Odds and Sods and White Noise

Need some book suggestions? Here is a complete listing of Pournelle's book of the month suggestions going back to 1994.

The Ohio Farm Bureau announced that the USDA Rural Development grant awards have gone to six recipients, in the following states: Arkansas, Iowa (two awards), Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The Center for Disease Control reports that Type 2 diabetes has increased 90% in the U.S. since 1997. Data was complete for 33 states. Vermont is 28th in the list with a reported 6.6 new cases per one thousand residents. This is an increase of 43%.

Gasoline prices are in free fall; we're paying about $2.89 a gallon. Maybe this accounts for the fact that people are idling their cars again at the post office. Now that the weather has turned colder (we've gotten the first snow that stuck), my old Prius' mpg has gone down to 49-50, down from 52-56.

I've been experimenting with a white noise generator called Noisy as a way to mask distracting sounds. It is rather like working next to a waterfall, or under a tin roof while raining. Here's a Wiki article, with all the math. An online flash version is located at simplynoise.com The online generator includes "red noise" which seems to increase the low frequency component. They also have audio files which can be downloaded and played through iTunes or Windows Media Player.

Over Lunch

This week's New Yorker magazine, (and next week's too, since it is a double issue), has a wonderful article in their occasional "Annals of Invention" series about the artist and inventor Steve Hollinger called Thinking in the Rain--An Artist Takes on the Umbrella. If you ever wanted to find out about the provenance of Tubers and Zots, more than you ever knew about clerical haberdashery, manufacturing in China, and umbrella design (tricky), it is all in this article...unfortunately, not online, but in the print issue.

But there is a sentence fragment buried in there that just begs for a fuller explanation. Top of page 95 second column.

His mother, Myrna, a sculptor who works primarily in the medium of dried fish, said about him recently...

Ten Thousand Hours to Mastery

I've been reading Daniel J. Levitin's book This Is Your Brain on Music. In particular, I was interested to learn of the ten-thousand hours theory of mastery...that it takes that long to become "world class" at something.

The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert--in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or twenty hours a week, of practice over ten years. Of course, this doesn't address why some people don't seem to get anywhere when they practice, and why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others. But no one has yet fond a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

Of course, my question is, how long does it take to become "pretty good"?

And, after searching Google, I see I'm pretty late to this party; there are further discussions in the context of game development, and personal productivity.

The only political post on this blog for 2008

Writing on the eve of the New Hampshire primaries and after the Saturday evening debates:

I was really interested to hear from the Republican candidates (all white guys pushing or over 60) that the Republican party was looking to continue the legacy of either George Bush or Ronald Reagan. How is that going to improve things?

I thought Obama really nailed it when he replied to a hostile question about Iraq, (and I'm paraphrasing) "Unlike the Bush administration, We will actually go after the people who were responsible for 9/11, and we will withdraw from Iraq, a nation that was not responsible for 9/11." What a concept.

I thought Hilary Clinton, citing "35 years of experience in Washington" was a little over the top. Being first lady? Taking a run at health care reform, but ultimately failing? Carpet-bagging to be a Senator in New York? And what about the 13 years before she came with Bill to Washington....how does that count as Washington experience?

More than one Republican candidate called Islamic terrorism the existential threat of our age. Um...guys....how about climate change and peak oil? Neither party seemed to place this at the top of their priority list. (Maybe they are still mad at Al Gore). (And maybe they don't make any connection about our insatiable thirst for oil and our relationship with the middle east...) Nor did they place the health care crisis at the the top of the list. Republicans are mostly concerned about illegal immigration, even as they hire firms who employ undocumented immigrants to do their landscaping.

The republican party is decamped to Planet Bunny. Look to Ronald Reagan. Stay cozy with all their business buddies. (Let's bail out the banks while we're at it). Build a wall across the Mexican border. Stay in Iraq...forever. No change for the health-care system...it is working fine.