Top 15 of 2008

I thought about doing one of those year-end lists (like best CDs of the year) but I'm never very in touch with what's been released any given year. And furthermore half the time I find myself amazed by old things as if they were new (like a few years ago when I discovered Marvin Gayes' 1971 R&B classic, What's Goinig On). Society has a strong preference for the new, but sometimes old ideas can seem all the more relevant. So I decided to make a list of just top stuff in my life this year. Some are ideas and areas of study while others are new media and entertainment. Think of them as influencers in my life this year. In that sense, they're all things that proved to be novel to me in 2008 (that's why you won't find the sun rising) like little surprises or discoveries for the year. And in that sense as well I hope some of them you might find novel in your life.

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15. Dogs

Previously I never understood why people become so attached to them, though I never gave it much thought. But with new roommates I'm now living with a bunch of dogs and they’re a whole lot of fun like good buds. Dogs definitely make life just a bit richer.

14. The Washington Redskins

Being fully away from any form of school I’ve been able to get back into football. I enjoyed following the Skins throughout high school, but now that my mind’s a bit more matured I suddenly see there’s so much more to the game. This has become my new religion insofar as I set aside time each Sunday and think about it all week...and insofar as it’s not really a religion.

13. The Stock Market

Stock prices fluctuate in relation to demand for them not in relation to how good a company is. On a very intuitive level, this has never made sense to me, and it still doesn’t. But this year I’ve become intrigued with finding good intro books, reading about the market, researching companies, and even buying my first couple of shares. It’s essentially a mind-puzzle, a very tempered and controlled form of gambling. But boy is it intriguing. Sometimes I’ll just go to finance.google.com and watch the numbers change.

12. iTunes Genius

iTunes Genius is like an automated DJ who works with your digital music collection. You “play a song, click the Genius button, and iTunes creates a playlist of other songs from your library that go great together. Genius playlists help you discover songs in your library you never knew you had — and rediscover forgotten favorites.” Each song transition is tasteful and perhaps even artistic. It’s not perfect as it doesn’t recognize every song, and you can only use it for one song at a time. But its playlists really rival my own, some of which I've spent some time on. Even if you prefer to make your own mixes, you can use Genius to generate new ideas when you're stuck.
11. Motley Fool Caps

Motley Fool CAPS is an addictive stock market stimulator in which you vote on which stock picks will out- or under-perform the S&P. It’s as close as you’ll get to a true social networking community focusing on the stock market. And it’s taught me a good bit the market, both through making picks and reading others’ commentary. Tons of people use it and many stocks have thousands of predictions. For instance, Apple is currently the most frequently rated stock with 19,512 members for it and 1,593 members against it. TMF collects the data to generate all sorts of stats on players and stocks. It's only been around since 2006, and they're constantly tweaking it for the better. No one is even sure yet how it’ll turn out: Will it provide accurate real-world predictions? Will the highest rated stocks win out in the long run? In the meanwhile though who cares because it’s more fun than real investing.

10. Good cappuccinos

I’m not one to make elite aesthetic distinctions – they're often just puffs of ego and semantics. But this year a friend introduced me to a coffee shop that makes “real” cappuccinos and boy what a difference. Ones that look like this:

Cappuccinos are supposed to be thick and made with whole milk. The whole point in adding milk is so the dairy fat can bring out the flavor of the coffee. I'm hooked, and Starbucks' – who recently made skim milk their default for cappuccinos – now taste pretty empty to me.

9. metacritic.com

Metacritic.com combines critics' reviews on any given movie, music album, video game, or TV show. Each item gets a combined score across all critics, similar to rottentomatoes but with more media and a more user-friendly layout. I’ll often check it out before – and sometimes after – seeing or purchasing related media. The service is topnotch, since being bought by CBS, who've supplied it with more than adequate bandwidth, better quality control, and new features.

8. Coldplay’s album Viva la Vida

Like a revelation unfolded in sound. The collaboration between Coldplay and producer(/ambient maestro) Brian Eno worked perfectly. Coldplay and Eno are each intellectual aurally-aware introverts – sometimes to a fault – but here they build off each other quite well.



7. Improv acting classes

A few months ago I capriciously decided to give improv acting classes a try, as inspired through this article at CNN. It's taught me some unique life lessons, which I wrote about previously, but moreso it’s just a great release.

6. Slumdog Millionaire

The world is getting more connected, and we could only go on for so long before some artsy director pondered "why not make an American version of a Bollywood film?", and Slumdog Millionaire is the glorified result. An intense journey through the deepest reaches of poverty and fantasy, it’s the sort of film that could only have been released – or made money – this decade. Americans are truly getting smarter with each passing generation. Movies like Slumdog Millionaire or the Dark Knight are too complex and edgy to have been widely accepted a couple of decades ago. I loved them. We’re demanding more from pop-culture Mecca’s like Hollywood, and they’re giving us the goods. For more see Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Check out Slumdog's soundtrack as well.

5. iTunes audio-books

I enjoy music and my iPod gives me freedom to listen to it anywhere. But I’ve recently begun digging iTunes’ audio-books as much as its music. At first I thought that I’d rather just listen to my favorite tunes everywhere and get into a groove. But audio-books have slipped into my daily iPod use with surprising ease. Just be sure to pick ones that aren’t too complex to listen to on the go. For example, an audio version of Newton’s Principia Mathematica won't work.

4. New Balance motion control sneakers

A few months ago I decided to give these shoes a go. They're called motion control shoes, because they have extra support around the arch in order to force your foot into correct pronation. They’ve completely corrected my posture, solved a running injury that I’ve had for years, and allowed me to run again. Who would’ve thought? The New Balance store by me has exceptional customer service as well, far exceeding similar high-end running shoe stores that I tried.

"Graphite Rollbar® is a boomeranging positioned piece of graphite in the midsole which maximizes rearfoot stability. Rollbar can be combined with a TPU medial and/or lateral post for motion control."

3. Economics

Economics suddenly intrigues me to no end. I don’t know what it is, but this topic seems to pervade everything. This year I’ve spent some time trying to finding the right books to teach myself about economics, and so far my picks have exceeded my expectations. Among the top is Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics.

2. Sleep

This year I’ve reached new plateaus in how good my sleep feels. Wrote Vladimir Nabokov, “Sleep is a rose the Persians say.” (For more see a previous post).

1. Robert Pirsig's Zen & the art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I've returned to this book for the first time since a teen and it hits the spot like a popsicle on a hot day. I first read it a decade ago but it seems so much more relevant now. You can feel yourself learning with each page. And I even see how its lessons – which I’d forgotten explicitly came from the book – left their mark on my thinking since I was teenager, such as: the importance of analysis, both regarding its benefits and limits; the notion of honest work; quality and gumption; the limits of ego, opinion, and rigid-thinking. Other lessons are particularly relevant to my life now: the notion of moving laterally in life instead of forward; that roadblocks in life or in the mind are equally or more important than success; the severe limits of the empirical sciences. His discussion on lateral movement is exactly what I find so fascinating about free markets and alternative uses of scarce resources. But the book's reach extends far beyond.

-KJ
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Media (in order of appearance):

Photo: (1) Jason Taylor, 08/16/2008, jf; (2) iTunes Genius logo; (3) CAPPUCCINO, 07/22/2007, by kina3; (4) Movie poster from the 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire, fair use rationale to provide commentary on film; (5) 365/365: Audiobooks, 01/09/2008, by David D Muir; (6) New Balance motion control technology; (7) Cover from Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Video: (1) Music video from caleismachinegun of the song "Lost" by Coldplay from the 2008 album Viva La Vida. Sphere: Related Content

Lucid Quality

I had my first lucid dream the other night, or at least, the first that I remembered anyway. It was rather banal: I dreamed that I’d gotten up and eaten breakfast, realized that I was asleep, and then returned to my dream where I was attending a musical at the Smithsonian or something. When you describe a dream to others, it never sounds as profound as it was in the moment. It’s all about how it registers to the dreamer. At least, the dream seemed to mean something to me…at the time. Sometimes a good deep sleep feels so damn good that I wonder whether sleep is the purpose of life.

It’s become a hippie cliché to go around saying things like, “How do you know that reality isn’t just a dream…man?” This line of thought was started by Descartes (“it’s possible…that all those images, and in general all that relates to the nature of body, are merely dreams or chimeras.”), who went on to create objective realities as widely applicable, exacting, and sobering as the Cartesian coordinate system. Suffice it to say, I tend to think of myself as more in touch with reality than with pseudo-intellectual dead-end ideas. But just the notion of a lucid dream – where you realize in your sleep that you're dreaming, but you keep dreaming – it does make you think, doesn’t it?



This quote has been on my mind for a few months now, it’s from an interview with the Flaming Lips:

We like to sleep. Who doesn’t? I hate it when we run into these people who are like “I hate TV, and I hate sleeping, and I hate these things” because they want to show you how serious and how hard they work all the time. But I don’t trust them. I don’t. People who don’t like to sleep - I don’t trust that they value anything. (i-tunes Original)

To some degree I’m sure we’ve all taken up that mentality at least at one point in our lives: If I could just cut back on my sleep I could accomplish so much more in life. I remember thinking that way at some times in college.

Nowadays it strikes me as ass-backwards. Maybe you have to go through a prolonged period of receiving good sleep to realize that. Or maybe you have to go through a period of getting terrible sleep. But the notion that spending time to sleep is somehow holding you back – even if you’re a busybody – seems paradigmatic of so many logical fallacies in life. On the one hand, you can see exactly why some people would think that way, and on the other hand, it's easy to tell why it's so incorrect. This is why I've recently starting thinking that deep sleep is an end in life, rather than a means toward an end.

Treating sleep as your enemy gets at a very basic error in human life: Confusing quantity for quality. It’s tough because quantity and quality often overlap, each affecting the other. But too often the focus is on quantity, if only because it’s easier for the mind to grasp.

Consider two completely different areas where quantity is severely mistaken for quality:

Obesity and dieting. How often have you heard that if you consume more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight? This maybe true in the most technical sense, but in everyday life, the body lives on more than just calories alone. The logical implication from this overemphasis on calories is that you could go on a sugar-only diet, and if you ate nothing else, and limited your intake of sugar, you’d lose weight. But it’s just not that simple. The body demands a variety of nutrients. And under various idiosyncratic conditions, the body requires more or less amounts of food. One of these conditions, interestingly enough, is sleep: It’s thought that insufficient sleep increases appetite, likely blunting satiety. Not to mention other things that affect calories required, such as menstrual periods, stress, age, muscles, the common cold, and the weather. Just focusing on calories in and calories out is a gross oversimplification, a paradigm that loses more than it contributes.

Government-created jobs and inflation. Anyone reading this blog with any regularity knew this was coming, but it’s the exact same thing: Creating new jobs to stimulate the economy, without thought of the necessity for these jobs, is once again a focus on quantity over quality. Captain Capitalism's blog has a great post about how a job is valuable to begin with because of the necessity that exists in getting it done. The Captain goes further to point out that artificially creating jobs is just like inflation. In the real world, jobs and money are valuable because of their quality, not their quantity. Diminishing quantities of jobs are usually due to their diminishing qualities (e.g., demand), not the other way around.

These are just 2 areas, but they highlight the importance of well thought-out long-term solutions over quick-fixes. Indeed, in the short-term, you can lose weight pretty well by eating less calories, and you can improve the economy by creating jobs and money out of thin air. But these fail in the long-term: When you eat less, your metabolism decreases so that your body holds onto its fat. And when an economy has an unnecessary amount of jobs and paper money, more of it becomes useless. As these examples demonstrate, there are real world implications of mistaking quantity for quality, and often the end-result is the exact opposite of that desired. Indeed, these are the sort of short-term solutions that people come up with when they’re short on sleep.

It's never just about the bottom line. Never. We're born and we die. Just looking at the bottom line, net result: zero. It's always a question of what occurs in between the input and the output. A human body takes in calories and it expends them, just as a corporation takes in money and it spends money. Somewhere in the middle is a creation of quality.

-KJ


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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) krakow: dream of mirrors, 01/28/2008, by smiff; (2) Dream on, dream on., 07/27/2007, by Porcelaingirl; (3) Organic tea nutrition fact sheet, 12/29/2005, by Bruno Girin; (4) Steel Worker Houston Texas 1, 04/03/2006, by billajacobus1; (5) le morning dream, 11/19/2008, by boris.

Video: (1) Music video from xxJustChloex, of the song Vein of Stars, by The Flaming Lips, from the album At War with the Mystics, released in 2006. Sphere: Related Content