridding the world of every trace of Carax’s work.  But why?  A really interesting whodunit ensues.
7. The Brothers K, by David James Duncan.  Duncan, the author of another great book in The River Why, spins the tale of the Chance family, led by disappointed former minor league baseball player Papa Toe Chance.  It is a crazy-quilt of religion, family tension, politics and baseball, and it is wonderful on every page.  I read this on a vacation that I hardly remember, as I was so engrossed in the book.
8. Moneyball, by Michael Lewis.  Well, you might have read this one; a lot of people did.  What those people did not know, though, is that they were reading the single best business book I’ve ever read.  They thought it was a baseball story.  Lewis attempts to answer a single question about the Oakland A’s baseball team: with one of the lowest payrolls in baseball, why are they always so good?  The answer applies to all businesses.
9. The Lost Painting, by Jonathan Harr.  Can a true story about a couple of art historians figuring out the whereabouts of a lost Caravaggio masterpiece actually be incredibly interesting and fun to read?  The answer, surpisingly, is yes.
10. Pistol: the Life of Pete Maravich, by Mark Kriegel.  The all-time leading scorer in college basketball history was beset by demons, not least of which was a coach/father who lived through his son’s exploits.  Like The Great Santini, only true.

Got any of your own?

Men: Let’s Get a Few Things Straight June 24, 2008

I work in tech.  As a practical matter, this means that I work in an extremely multicultural environment.  Tech people come from the U.S., India, Japan, China, Korea, Scandinavia, Eastern Bloc countries, the U.K., and more.  A typical office at lunchtime will fill with smells ranging from curry to kimchi.

But most of us share three things: We like tech, we like science fiction, and we cannot dress ourselves properly.

I find that this last one applies across a number of industries, to be honest, and maybe I’m an offender.  But there are a few things I have come to know about getting dressed in the morning, and I thought I’d share them for those who may be even more clueless than I.

1. Repeat after me: Your belt matches your shoes.  Breaking this rule automatically brands you as a goober.
2. Perhaps even more important: your socks match the color of your pants.  You may wear white socks with the combination of jeans and athletic shoes.  But frankly, if you’re an adult, why are you wearing jeans and athletic shoes when you know that you’d look better with brown shoes (or, even better, suede shoes)?
3. If you wear socks with sandals you are an embarassment to all who know you.  The look on your wife’s face is horror.
4. You may wear black jeans if your name is Ric Ocasek.
5. You may wear torn jeans if you are either: (a) under 23; (b) an actual hobo; or (c) George Michael.
6. You may wear jeans with paint splatters if you are actually in the process of painting a home.  Or, see 5(c) above.
7. You may wear white jeans if you enjoy the scorn and derision of all you encounter.
8. You may wear skinny jeans if… no, wait.  No one can wear skinny jeans.
9. A tuxedo is black.  Period.  A faux “tux” of any other color is also referred to as a “What Was I Thinking?” suit.  Maybe…maybe… we can make exceptions for extremely dark versions of other colors, so long as they look black in the right light.  And then only if your date insists.
10. The single difference between a nice-looking suit and a suit that makes you look like a fourth-grader playing dress-up is a tailor.  For $50-$75, you can make just about any suit look good on you.
11. Note to urban hipsters: vintage clothing is primarily for Halloween.  You are not Cosmo Kramer.
12. Special note for prom and weddings: Special occasions do not allow you to forgo #9 above.  Your date may well be wearing a yellow dress.  Okay.  This does not mean that, if you wear a yellow suit or “tux,” you look any less like Big Bird.  Wear the black, and put on a yellow tie.
13. A navy blue suit cries out for the brown shoes and belt, not the black.
14. Please, please, I beg you: if you are wearing a white shirt or a thin shirt of any kind: the t-shirt is your best friend.
15. If one of your ties is an American flag, you are not patriotic.  You are an eyesore.
16. A fur tie in winter, however: well, that’s just funny enough that it works.
17. To the often-asked question of “which buttons do I button on a suit?”, the answer is: (a) none, or (b) on a two- or three-button suit, any combination that excludes the bottom button.  You may button all the buttons on a suitcoat or sportcoat if you are Pee Wee Herman.
18. Wardrobe staples include: khaki pants, a blue blazer, black dress shoes, brown dress shoes, jeans that you love, a pea coat, a couple of good watches, and a suit that fits you.
19. Pleats mostly look bad on men.  Wear flat-front pants.
20. A pox on you if you would even consider wearing leather pants.  Some information about you is simply not to be readily known.
21. European men sometimes wear pants that are salmon, green, yellow, orange or even Madras (patchwork).  You sometimes see them on preppies in New England, as well.  This is an important part of why we make fun of those people.
22. Your girlfriend will tell you that you look good in pink.  This is because she secretly hates you.
23. Your jeans may have exotic embroidering on the back pocket if you intend to undergo gender-reassignment surgery this week.
24. If you are ironing or (heaven forbid) creasing your jeans, you have vastly too much time on your hands.  Step away from the board, Sparky, before you hurt someone.
25. Do your wardrobe and your back a favor and get a front-pocket slim wallet.

Anyone else want to contribute?

What Happened to Honest Disagreement in Political Discourse? June 23, 2008

I was in Utah recently, and a Republican friend literally seemed to worry for the state of my mortal soul… because I’m a Democrat voting for Obama.  I don’t mean to say that he was upset.  I mean to say that he truly and honestly seemed to believe that I would go to hell for my political positions.

Saturday, I was in a car with a friend who said venomously about Barack Obama: “I think he’s leading us straight toward socialism.”  Socialism?  Seriously?  Maybe bigger government; I’ll at least discuss taking that hit.  But socialism?

This is the new political discourse: ad hominem attacks pour forth piping-hot and frothy from every source of political information: networks, cable, radio, the internet.  Wherever you can ingest news, you can ingest attack politics.  Part of this is the result of our dramatic shift away from the politeness of network news (think Walter Cronkite) to the free-for-all that is cable (think Bill O’Reilly).  It is now the case that over 60% of viewers who watch political news watch it on cable.

This is partly, of course, due to the ability of a cable channel to focus on news.  They can talk about politics for as long as they want, utilizing more policy wonks than we ever knew existed.  Part, though, is due to ratings: cable news is up 11 percent over last year and 21 percent in prime time.

The clear signals of the shift to cable are everywhere: on Super Tuesday, NBC was showing The Biggest Loser while its heaviest political hitters, Brian Williams, Tim Russert and Tom Brokaw, were shifted over to cable cousin MSNBC to cover the primaries.

And cable news is the hangout of O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Keith Olbermann, et. al., running their mouths without the restraint that those of us of another generation can clearly recall.

How bad has it gotten?  A few examples:

Bill O’Reilly suggested on his show that John Edwards purposely had his wife Elizabeth call Ann Coulter on the Chris Matthews show just to remind viewers that Elizabeth has cancer to get some sympathy votes.  Rush Limbaugh imitated the jerky movements of Michael J. Fox, who has Parkinson’s disease, and accused Fox of manipulating his medications to look worse than he actually is for a political ad.  Keith Olbermann, outraged by President Bush’s statement that he had given up golf as a show of solidarity with our soldiers, finished a rant by telling the President of the United States to “shut the hell up!”  Saddest of all, perhaps, was O’Reilly suggesting that Shawn Hornbeck, a 15-year-old boy who had been kidnapped and held for years by a deranged pizza guy, did not want to escape because his situation was “more fun” than what he had at home.

On the internet, we have left-wing blog Daily Kos asserting that President Bush is “no better than Hitler,” and that, according to a headline, the “GOP Plan to Suspend the Constitution and Install a Fascist Military Dictatorship.”  On the other hand we have Townhall.com telling us that liberals and terrorists “work for the same team,” and we have Renew America telling us that liberals hate God, freedom, and America.

Sticks and stones, over and over.

All of this stultiloquence has the unfortunate effect of giving us more information than ever and yet ensuring that we are less informed.  The candidates, almost against their wills, participate or die.  John McCain, he of the questionable-to-the-point-of-being-maybe-criminal loan against federal election money and other financial derring-do, jumps on Obama’s rejection of federal campaign money and misrepresents it to the public while absolutely knowing he’s being misleading.  Meanwhile, Obama used the floods in the midwest to attack McCain’s opposition to an infrastructure bill while knowing full well that McCain has taken a firm position against earmarks to bills, of which the infrastructure bill was one.

This is all nonsense, and it’s killing us.  Dogma is not discussion, and divisiveness is not debate.  Taking the horrors of 9/11 as our example, we see how it’s dumbing down America’s political smarts: in a recent poll it was revealed that 41% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had a “direct role” in 9/11, which not even the Bush administration would claim is true.  (Remarkably, 7 in 10 Americans believe that Hussein had “a role.”)  On the other hand, 35% of Democrats and 22% of Americans overall believe that President Bush “knew about the 9/11 attacks beforehand,” and there was a point in late 2006 where a whopping 36% of those polled believed that 9/11 was “an inside job,” suggesting that they thought that not only did the Bush administration know about the attacks, it actually orchestrated them.

Putting all of this another way: due to our current political information system, somewhere between 40% and 70% of Americans currently believe one form or another of complete and utter bovine fecal matter.

People get smarter by debating merits, not by rearranging prejudices.  A return to civility would allow us to hear — actually hear — nuanced positions and complicated policies, and understand the perfectly rational thought processes that inform either side of almost any issue.

But we are a very long way from that particular home.  We are in Oz without a balloon.

Why Barry Bonds Should Make the Hall of Fame June 20, 2008

Let’s get this straight up front: I dislike Barry Bonds.  Really can’t stand him.  He was almost certainly the most arrogant athlete of his time, and it looks an awful lot like he cheated and broke the law.  If you put a gun to my head and made me guess, I’d say he probably took steroids.  But he should be voted in to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot.

Why?  Let me provide a few reasons:

1.  He was a Hall of Fame player before he ever touched steroids.  By the time he showed up at (then) Candlestick Park, Barry Bonds had already won two MVP awards, and he won another for the Giants while he was still whippet-thin.  He averaged over 36 home runs per year during the 1990s; for comparison, during Hank Aaron’s most productive decade (the 1960s), Aaron averaged 37.5 home runs.  Bonds was one of the best-fielding left fielders of all time, garnering 8 gold gloves.

It seems unlikely that Barry Bonds would have broken Hank Aaron’s record without steroids, if we presume that he took them to his advantage, more because it allowed him increased longevity than anything else.  But he already had 455 home runs before the 2000 season even started, and he still had good years left in him.  He was a lock to hit over 500 home runs, steroids or no.

This is a poor argument on its own, though.  If accomplishments before scandal could rocket a person into the Hall, then both Pete Rose and Joe Jackson should have their place there.  But there’s more.

2.  His steroid use is still (largely) unproven.  I said above: it looks an awful lot like…, and it does.  His trainer was clearly around steroids.  He had an association of some kind with Victor Conte’s awful BALCO labs.  But wait: I employed a trainer, a while ago.  I honestly have no idea whether that trainer used steroids, or whether he supplied them to others.  Why would I know that?  Furthermore, why would I even care?  As long as he’s not supplying them to me.

Apparently, in documents leaked from his grand jury testimony, Bonds admitted that he used “the clear” and “the cream,” both steroids.  He said in the testimony that he did not know that they were steroids, and of course there is nothing in the testimony that indicates how long he took whatever it is he took.  Still, this is not pretty.

Probably the next-most damning circumstantial evidence against Bonds is his body.  He was rail-thin, and then suddenly he ballooned.  Many scientists believe that the maximum amount of muscle an adult male can add in any 12-month period without the aid of hormone therapy is 15-20 pounds.  The theory on Bonds goes, “He added more muscle than a human is supposed to be able to add.”

But even that isn’t necessarily so.  Bonds weighed in at 185 in 1986, then at 206 in 1997, then 226 in 2001.  He added 20 pounds in four years, after adding 21 in the ten years prior.  He might very well have used steroids, but he might have been working out.  Esquire Magazine reported in 2001 that Bonds worked out five days a week, five hours a day.  That would tend to add some muscle.

The other proof point often offered for Bonds’ steroid use is what is perceived as a huge jump in his statistics.  But that might not be exactly what it seems, either:

Most people divide Bonds’ career into two phases: pre-steroid allegations, and post-steroid allegations.  They often use the 1999 season as the dividing line.  And it looks pretty bad: from 1986 to 1998, Bonds averaged a .290 batting average, with 32 home runs and 93 RBI.  From 1999 to 2007, Bonds averaged .328, with 49 homers and 105 RBI.

But, like most statistics, the devil might just be in the details: As reported on the blog “Cosellout“, if you took a different stance and did not pre-convict the man of steroid use, you might separate his career into three phases instead of two: a developmental phase, a growth phase and a developed phase, each six years long (well, let’s make the developmental phase seven, just to include his rookie year).  That would look more like this:

In the developmental phase, Bonds averaged .275, with 25 home runs and 79 RBI.  In the growth phase, he averaged .307, with 39 homers and 110 RBI.  In the developed phase, Bonds averaged .328, with 49 home runs and 105 RBI.

Not as dramatic, is it?  It looks even more plausible when we put it up against a similar comparison for Hank Aaron, who clearly had nothing to do with steroids:

In Aaron’s developmental years, he averaged 31 home runs.  In his growth years, he averaged 36.  And in his developed years, he averaged 41.  Hmm.  Maybe what a guy learns about hitting over the years really can help him as he gets older.

Finally: Bonds failed exactly zero drug tests.  He did not experience a drop-off in production (except for injuries) after MLB started testing, he did not retire to get out of the spotlight, and (perhaps most significantly) he did not lose weight after baseball started testing for steroids, as a number of other stars (notably, Jason Giambi and Mark McGwire) did.

Not saying he didn’t benefit from steroids.  But it’s not 100% clear that he did.

3.  Steroids might not make the difference you think they do.  It’s a proven fact: working out while taking steroids will provide you with greater size and strength gains than working out without steroids.  But how much?

Professor Arthur DeVany of UC-Irvine studied home run hitting through the years, and concluded something interesting about the pre-steroid and post-steroid years: there’s no statistically significant difference at all between them.

That runs against the grain of what we’ve been told, but if we dig deeper it makes sense: Hitting home runs is not primarily about raw power.  It’s not a clean-and-jerk; heck, it’s not even shot putting.  It’s about the application of speed.  Put another way: no amount of power is going to help you if you can’t put the barrel of the baseball bat directly onto the baseball.  If it were pure power, then Bo Jackson (who famously broke a bat over his own head after striking out) would have been the greatest home-run hitter ever.  But in Jackson’s eight-year career, he averaged less than 20 home runs.  In the four-year stretch of his prime, he averaged barely over 25.  No — hitting a baseball is fundamentally a skill.

Partly for this reason, but partly because the strength differences are not as dramatic (according to a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine) as you might think, Yale physicist Robert Adair, author of the seminal book “The Physics of Baseball,” as well as “Why a Curveball Curves,” has determined that steroids help a person hit home runs, but the difference is not dramatic.

This is very controversial, though: while most scientists seem to think that the difference in bat speed between steroid users and non-steroid users could be as little as two to four percent, which would translate into as little as seven feet on a typical home-run ball, a Tufts statistician has recently suggested that, paradoxically, that small difference could increase home runs by as much as 50 percent.  It’s a very, very hard topic on which to reach conclusions.

Over against that, one also has to wonder: how much did steroids help the pitchers against whom Bonds was hitting?  And the answer appears to be: quite a lot.

Finally, it has been proposed by a number of medical people that drugs that tend to improve concentration and quickness of mind would do a great deal more than steroids to increase a hitter’s results.  We’re perhaps not hearing as much as we should about that side of baseball’s drug problem, aside from a few articles in 2006 about amphetamine use among players being rampant.

I’ll feel a little differently if Bonds becomes a proven intentional user of steroids.  I think then it falls into a simpler category: he will have knowingly broken the rules, precisely as Pete Rose and (maybe) Joe Jackson did.  But as it stands today, I’d have to put him in the Hall.

My Time Management System June 18, 2008

A couple of people have asked me lately about how I get things done.  I’m my own boss, often working out of my home, so being able to stay on task is critical.  My mechanism for getting my work done is fairly high-tech, but pretty simple in practice.  Here it is:

1.  I capture everything.  You cannot manage your time without ensuring that every last thing you expect yourself to do is captured in a single place.  There is really no exception to this rule.  You have to have a place where every task is captured and every appointment is captured.

To do that, you must have your capture mechanism on your person at all times.  ALWAYS.  So, I asked myself: what is always on me?  And the answer is: my phone.  How can I use my phone as a capture mechanism for all tasks?  Here’s how:

First, I signed up for a task-management web application (Remember the Milk), and then I signed up for a calendar application (Google Calendar)  Remember the Milk is nothing particularly special, but it’s free and it’s easy to use, and (most importantly) it has an interface with both Jott and Google Calendar (more on these coming).  You could use a different to-do list application that interfaces with Jott, though: Vitalist, Toodledo, etc.  Whatever you like best.

Second, I signed up for a Jott account.  This has been critical.  Jott is an application that is capable of transcribing your voice (over the phone, when you call Jott’s number) into text and adding what you said into a number of web applications.

Jott provides you with a telephone number to call.  It answers, and asks, “Who would you like to Jott?”  You can provide any of several answers (once you set it up on the Jott website), but (importantly) two of the potential answers are, “Remember the Milk,” or “Google Calendar.”  It then transcribes whatever you say, and posts it online in the place you indicated.

If you were to walk up to me while I’m standing in line at the grocery store and say, “Could you email me a recommendation for a couple of good books for the summer?”  I would call Jott, and tell it that I wanted to leave a message on Remember the Milk.  It would beep, just like a regular voicemail system, and I’d simply speak into the phone, “Email [your name] book recommendations.”  Then I’d hang up.

By the time I got to my computer, if I were to check my to-do’s on Remember the Milk, sure enough, that task would appear there.  Jott has transcribed it from my voice into the computer, and sent it to Remember the Milk.

The same process would apply for appointments people make with me: if I’m at my computer, I’ll simply enter it in Google Calendar.  If not, I’ll let Jott do it for me.

2.  First thing every morning, I spend five to fifteen minutes establishing my priorities for the day.  Basically, I separate things into four categories: Things that must happen today (Category A), things where it would be very nice if they happen today (B), things that really won’t happen today but still must be done someday (C), and things that I should really forget about (D).

Then, I take everything that is an A and prioritize those.  The most important things are done first, the less important things are done later in the day.  I actually then put tasks, as well as appointments, on my Google Calendar.  I treat them just like appointments: I estimate how long they’ll take, and I make an appointment with myself to do them.

Category B tasks will end up very late in the day, usually, but they also make the list.  The only real key here is: I do not rest if there is an open Category A task.

I pretty much ignore Category C tasks for the day, and only revisit them if I’ve somehow knocked all of the other stuff off the list.  I then delete the Category D tasks from off of Remember the Milk, never to be revisited again.  It just wasn’t important.

3.  I manage my day by text messages to my phone.  For every appointment I have, and for every one of my day’s top priorities, I receive a text message at the appropriate time.  For this I use Google Calendar.

If you have a Google Calendar account, go to the “Settings” tab, and then click on “Mobile Setup.”  This will allow you to enter your cell phone number and carrier.  From now on, when you enter an appointment, you’ll have an option to send yourself reminders.  By default, you’ll get a text message half an hour before the appointment starts.  Do nothing, and you’ll get that.  But you can also set it to send you the reminder at whatever interval you like (and you can even send multiple alerts).  Set an appointment.  Where you see “reminders,” click on SMS.  Send yourself an alert for whenever you like: 5 minutes before the appointment, a half hour before, whatever.

The option for multiple reminders works great for early morning appointments (where I send myself a reminder 12 hours before, and another at about the time I want to wake up), or appointments where I need to do something (like change into a suit) beforehand (then I can send myself a text an hour or so before, just to make sure I get home, change, and get to the appointment).

As I noted above: important tasks end up as appointments, so the same process is followed.

Now, I cannot possibly forget anything.  I will receive a text to remind me of every single thing I intend to do today.

It sounds more complicated than it is.  It nets out to: I use Jott to capture everything, I prioritize in the morning, I use Google Calendar’s mobile reminder function to send myself text messages as reminders, and I promise myself that all Category “A” tasks will be done before the day ends.  That’s pretty much it.

If you don’t have a system of your own, you might want to try this one.  Every technology I described above is free, by the way.

Suggesting Great Band Names June 18, 2008

Okay, everyone: On TV last night I watched one of my favorite rockabilly performers, The Reverend Horton Heat.  He’s pretty darn good, and let’s admit that it’s a great name.  In his honor, join me in suggesting awesome band names.  (And by “awesome,” I mean “bizarre.”)  Here’s my list:

1. The Benign Polyps
2. Giant Sucking Sound (hats off to Ross Perot for that one)
3. The Dipthongs
4. Free Radicals
5. Chief Bender and the Monks of Peckham    (Chief Bender was a pitcher for the Philadelphia A’s; John Peckham was Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1200’s)
6. Judge Learned Hand    (Actual name of perhaps the most influential jurist never to serve on the Supreme Court)
7. Cubicle Tension
8. Parker Bowles and the Adenoids
9. Fluid Moves   (A little double entendre)
10. Kareem O. Wheat and the Huguenots

Anyone looking for a band name: never say I didn’t do anything for ya.

Your ideas?