Two chemists walk into a bar.
The first says, “I’d like to order some H20.”
The second says, “I’d like to order some H20, too.”
The second man dies.
++
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar.
The first orders a beer.
The second orders half a beer.
The third orders a quarter of a beer.
The fourth begins to order, but, before he does, the bartender cuts him off, puts two beers on the bar and says, “you guys need to know your limits.”
Jess: AND TAKE OUT THE TRASH!!
Me: You know you don’t have to yell at me just to get me to do something.
Jess: Yes I do! You’re voice activated.
Cleaning out my closet this spring, I tossed at least a dozen t-shirts and button-downs whose armpits had yellowed beyond acceptability. I went online to see if any cleaning products might help (answer: Oxiclean, though not enough to save that deeply yellowed batch), and discovered more importantly that it’s not the sweat, but rather the acidic aluminum in antiperspirants, that drives the color shift in the first place.
Still, that new knowledge presented me with an ugly Catch-22: better to scare people off with pit-stains, or with pit-stink? I had tried deodorant (as opposed to antiperspirant) a few times in the past, due to concerns about aluminum’s healthfulness, and each time had quickly sweated my way out of thinking that was an even vaguely publicly-acceptable solution.
So it was with more than a little skepticism that, on a friend’s recommendation, I tried out MenScience Advanced Deodorant. The brand name “MenScience” sounded like something out of a Saturday Night Live commercial. The fact that it was unscented seemed even less likely to work (what did deodorant even do without antiperspirant, aside from masking scent?). And ‘active ingredients’ like tea tree extract and witch hazel made me feel like the stuff might be better sold at a booth at Burning Man.
Despite it all, it works. After a few days of use, I found that MenScience Advanced Deodorant, stupid name and all, left me with less armpit smell at the end of the day than even high-aluminum-content products like Certain Dri.
Color my armpits surprised. And not, for a change, yellow.
I have always thought that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes, and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he first forms a good plan, and, cutting off all amusements or other employments that would divert his attention, make the execution of that same plan his sole study and business.
– Benjamin Franklin
Sometimes, you come across a piece of technology so blindingly obvious, you wonder how it didn’t already exist.
Consider Kwaga’s excellent WriteThat.Name: it plucks information from people’s email signatures, and uses it to update your Gmail contacts.
It’s so effective, I’ve now stopped manually entering contacts into my address book, and simply synch my iPhone directly with my Gmail contact list.
Definitely worth giving WriteThat.Name a try yourself.
Last night, talking with Jess, I said something about nihilism. I said it ‘nee-hilism’, which prompted her to say, “I thought that was nye-hilism”. According to Google, both of us are correct, which Jess found wildly disappointing: “Now how is one of us going to lord it over the other?”
So it seemed apropos, later that evening, when I discovered both Pronunciation Book and Pronounciation Manual.
The first teaches non-native speakers how to pronounce tricky-looking English words:
The second, while visually indistinguishable, teaches non-native speakers how to butcher those words in hugely embarrassing ways.
Given my own history of pranks (cf.), I must admit this made me laugh to the point of nearly wetting myself. And, like any good prank, it also made me think. Given that we rely ever-more on the Internet as a source of definitive information – on anything from pronunciations to legal and medical matters – it’s more than a bit surprising how little we worry about separating the truthy from the actually true.
Even decades before I started CrossFit NYC, I was deeply fascinated by fitness. I’d read textbooks, medical journals, any fitness websites I could find. From the anaerobic pathway to Zatsiorsky’s power output formulae, I consumed it all.
Nutrition, though: not so much. I read up enough to become a very early Paleo Diet convert, have kept up sufficiently to field the odd question from gym members or from family and friends. But after even fairly cursory amounts of nutrition reading, I inevitably find my eyes glazing, resort to a fast skim of the balance of the text. I’d like to know more about nutrition; I just don’t want to put in the work.
About six months ago, I discovered Paul Jaminet’s excellent book, The Perfect Health Diet. It is, by far, the best diet and nutrition book I’ve found. (It’s also perhaps the best researched; each page is about half text and half footnote.) And I discovered his equally smart and thoughtful blog, which synthesizes cutting-edge information through a lens of deep domain expertise and common sense.
And, in short, I realized that I could save a lot of time and angst by just making Paul my outboard nutrition brain. Here was a generally brilliant guy, who already knew much more about the field than I did, and who was following new developments far more closely than I could make myself. So why not just piggyback on his erudition, and simply agree with whatever he concluded?
More recently, I’ve been thinking that I might similarly be able to offload some of my political and economics brain. Reading and watching more of Fareed Zakaria, I’ve found myself being impressed by, and agreeing with, virtually everything he says. Sure, I continue to consume political and economic books, articles and podcasts. But the world is a big and complicated place. And I simply can’t keep up, in depth, on all fronts, with somebody who spends more time and energy – and has for decades – on a given subject than I do.
I’ve been kicking the idea around in general: if I want to be a well-versed generalist, but also believe that I accomplish more when I focus on less, can I square the circle by outsourcing more and more of my less-critical thinking to an array of outboard brains?
Recently, we picked up a new office printer, a Brother HL-2270DW.
This morning, I discovered it prints double-sided.
For some reason, I find this wildly exciting.
“Steve was among the greatest of American innovators — brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.”
– Barack Obama
Last year, I gave a talk about Paleo Fitness (with CFNYC‘s inimitable Allison Bojarski) for the Eating Paleo in NYC Meetup.
The thesis was simple: the same evolutionary thinking that drives the increasingly popular Paleo Diet could be applied equally well to fitness – to how we exercise, how we move, and how we live our lives.
So, I pulled together some slides on, as we put it, “caveman lessons on performing better, living longer, and looking good naked.”
The event was very well attended, and I’ve been meaning to record a web version ever since. I finally did. Part one below; look for parts two and three at some point in the next two weeks.