Category: Uncategorized

What was your adolescent dream ambition?  Rock star, football player, violinist, chess master, actress, master chef, writer, film director, video game programmer, reporter, politician?   I wanted to be another Robert A. Heinlein on most days.  On other days, I pictured myself competing with Bob Dylan or Neil Young, but during those rare moments when I thought I was being down-to-Earth, I figured I’d become an astronomer.  I became a computer programmer, and not even a very exciting kind of programmer, like those guys who program artificial vision or Mars rovers, but a name and address kind of database guy.  Probably all of us, in our teenage fantasies, expected to do a whole lot more with our lives than we actual did.  So why didn’t we become rock stars?

Malcolm Gladwell explains why in his new book, The Outliers: The Story of Success.   To learn about one of the factors of success, read a significant extract in The Guardian.  Gladwell makes the case that successful people, the kind that become rock stars or computer programming billionaires, succeeded because they all have devoted at least 10,000 hours of practice to their craft.  That figure has been reported for years, but Gladwell explores the idea further and wider.  Want to be the next Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen or the Beatles, then practice a lot, a whole lot, for about 10,000 hours and you’ll be ready for Carnegie Hall.

I must be a genius at television watching because I’ve probably logged more than 25,000 hours watching TV.  Ditto at listening to music and reading novels, but those passive activities really don’t count.  And I know I’ve put in 10,000 hours at work programming computers, but I’m no Bill Joy.  I’m nowhere near as good a programmer as my friend Mike.  Mike has spent thousands of hours studying programming after work.  I seldom do that.  My guess, the 10,000 hours Gladwell is talking about, are those hours where you’re pushing your brain to learn something new, where you’re constantly trying to get something right, where you stay on the cutting edge of discovery.

Another factor I wonder about is age.  Many of the examples Gladwell covers deal with people putting their 10,000 hours in before they were 20.  That’s practicing 2.7 hours a day from the time you’re 10 till 20.  What kind of kid has that discipline?  Bobby Fischer, Bill Gates, John, Paul, George and Ringo.

To test this concept, we should start teaching about the rewards of 10,000 hour of practice to every kid that begins kindergarten and remind them every day until they finish high school.  What if we all gave copies of The Outliers to every tiny tot expressing a desire to be famous, could we create a super ambitious next generation?

Would every seven year-old that was actually able to grind out his 10,000 hours of practice become a major success?  If I could time travel back to my younger self and convince him to pick something and stick with it, would I have been able to become a rock star or science fiction writer?  We like to think winners are big successes because of lucky genes, or the lucky bastards were at the right place at the right time.  Malcolm Gladwell suggests it isn’t always so.

The answer I am seeking is whether or not I can use this knowledge now, at age 57.  I’ve tried to play the guitar more than once in my life, but I doubt I’ve put 20 hours of solid effort into the endeavor.  If someone had shown me this article before I bought my first guitar at a pawn shop when I was a teenager I might have saved myself $25.  Then again, maybe I would have bought the guitar with more realistic expectations.  But do the math.  Let’s say I was disciplined enough to practice 1 hour a day.  That’s 365 hours in one year.  Ten years of study will log me 3,650 hours of practice time.  That’s almost three decades to mastery.  Gee, I could become a studio musician by the time I’m 97.  I could speed up the process by practicing 2.7 hours a day and be looking for music work by the time I’m 67.

Are old dogs too old to become virtuosos.  Gladwell said that music students who only gotten in 4,000 hours of practice were destined to teach.  That makes me ask:  How many hours until I’d be a competent hobbyist?  Let’s say I wanted to take up the guitar again.  How many hours would it take to learn 10 of my favorite songs, and be able to perform them for my friends so they could 1) recognize the tunes, 2) endure listening to all ten songs, 3) be willing to testify that I could play the guitar without smirking, and 4) be able to play those songs in time with other musicians?  I’m not talking about being great, but being able to play like people used to do back in 19th century, when friends would play for fun because back then, if you wanted to hear music you had to make it yourself.

I can think of several hobbies I would like to be moderately accomplished at.  I’ve recently taken up digital photography.  I’m better than most snapshot shooters, but light years away from the good amateurs that I see presenting their work in online galleries or selling photos at arts and craft fairs.

I’d also like to be a better web graphic artist and master Photoshop.  At work I develop web pages, but mostly for data entry and reports.  I’d like to have the skills to create better looking web sites.  This desire overlaps somewhat with the digital photography because people wanted more photos on the web pages I maintain.

Would 1,000 hours of applied practice make me a skilled amateur?  There’s a chance I’ve already put in 100 hours at digital photography, and I can already feel a great deal of improvement.  Would 1 hour a day of dedicate study and practice get me a quantum leap ahead by next holiday season?  I think it would, despite the fact that I’m 57.  I went and shot some friends yesterday for about 2 hours.  Before I left I studied my camera’s manual and picked out a handful of new techniques to try.  Knowing about those tricks didn’t magically make me shoot better pictures, but I was seeing different looking photos than what I’ve been shooting before.

Taking MFA writing courses helped me improve my fiction writing.  Where I failed was the daily practice.  If only I had developed the discipline to practice one hour a day since Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in 2002, I would have logged 2,200 hours of practice.  I think I have put in 600 hours on blogging since last year, and I see improvements there.  To be honest, I would be much better if I consciously studied creative non-fiction techniques and applied them in a systematic disciplined way.  I should dissect great essays for practice.  To work, I think practice means pushing the envelope.

January 1 is still over a month away, but an interesting New Year’s resolution experiment for 2009 would be to apply the techniques I’m learning from Gladwell’s book to see how far I can take this old dog brain of mine.  If I really wanted to scientific, I should pick the guitar, something I’ve got about zero skill with and see how far I can get in one year.  Does the 10,000 rule apply to everything?  Or does it only apply to a person’s natural inclinations to pursue certain skills?  If we all put an hour a day into juggling, would we all reach the same skill level after a 1,000 hours of practice?

The only song I can remember the words to is “Happy Birthday,” and I still stumble on that third line.  I’ve listened to “Like A Rolling Stone” at least a 1,000 times, but I can’t recite the lyrics, nor could I hum the tune.  A friend once taught me the chords to that song, and I got so I could play them through consistently, but few people could ever guess what I was playing.  Logic tells me since I’m rounding the bend towards the home stretch to the social security years, I shouldn’t waste any of my practice hours chasing skills that have little chance of paying off.  Would any number of hours of practice help a tune-deaf person lacking any sense of rhythm learn to play music?

The only endeavor I’ve stuck to in recent years has been this blog, and piddling around with my three other web sites, The Classics of Science Fiction,  Lady Dorothy Mills and Classic Booklists, which are all extremely homely when it comes to web design.  Let’s see what 400-600 hours of disciplined practice would do for these existing efforts.

To be honest, I’d still like to be great at something, but I think I’m too old for that.  How many late bloomers make a success at 57?  Sounds silly, doesn’t it?  But is age really the factor?  If success is dedicated focus and discipline, could it be those traits always show up by the adolescent years not because those are they best years to learn, but because if you’re going be focused and disciplined person those traits would have shown up by then?

I was never great at anything because I never wanted to pick one thing and stick to it, pursuing that one skill like an idiot savant.  What would be fascinating to know if I could somehow discipline my brain to focus on one pursuit and ignore all other interests, would mastering that skill be any different at 7 or 57?  If I was 27 or 37 or even 47, I think I’d try hard to find out.

JWH 11/29/8

I’m listening to “Everybody Wants to Rule The World” by Tears for Fear, but that just finished and Todd Rundgren begins singing “Change Myself.”  That’s a better song for my mood, and it’s a nice transition from Tears from Fear because Todd sings,

I want to change the world
I want to make it well
How can I change the world
When I can’t change myself
Try again tomorrow

But then I go back to Tears for Fear and listen to,

It’s my own design
It’s my own remorse
Help me to decide
Help me make the most
Of freedom and of pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever

Every day I wake up knowing what I want to do.  I have been struggling for months to work on a short story that I have tried off and on for years to finish writing.  I tell myself that’s the one thing in life that I want to complete, yet I can’t, no matter how I apply myself.  I guess it’s writer’s block, but since I’m not a real writer I think it’s something else.  I can write essays until the all the bovines get back to the barn, but writing fiction is like pushing the molecules of my body through a concrete block.

This leaves me in a state of continual restlessness that I can only fight by occupying my mind with other diversions, such as watching “The Big Bang Theory” or flipping through my 18k of mp3 songs looking for mental stimulation.  My restless is often soothed by words, such as Bob Dylan’s,

You will search, babe,
At any cost.
But how long, babe,
Can you search for what is not lost?
Everybody will help you,
Some people are very kind.
But if I,
Can save you any time,
Come on, give it to me,
I’ll keep it with mine.

I can’t help it
If you might think I am odd,
If I say I’m loving you not for what you are
But what you’re not.
Everybody will help you
Discover what you set out to find.
But if I can save you any time,
Come on, give it to me,
I’ll keep it with mine.

The train leaves
At half past ten,
But it will be back
In the same old spot again
The conductor
He’s still stuck on the line
And if I, can save you any time,
Come on, give it to me,
I’ll keep it with mine.

Every evening I am back at this word processor at half past ten.  When I can’t paint my own words I stare at words others wrote.  I should give up and shoot up some TV.  I’m so restless that it eats away at me, but writing about it doesn’t really help.  I wish I was a machine so I could program myself to do exactly what I want.

JWH 11-3-8

Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization can be downloaded for free, but I recommend buying a copy and making it your personal Bible.  Lester R. Brown, from the Earth Policy Institute, continues to monitor the Earth’s economic and ecological health and analyze what needs to be done to build a sustainable future.  We’ve all boarded the Titanic, and Lester Brown knows about the iceberg, but few people listen to him.  Studying this book gives me so much to contemplate.  Just glancing at the subjects in the table of contents will tell you what’s this book is about, and you can read every chapter online, or download a .pdf of each chapter or the whole book, and even download an Excel spreadsheet of the data too, if you like studying numbers.

Just look how he has divided the problems we face:

• Deteriorating Oil and Food Security
• Rising Temperatures and Rising Seas
• Emerging Water Shortages
• Natural Systems under Stress
• Early Signs of Decline
• Eradicating Poverty, Stabilizing Population
• Restoring the Earth
• Feeding Eight Billion Well
• Designing Cities for People
• Raising Energy Efficiency
• Turning to Renewable Energy
• The Great Mobilization

What is My Fair Share?

To ask if God exists, is philosophical speculation.  No on knows, and we have debated the question for centuries and will continue to do so.  To ask if there is a limit to economic growth is not imaginary speculation.  We will soon know the answer, one way or the other.  Most people believe there is unlimited economic potential for growth.  The economic foundation of our society is based on this belief, just like the builders of the Titanic believed they had built an unsinkable ship.

There are new economists that now see that any model of economics that does not include the ecology of the Earth is doomed to fail.  Lester Brown says that any product that doesn’t factor in its complete costs from all sources is doomed to bankruptcy in the market, like Enron failed as a company because it cooked the books and hid part of its true operating costs.

What this means is economics is really a subset of ecology.

If you accept this, then you come to understand that the Earth has limits, and realize that growth based economics means we’re all cells consuming the Earth like a cancer spreading in a host.  The idea of steady-state economics is a theory that suggests we can all be healthy cells that live symbiotically within our planetary organism.

Once you realize this, your primary ethical question of existence is:  How much can I consume without being cancerous?  This is more than just worrying about carbon dioxide and global warming.  That’s only one of many cancerous growths attacking the Earth.  The answer has to be more than:  As little as possible.  Economists and ecologists need to set goals for individuals to aim for in their daily lives.

If you could buy a piece of land and live there in a totally sustainable manner, without using resources outside of your property, that might be one answer, but not a practical one.  Scientists are just beginning to explore this issue.  Think of the parable about the fishes and the loaves, but this time divide them between 7 billion people and then factor in that the supply of wheat and fish should never end.

Another way to think about it would be to let scientists determine how much carbon dioxide can safely go into the atmosphere each year and then divide that number by 7 billion and let us each figure out how we’re going to budget our CO2 use.  A recent issue of the New Scientist suggests that might only be 1 ton per person, which means living like someone from Yemen or in the Republic of Congo today.

Since I’m probably using 10-20 times that, I’m quite cancerous.  About the only way to get myself down to using 1 ton of carbon per year would be to ride a bike and make my house perfectly energy efficient.  A possibility, but not a likely one.  The 1 ton per person is a global fair share estimate and much more restrictive than those 50% and 80% reduction goals for American peak usage.

What Happens If We Don’t Change?

Even if we don’t concern ourselves with various forms of pollution, there’s a good chance we’re still heading for economic collapse.  If unlimited economic growth is truly unsustainable, then it will also fail for other reasons, other than too much poisonous output.  We can also fail for not having enough input.  The economy can also crash and burn by not jogging faster than debt, something that’s been dominating the news lately.  Other canaries falling dead are stories about shortages.  Just before the liquidity scare, it looked like we were about to start running short of oil.  Luckily a cure for high oil demand is a slow economy, or is that lucky?  What if we ran out of oil but didn’t have renewable energy.  What if we ran out of fresh water before we ran out of oil?  We could easily face critical shortages of commodities long before we faced surpluses of rising oceans.  Reading Plan B 3.0 illustrates the enormity of all the problems we’ll be facing.

Human nature tends to ignore looming icebergs or melting glaciers.  We like to focus on what we want, and not people shouting that the sky is falling.  However, we have seen great positive social transformations happen quickly – just look at the switch to electricity or going from horse power to horsepower.  And isn’t it amazing how fast we all became geeks with our computers, video games and cell phones?  I think we’ll all change over and over again, whether changing for good or bad, whether we move into an ecological paradise, or a depression that makes the Great Depression seem like the good ole days.

We can’t avoid change.  The real question is whether we can surf change or will change flow over us like a tsunami.

Change is Happening Now

Everything Lester Brown writes about in Plan B 3.0 can be seen on your high definition television right now, if you’re willing to tune in to the right shows.  If you only watch Pushing Daisies and Heroes you can delay learning about the iceberg until after it hits.  A good way to set up your early warning system is to watch PBS Frontline each week.  Keep adding PBS shows, and then documentaries from National Geographic and the various Discovery channels.  Watch between the scenes.  Count how many references to drought you’ve seen in one week, or how many continents and countries are losing their glaciers.  You don’t need a supercomputer or Al Gore to spot trends in global weather patterns.

How Smart Are People?

All the problems mentioned in Plan B 3.0 can be managed.  Theoretically, if humans can cause the problems, humans can fix the problems, but that may not be how things play out.  What everyone really wants to know is whether they are going to be one of those people at the Superdome after Katrina, or will they be the kind of person who had the resources to get out safely on their own.  Being prepared helps.  Sometimes luck is merely a coin toss, and other times luck favors those who plan ahead.  But how do you prepare for global recession?

Plan B 3.0 is a look at what the people in power need to be doing to solve the transition from the economics of growth to a steady-state economy at the macro level.  What we need now are Plan B handbooks for us little guys, advising us what we should be doing to make the same adjustments at the micro levels.  This could be books about careers for college students, to how-to books about starting businesses in a steady-state economy.  I doubt the plumbing industry will be shaken up, but is there much of a future for jet airline pilots?

JWH – 11-2-8

At work, years ago we set up a “Free Stuff” table, up on the third floor near the student copier.  I work at a university, in the College of Education.  The free stuff table started with old text books, from a school book repository.  We had a library of K-12 schoolbooks, and when new editions came out, we’d put the old ones on the free stuff table.  After that, when a professor would move their office, or leave the college, they’d dump academic books and journals on the free table they didn’t want to take with them.  Eventually, faculty and staff, began bringing books, magazines, music CDs and LPs, software, VHS tapes, DVDS from home and drop their stuff off on the table.

Sometimes the donations were good stuff, and the table would clear in less than an hour, sometimes even within minutes.  Other times, the table would fill with boring stuff, 20 year old educational journals that would lay there for weeks, but would eventually thin out and disappear.  I used to take old books to the library, but bringing them to work is much easier.

Because of its location, the table needs to stay neat, so mostly people leave small stuff.  Sometimes we’ll see a DVD drive for a computer, or little radio, or various office supply gadgets, but for the most part the giveaways have been books and magazines.  We have a couple hundred faculty and staff, and a few thousand students, and the table is by the computer labs, so it sees a lot of traffic.  The free stuff table has become a form of recycling.

I’m also fascinated by what kinds of books show up there.  Lots of fiction, lots of educational books, but also religious books, statistics, psychology, sociology, kids books, cook books, etc.  After my mom died, I took a bunch of her old books up there, various bibles, religious books, and Edna Ferber novels.  They went quickly.  The other day my wife set out a box of Christmas ornaments to give to Goodwill.  I took them and put them on the free stuff table and they were gone within 5 minutes.  What’s worthless to one person is valuable to another.

I’m writing about this free stuff table as a way to recommend the idea to others.  It could be a common concept at most offices, but I don’t know.  All we did was tape down a sign on a 30″x42″ table that said, “Free Stuff.”  After that, the table took a life of its own.

JWH 10-21-08

Again, my friend Carl from Stainless Steal Droppings has inspired me to write another essay about religion.  He and I are both disturbed by aggressive communication tactics taken by people on both sides of our philosophically polarized society.  Carl and I agree that both liberals and conservatives go to extremes in attacking each other.  Carl is a Christian and I am an atheist, and we’re working on ways to coexist philosophically.  We’re not trying to convert each other to our own positions, but we are trying to find ways to have opposing ideas and still have friendly discussions.  This is a real challenge.

Often in the editorial press and on the blogosphere you see writers trying to convince readers of their beliefs.  For many aggressive writers trying to get notice their position is often:  I’m right, you’re wrong, let me explain how you’re a dumb ass.  One step up in politeness is:  We’re right, they’re wrong, let’s have a good laugh. What I like to see is:  I’m coming from this vantage point, you’re coming from that vantage point, how can we solve a problem together.  Which probably explains why I’m not a popular writer because of my Pollyannaish thinking.

In my last essay on the subject, Faith, Carl posted a very good reply, but I particularly like what he said here:

I think you certainly got part of what I was referring to as ‘faith’ down. The other part is probably most accurately reflected in my feelings about evolution. I certainly believe in the type of evolution that involves adaptation. I believe species can adapt to surroundings, eventually developing new ways to cope with their environment, etc. In fact this kind of thinking most definitely falls in line with biblical ideas about how God’s creation works. I do not, however, believe that any one species evolved into another regardless of how long this ol’ earth may have been around. My own personal view of the ‘theory’ of evolution is that it is that, a ‘theory’, based on observations and calculations of scientists but mostly based on a type of ‘faith’. I don’t recall reading any ‘proof’ that my ancestors came from monkeys and it is certainly not an experiment that can be duplicated in a lab, tested, etc. so my ideas that there is ‘faith’ involved in science in large part comes from the way that a large part of the scientific community and humanity at large accepts the idea of evolution as science ‘fact’ rather than theory. That, in my mind, is no different than the faith I place in the existence of a real and loving and personable God. I know, your hackles are rising, but can you see what I am driving at?

Now this brings us to a very exact problem.  I don’t want to make this an issue of which side is right.  I’m not going to try and convince Carl how I think evolution is a good explanation biological reality.  What I want to do is explore ways in which Carl can have his beliefs and I can have mine and we can develop a social structure that allows us to coexist and communicate.

Science describes a universe 13.7 billion years old.  The Bible, by certain people’s measure, describes a universe that is just several thousand years old.  This is a problem mainly for our public education system.  It’s a problem being fought by school boards and state legislatures.  One solution brought about by creationists, is the theory of intelligent design, an idea that scientists considers an insult to science.  To describe the battle so far, some Christians feel that society went too far by excluding religion from schools.  The original solution to the problem Carl and I are working on was to separate church and state, and that’s still the best solution in my mind.  Evidently, there are conservatives that don’t like that idea, and they want to find ways to change the educational system.

But I don’t want to get into politics.  What I want to explore is how we treat each other personally.  Concurrent to my discussion with Carl, I’ve been discussing Christianity with a lady friend at work.  I told her that even though I’m an atheist I like studying the Bible, and I’m willing to consider some religious teachings as philosophical explorations on down-to-Earth problems.  She said Christianity is about accepting Christ, salvation and rebirth.  I told her I couldn’t go that far.

In fact, while I was talking with her, I had a revelation of my own.  I’ve always tried to imagine a metaphysical aspect to reality where religious people could be right.  I’ve always tried to imagine some kind of wormhole to the spiritual dimensions.  Theoretically, I wanted to give religious beliefs a possible loophole in space and time that could only be found in death where we might exist in some other dimensional realm.  However, while talking with my friend, I realized that I no longer can imagine such a loophole existing.

Where does that leave me?  I feel quite confident that all 6.7 billion of us living on planet Earth all share the same reality.  Whether or not that reality is ruled by some unknown quantum physics that allows for thought to bend the fabric of reality so Christians can be right as well as Richard Dawkins, or Buddhists meditating in a temple in Tibet, is beyond what I can know.  I do know that a couple billion of our 6.7 billion are Christians, and I think Muslims make up another billion or so.  Whatever political and social system we have has to include everyone.

Does that mean that the religious of the Earth are like a more populous Amish, and we should just let them freeze knowledge at some pre-19th century level of discovery?  Is it okay to just let a portion of the population deny Darwin?  Maybe the answer lies in my discovery of how to handle climate deniers that I made last week.

Up until very recently I worried that climate deniers would keep humanity from doing something about global warming, and then I reached a critical mass of observations in the news.  So many nations, states, companies, industries, scientists, educators and citizens are now working on the problem of global warming with the assumption that the theory is valid that it doesn’t matter if millions of people who are doing nothing, deny the concept.  Sometime in the last year, I think a secret vote was taken, and it was decided this was a problem we had to deal with, and people went to work.  A critical mass of scientists accepted the theory, and now the problem of global warming caused by man-made actions is now accepted as fact.

There are millions of people that don’t believe in the income tax, but that hasn’t stopped Uncle Sam from collecting our dough.  The same is true about evolution.  The scientific and academic world accepted evolution as fact a long time ago.  I do not understand linear algebra, but this mathematical discipline can exist quite well without my awareness.  The time to argue Darwin’s ideas was in the late 19th century.  Botanists, zoologist, biologists, and all the people who use the science of evolution in their work took up the idea long ago and made it part of their routine because it worked.

It doesn’t matter that I believe Darwin, because my kind of belief is only a kind of faith. I’m just a fan at the Science Bowl rooting for the Science team.  It doesn’t matter that Carl chooses not to accept the theory of evolution.  As long as he doesn’t try to publish any papers on biology, his lack of belief will go unnoticed.  Is me trying to convince Carl that evolution is right any different that me trying to convince him that the Beatles were a better band than The Rolling Stones?

I think too much of the polarized emotional heat in the press and the blogosphere are people fighting over opinions.  Why should it matter to Christians that some people don’t believe?  Why should it matter to atheists that some people do?

Carl and I love to discover great books.  That’s what we do.  That’s why we’re friends.  I think we need to focus on what we do, and less on what we believe.  In the old days, it was considered impolite to talk about politics and religion publicly.  I think I’m going to take up that custom.  It doesn’t matter if I “believe” in global warming, it only matters if I do something about it.  I need to get away from writing essays about pure ideas and abstract beliefs.  I need to get back to writing about science fiction books.  Those are real.

JWH – 10-4-8