What Netflix Thinks of Us
I don’t know if I feel known or condemned by the monikers. “Fighting the System” made me laugh the hardest.
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
This morning I finished my first book of the year, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The sub-title is The Story of Success and I think that’s a good summation of the book. Outliers a pop-science book where Gladwell gives blends interesting examples to illustrate a series of points about what determines who succeeds and why.
One basic point is that the outrageously successful of the world are successful not just because they are smart and work hard (very hard) but also because history, family, and culture come together and provide them the chance to be outrageously successful.
For example, Bill Gates born 10 years earlier would not have had access to computers at all. Bill Gates born into a different family would not have had a mom who raised money to put a computer in his Seattle high school. Bill Gates born in the same year but in Hendersonville would not have had been hired to program for power plant HR systems as a high schooler.
In making his points about success Gladwell fills the book with interesting tidbits about why Korean pilots crashed 17 times more often than American pilots pre-2000, why being born in January makes you four times more likely to be hockey all-star than your friend born in December, and why poor elementary school kids learn more during the school year than their rich peers and still end up behind in test performance by fifth grade.
Fun, interesting, and short if this kind of stuff interests you.
Snow!
For you Nebraska folks this 5-10 inches might not seem like much, but for Southerners this is a lot of snow!
Econ Rap Video
I thought this was an amazing parable/rap. Admittedly I study the intersection of macroeconomics and politics for a living, but I thought this was a nice way to talk about the two major points of view about stimulus packages and why the federal government is taxing us just as much as they are.
Plus Ke$ha likes it.
NPR and Planet Money
I regularly listen to NPR’s Planet Money podcast about current economic trends and economic history so I’m delighted to be quoted on their blog yesterday. They really liked my suggestion and comments in response to one of their stories. Next month they’ll be interviewing the economist I suggested.
I am pretty excited to be influencing the national debate just the tiniest bit and to have my training do some good outside the academy. 
Learning to Bake Again
Our gas oven is a bit . . . ah . . . elderly. Very functional, but elderly. As such, I’ve always estimated temperature by the thermometer in the oven instead of the gauge on the stove. What hadn’t quite sunk in over the last six years is that the oven thermometer itself might also been elderly.
How elderly you might ask?
65 degrees too high, that’s how elderly, or so the new oven thermometer has revealed.
Just think, for years I’ve thought that the reason I’ve never burned anything is that I’m such a clever cook.
In addition to wondering how I’ll have to adjust my sense of cooking times, I wonder if there is an upper limit to how highly I can think of myself without cause!
The Annual Read
Last week I let it slip in class that I’m reading Lord of the Rings again, possibly for the 13th or 14th time but certainly in double digits. When the students rolled their eyes and laughed at me for reading LOTRs again, I hurriedly (and awkwardly) said that it changed my diction. That’s true in that as Tolkien’s sentence structure is different and I do find myself speaking differently after a read, but that’s not why I read them.
I read them because I find them beautiful.
Elizabeth wrote today about how she is rereading a favorite book and it’s taught her more about community and healing than many of her seminary classes. I resonate with that. I find Tolkien’s eye for the natural world to be amazing. As I think again about traveling to Europe, love how his descriptions of the Shire to perfectly evoke England to me; Rivendell, Lauterbrunnen; and Ilithien, the dry, piney, Adriatic isles I’ve vacationed on. Today, as I drove to David and Tosha’s, I saw beauty on the streets because I noticed, because I’ve been tracking the thoughts of someone who notices beauty.
I read them because the move me. I’m in the second half of The Two Towers and just passed one of the tenderest moments in the book.
I love them because they remind me that I do have a secret hope, that I am on a long journey that is meaningful, that beauty will triumph over darkness, and that my ultimate success, like Frodo, comes despite my own claims and through another’s death.
These are the kind of messages I want to be continually filling myself with (even if it means undergraduates laugh at me).
At Center Court
Yesterday I was recognized at half time of the UNC game for winning a teaching award. I thought it worked out rather nicely that I got to stand dead on center court. Dad got to go down to the front row and snap a few shots, which was great. I liked this one particularly.
Pointing to Mom and Charity
I liked this shot that Dad took. I look like I’m calling my shot but I’m actually point to Mom and Charity. It was great to have each of them there.
Power Sleep
Katie recommend Power Sleep by Dr. James Maas over Christmas. After our conversation, I’ve been thinking a good bit about how CP and I need to get more sleep. We strive for eight hours and have been better about it yet I still could go back to bed now (10am) and am still excited about naps during the day . . . hmm.
Given how important Dr. Maas says solid sleep is for creativity, gracefulness, and safety, I’m starting to wonder if our sleep patterns should be a topic of community discussion as much as other deeply personal topics that effect ourselves and our neighbors like our eating, exercise, weight and finances.
I found this paragraph particularly compelling,
According to Stanely Coren, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, in the four days after we lose one hour of sleep following the spring shift to daylight savings time, there is a 7% increase in accidental deaths compared to the week before and the week after – a pattern that is reversed in the fall when we gain one hour of sleep on a given night.
The Arms of Krupp
After many long weeks, I’ve finished The Arms of Krupp by William Manchester which is the story of the Krupp family and their giant manufacturing firm based in western Germany. I picked it up because I wanted a bit of history about Germany before WWII.
It was interesting to read the history of a family and a firm instead of simply an individual. In truth, the Krupps themselves could be rather dull lot. What makes the story is how they were intertwined with ruling elite of Germany. Let’s put it this way, there’s a chapter in the book titled “We’ve hired Hitler” and that is a pretty accurate statement.
The book focused on the Krupp family which was the German equivalent of the Rockefellers, unbelievably rich and powerful or of the Ford family, ruling the lives of a 100,000 or more workers. They were friends of kings and prime misters.
They were the armorer of the world: creating cannon that could shell England from France, selling arms to Russia, China, Turkey and others, and being the primary armorer of the Reich itself.
Like most biographies it was full of colorful details, including some lurid and some shocking. My favorite was that one of the patriarchs found the smell of manure invigorating and built his office over a stable with vents that let the smell waft up into his office. Wow.
Alfried Krupp after his early release from prison.
The saddest part of the book was easily the description of Krupp slavery during WWII. The author makes a point to use the German word sklaven as he reviews the Firm’s memorandum about selecting, feeding, and using sklavenarbeiten (slave laborers). Jews, Slavs, Frenchmen, and Belgians were all enslaved in the vast Krupp works, creating machinery for the German war machine.
The despicable detailed and specific horrors of the Krupp firm, which Manchester painstakingly traces to the head of the family, resulted in Alfried Krupp’s Nuremberg conviction for war crimes. Then, in a strange turn of events, Alfried, a man responsible for the deaths of thousands, is released after just three years in prison.
In the 1970s, having survived and prospered for centuries, the firm finally falls apart, having borrowed well beyond it’s means as its businesses hemorrhage money. Today my Krupp food processor was made by a stock holding company, not by a business run by a sole proprietor.
But besides the story of the family and of German politics it is also a story of business: one giant, sprawling business that dominated Europe. Manchester tries to keep one out of the realm of accounting but the simple facts of business where what drove the Krupps, drove their politics and drove Germany.
In the end I don’t know what I thought of the book. I would not recommend its 800 odd pages unless you’re very interested in the making of Germany or in the German war economy. Even then, I would recommend different reads. That said, I do admire the amount of work Manchester did for the book, the lucid writing and compelling story that he presents. Reading Manchester makes me think again about the importance of investigative journalism, both as history and as a means of framing and understanding current events. I’m glad he set down this story, even if it was a long one to get through.
DPP Day 24: Part Human, Part Machine
But if Jeanie is a cyborg, then what does that make Charity?
