Not To Be Trusted With Knives

Today, my friend Jen defended her PhD!  I didn’t get to attend the defence because The Man made me go to work all day, but I heard from people that were in attendance that Jen rocked it!  Not that there was any doubt that she would!

Here’s a poor quality photo I took of Jen on my iPhone at the Cactus Club, where we went for celebratory drinks tonight.

Congratulations, Dr. Jen!  I hope you are enjoying your new life as one of the club. You deserve it!

A few months ago I was approached to write for CurioCity, a e-zine for teens about science that is produced by the science outreach organization I used to volunteer with. The articles are geared at teens and focus on science in everyday life. Since I’m totally missing the science outreach work I used to do, I thought it would be fun.

Here’s my first article!

I was quite excited when I first heard that Malcolm Gladwell had a new book out.  I received Outliers from Sarah & Dave for Christmas last year, which I devoured while I was in Mexico and soon after I discovered the free e-audiobooks at the library, I quickly devoured Blink and The Tipping Point too.  Love, love, loved all three of those books.  So when I saw that Gladwell’s new book, What the Dog Saw, was at the library as an e-audiobook, I signed right up to get a copy.

After having read it through, all I can give it is  resounding “meh.”  When I first got the book, I didn’t realize that it was just a collection of his old essays. His other books each had an overarching theory for which the book built a case.  And while this book wasn’t intended to be that way¹,  I found it much less compelling than his other books.   The stuff if in the essays was interesting, but it didn’t seem to go anywhere.  You can definitely see glimpses of his other works  – like the essay on how interviewers make snap judgments on people, which is clearly related to Blink – but I already read that stuff in his other books.  Overall, I just felt like this book was put out with the thought “Hey, Malcolm Gladwell books sell like hotcakes – throw one together as fast as you can!” I guess I should have realized when What The Dog Saw was released this year, only a year after Outliers, that he couldn’t have written a whole book of new material and had it published that quickly!

Here’s hoping the next Gladwell book doesn’t come out for a few years!

1. although it’s roughly structured into three separate “sections” of somewhat related essays, there isn’t really a coherent story in there, at least not as far as I could see [↩]

Like last year, I’m teaching a fourth year Food, Nutrition & Health course in which the students engage in formal debates as a way of learning about food science and nutrition topics.  So, like last year, I’m putting this question out to the blogosphere:

I’m looking for topics in the area of nutrition that would make for good debates (specifically, topics that have good scientific evidence to support both sides of the argument).

The topics have to be structured in a “yes” or “no” format as formal debates require that one team agrees with the statement and the other team disagrees with it.

I don’t want to use any of the same topics as last year, as I think it will be too easy to get ahold of the info from the people in last year’s class, so the following topics, which I used last year, are off limits:

• The Canadian grain supply should be fortified with vitamin B12.
• Athletes require a higher protein intake than the current protein recommendations from the Dietary Reference Intakes committee to meet their needs.
• Foods coming from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) should be labeled as such.
• Moderate alcohol intake should be recommended for (non-pregnant) adults.
• Unhealthy foods should be banned from elementary schools in British Columbia.
• High protein diets are healthy and more effective for weight loss than a standard recommended diet.
• Bill C-51 “An Act respecting foods, therapeutic products and cosmetics “ should be passed into legislation.

I’ve already put this question out via Twitter, but I’m looking for as many suggestions as I can get, so please add suggestions in the comments!

Image Credit: Posted by Elle-Epp on http://www.flickr.com/photos/92348589@N00/2292371816/.

It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

-Albus Dumbledore

Since I now spend almost an hour a half a day in my car commuting to work¹ and since I discovered that you can download audiobooks from the library FOR FREE (!), I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks. And since I prefer to read fiction the old fashioned way², I’ve been listening to a lot of business/success type books.  In fact, the first two books I listened to this way³ were ones I listed on my performance plan at work for the “professional development” section. Listening to books while I drive makes me feel less like I’m wasting a full work day per week (!) driving⁴.

One theme that seems to come up over and over again in these books — whether it’s a book on procrastination or negotiation or investing — is priorities and choice.  Kim Kiyosaki in her book, Rich Woman, gives a good example.  She asks, “Would you go to the gym for three hours every day?”  The answer, of course, is “no way! Who has that kind of time?”  Now imagine that your doctor has just told you that you have a life-threatening condition and the only way to cure it is to go to the gym for three hours every day. Would you go?  Of course you would! You’d make sure you fit that into your schedule – you’d chose to spend your time at the gym over every other thing you could be doing. It would become your top priority.  We use “I don’t have time” as an excuse for many things.  But the cold hard fact is – everyone has the same amount of time as every other person in the world – there are 24 hours in the day for each and every one of us and nothing will change that.  And it’s up to us to chose what we want to do with our time ⁵. As I’ve been thinking about it, I realize that I often don’t spend time thinking about the choices I make and I often use the “I dont’ have time to…” excuse.  I don’t have time to go for a run tonight! I don’t have time to clean my apartment! But I somehow have time to spend the evening reading blogs.  So I’ve decided to follow the advice of Dr. Neil Fiore in The Now Habit and change the language I use to help me be more conscious of the choices I make. Rather than say, “I have to do the laundry, so I don’t have time to go for a run tonight,” I’ll say, “I’m choosing to do the laundry rather than go for a run.” And this will prompt me to think about that choice – do I really consider laundry a priority over exercise? If I haven’t done laundry in two weeks and have almost nothing left to wear to work the next day, maybe I do!  Instead of saying, “I have to work on this project at work,” I’ll say “I’ve decided that this project is my top priority and so I’m choosing to work on it today.”  It’s actually quite empowering to think in terms of “I choose” rather than in the victim-like “I have to” or “I should.”  And sometimes I might choose to spend an evening reading blogs rather than doing something productive, but then it’s my choice to do something that I enjoy for an evening and I won’t be left feeling guilty that I wasted my time when I should have been doing something productive.

Anyway, that’s probably enough psychobabble for today. Although I have been reading⁶ a lot of these type of books lately, and I have a lot of thoughts about how the stuff in these books apply to me swirling around in my brain⁷ , so you can probably expect posts about things like procrastination and priorities and suchlike in the next little while⁸.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m choosing to go for a run!

1. that’s nearly 7.5 hrs per week, people! [↩]
2. in an actual book, written on actual paper – preferably curled up with a cup of tea [↩]
3. one on CD and one which prompted the discovered of downloadable MP3 audiobooks from the library [↩]
4. although I will admit that Fridays after work I typically listen to fun podcasts or blare my tunes. I know that I’m just not going to absorb anything more concrete than that on a sunny Friday afternoon! [↩]
5. Now, I’m the first to admit that we are not all on a level playing field when it comes to the choices available to us.  For example, when I was in university, I always had one, sometimes two, jobs to pay the bills, whereas many of my classmates had their bills covered by parents or big scholarships. So I had fewer hours leftover to choose to study or be involved in social or extracurricular activities than others.  Another example – someone who works for minimum wage has to spend more hours working than I do just to cover their basic living expenses, so they don’t have as many “free hours” to choose what to do with.  But we do get to make a lot of choices as to how we do spend our time.  For example, I chose to take on huge student loan debt in order to get an education (and I know a lot of people would not chose to go $70,000+ into debt for school) so that I could get a job doing something I love to do and to make much better money than I would have working in the factory where I worked the summer after my first year of uni [↩]
6. ur, listening to [↩]
7. one disadvantage of listening to books in the car, rather than reading them on the bus like I used to, is that I can’t write down my thoughts as I read and, since I have 7.5 fewer hours a week to do so, well, they tend to build up in my brain until I just have to get them out. No wait, until I just choose to make it a priority to get them out! [↩]
8. But don’t worry, there will still be my usual rants and funny random things from the Internetz interspersed as well! [↩]

So, did I mention I’m a procrastinator?

When I put out the call for donations, I said that anyone who donated to my Blogathon charity woudl earn the right to requeset a topic for one of my blog postings.  Sarah & Dave were the only people who took me up on this offer (which was really more of a help to me than anything, ‘cuz I have to come up with 49 freakin’ topics!)  And they gave me a topic.  And here it is, blog posting #45 and I haven’t yet written it!

But here I am, writing it. Wheee!  OK, so the question they asked as, if I were to write a book, what would it be about.  And I guess I’ve been procrastinating on it because I don’t really know the answer. I have thought that I should write a book on tips for university students, because it’s not so long ago I was one, but I’m also an instructor, so I can give tips, for example, on what instructors want to see in your assignments. Stuff I would want to have known when I was doing my undergraduate.  So, yeah, BO-RING!  Another book I might want to write someday is a cookbook. Except that no one reads cookbooks anymore.  Boo!

Part two of their question was: would it involve a pregnant women being attacked by ninjas?  You see, I once told Dave and Sarah about a scene I envisioned, like for a short film, where a pregnant women is home in her kitchen and then all these ninjas show up to attack her and she has one of those wooden blocks with all the knives in it and she’s grabbing the knives and throwing them into the ninjas and it’s awesome!  But that’s all I’ve got – the image of this scene.  Why is this pregnant women being attacked by ninjas? I don’t know. How did she learn to throw knives so expertly that she can kill all the ninjas?  No idea.  And this is why I don’t write books.

Is it 6 a.m. yet?

Don’t forget to donate!

Read about the charity that I’m supporting, Options for Sexual Health!

ZOMG! I’m such a scatterbrain!  I haven’t even posted Dave’s guest posting yet!  I suck!  Here it is – and, as always with Dave’s writing, it’s freaking hilarious!

Despite this being a theme I suggested, I’ve had a lot of trouble figuring out what to write. I wanted to lock onto one idea—one book—and write about that. Couldn’t do it, though. Instead, I present 17 Random Things Books Taught Me. This started off semi-serious, but it gets dumb and stays dumb from very early on..

If you’re nauseated, you feel sick to your stomach; if you’re nauseous, you make other people sick to their stomach – The Elements of Style

Under certain circumstances, I have found myself rooting for two siblings to have sex with one another –The Hotel New Hampshire

The Weinsteins are brilliant businessmen but complete and utter assholes, and Bob Redford’s a big of a dbag – Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film

Slaughterhouses are awful environments where animals are inhumanely murdered, and where the push for faster and faster production results in even the workers themselves getting mutilated; but all the same, I still likes me a hamburger – Fast Food Nation

To kick heroin, you will need: one room which you will not leave, soothing music, ten tins of tomato soup, eight tins of mushroom soup, one large tub of vanilla ice cream, milk of magnesia, Paracetamol, mouthwash, vitamins, mineral water, Lucozade, pornography, one mattress, three buckets (for urine, feces, vomit), one television set, and Valium. Alternately: never do heroin. – Trainspotting

There are books I have read and hated but will keep and display on my shelf forever just because I love the cover design. – A Polished Hoe

If you have a spiritual philosophy that’s best summarized in nine bullet points, and you stretch it out to a ‘novel’ with no real characters or plot, and the narrator just keeps running into people who vomit information at him for two hundred and fifty pages—there’s a pretty good chance your book will make seventy kajillion dollars – The Celestine Prophecy

Clowns are fucking scary. – IT

Stories of dystopic nightmare futures are made that much more bleak when described in very long sentences with little to no punctuation. – The Road

The big-breasted look might not always be in fashion. – What To Expect When You’re Expecting

If you take a big pile of money that your parents gave you, and you burn it, and then you drift across the States for a while, and then you go out to the middle-of-fucking-nowhere-Alaska alone, armed with nothing but a bag of rice and your questionable wits, and then you die—I’m not really gonna feel that bad for you. – Into the Wild

Moloko is milk, bog is god, glazies are eyes—and I still don’t know what the sloochavvy is. – A Clockwork Orange

Everything I ever needed to know, I learned in kindergarten. – Everything I Ever Needed To Know, I Learned in Kindergarten

Never fake being crazy to stay out of prison. Chances are pretty good that you’ll end up lobotomized, then suffocated with a pillow. On the bright side, the large native man who killed you will then throw an air conditioner through a window and run away to his freedom. – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

There’s a John Steinbeck book where one of the characters tortures another character by stabbing their genitals with a knitting needle(!?!) – East of Eden

If you’re good son who does all the hard work, minds the farm, lives well, and generally respects your dad, and you have a shithead brother who goes all prodigal, asks for his inheritance early, blows it all on (we can only assume) hookers, then comes back begging when he’s all poor and hungry, your dad will throw him the mother of all parties, which makes him a bit of a dick too. – The Bible

That Gatsby character: not so great, actually. – The Great Gatsby

So, my guest posters have been *much* better than I have with the whole “Stuff Books Taught Me” theme.  And they’ve written these beautiful, touching, insightful masterpieces.  And me, not so much.  But they have inspired me to talk about the first book I remember: Donkey Daniel in Bethlehem.

It’s a book about the Christian nativity, told from the point of view of Daniel, the donkey who carried Mary to Bethleh2m.  I *loved* that book. I made my parents read it to me over and over and over again.  Until I knew it word-for-word. I knew at which point to turn the page.  I truly, truly believed I knew how to read.  I mean, when people were “reading” they were looking at book, saying words and turning pages.  I was doing that. Thus, I was reading right?  I think I was about 3, maybe 4, at this time – it’s one of my earliest memories.

And then I remember trying to read a different book… I picked it up, opened it and… nothing. I didn’t know what it said!  And I remember this very clearly, I thought, “Oh no!  I’ve forgotten how to read!!”  Seriously, I didn’t think, “Oh, I have just memorized that other book,” I thought “I’ve forgotten how to read!!”

I think I also really liked the book because it had “Beth” in the title¹.  I may also have believed that I was the second coming of the Virgin Mary. Because, you know, my name is actually “Mary”².

It made sense to my 3-year-old brain.

¹see, I’ve always been a rampant narcissist!
²Mary Elizabeth.

It’s time for… a list!  Who doesn’t love lists?  Hitler, that’s who.  Everyone else loves lists.  And now I give you one.  It’s the list of all the books I currently have out of the library.  Correction: the libraries. Because I have some books out of the VPL and some out of UBC library.

Books I Have Out of the VPL:

• Eat that Frog: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy (Mp3 audiobook)
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell (MP3 audiobook)
• Getting To Yes Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher (CD audiobook)
• They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter In Persuasive Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein (an actual book!)
• Getting Things Done by David Allen (MP3 audiobook – I’m on the wait list for this one)

Books I Have Out of the UBC Library:

• Planning and evaluating health programs: A primer by Charles Hale, Frank Arnold, Marvin T. Travis
• Doing qualitative research: A practical handbook by David Silverman
• Enhancing university teaching: Lessons from research into award-winning teachers by David Kember & Carmel McNaught
• Discussion with more students by Graham Gibbs
• Sage qualitative research kit edited by Uwe Flick
• Doing conversation, discourse and document analysis by Tim Rapley
• Re-thinking science: Knowledge and the public in an age of uncertainty by Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott &Michael Gibbons.
• Structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn.
• Program theory-driven evaluation science : strategies and applications by Stewart I. Donaldson
• Research methodology for sport and exercise science : a comprehensive introduction for study and research edited by Herbert Haag
  
• Evaluating health promotion: Practice and methods edited by Margaret Thorogood &Yolande Coombes
• Program evaluation: An introduction by David Royse
• Philosophy and the sciences of exercise, health and sport: Critical perspectives on research methods edited by Mike McNamee

Don’t forget to donate!

Read about the charity that I’m supporting, Options for Sexual Health!

A guest posting from my Official Statisitian and Tattoo Consultant

Holy crapshite!

I almost forgot to write my blog entry! I’m horrible. But then again, I remembered so maybe I’m not so horrible after all. I blame my PhD, and my Post Doc, and a slew of other academic pursuits for my memory lapse. I also blame the universe for failing to remind me in a timely manner that I need to write a blog entry. Furthermore, I blame pants, spiders and any sort of pant wearing spider. The reasons for this should be obvious. Granted, I probably should really blame the beers that I drank last night, in place of working on said academic pursuits and blogging. But who can really blame beer for anything? It’s all tasty and wonderful and full of wholesome goodness.

So this is my first official blog entry for Not To Be Trusted With Knives. In fact, it’s my first blog entry ever. I’m a blog virgin if you will. So please, dear reader be gentle; it’s my first time. Truth be told, I’m stoked and nervous. Stoked because it is a huge honour to be writing for NTBTWK. Nervous, because I don’t really know what to write about, and I have a lot to live up to, especially given the awesomeness of the posts that one regularly reads here.

So, what to write about? As I sit here contemplating the theme (“Stuff books taught me”), I find myself at a bit of an impasse. Why? Well, despite my love for all things statistical and mathematical, I’m guessing that most readers likely don’t want to read about Bayesian priors, Multivariate Conditionally Autoregressive Random effects, or Poisson Mixture Models, really, ever [1]. In fact, based on my experience, most people tend to find a reason to leave the conversation if ever I go on a statistically laced rampage. I find this especially true when I make the effort to strike up a conversation with family and friends, or that random person on the bus that has that look about them. You know the look I’m referring to. It’s the I-want-to-know-everything-you-know-about-stats look. I’m sure you’ve all experienced that before. Hence, I need to figure out other “stuff books taught me” in order to satisfy the theme of this particular blog-tastic blogathon. But what makes up the “stuff books taught me”?

If I think back to my earliest book-perience [2], I find myself a child of the tender age of [insert whatever age one would be in grades 1 and 2] [3]. So there I was, an innocent [insert whatever age one would be in grades 1 and 2] year old going to the school library. The uniqueness of this particular visit is what makes it stand out in my memory. Specifically, this visit was to extend beyond the typical sit-down-and-listen-to-a-story as read to us by the librarian. In this case, we were tasked with the additional responsibility of choosing a book to check out and read at home. Being the nerdly fellow that I was, I was beside myself with excitement. Which book would I choose? How would I know that it was the book for me? Would people think me weird if I were to choose say, book A: Happy Days for Mr. Mugs, or book B: Where the Sidewalk Ends [4]. I frantically searched through the shelves, looking for that one book that spoke to me. The book that would be My Book. The book that would forever be my first.

This book was too ugly, that one too thin. A book about dinosaurs, that might work. A book about rainbows – no. A book about knights – maybe, but not quite. Fire breathing dragons? Monsters under the bed? Jelly-Belly? Little Ms. [anything]? No. No. No. No. I was losing patience and running out of time. The clock was ticking and I was the only one without a book. My teacher, Mrs. Hannigan, had already informed us that our time was running out. But where was my book? I was lost, heartbroken, confused and frustrated. So many emotions for such a young boy. And then, when I thought all was lost, a glimmer of something. To my left, shoved between two larger, uglier books which surely read of stupid cowboy adventures or saving the damsel in distress, there it was. A thin, simple book. But oh this book! The title spoke to me: “Where the Wild Things Are”. I knew it was love the minute I touched it. The minute I cracked it open and saw the pictures, touched the pages, smelled the ink. They weren’t just pictures, they were more than art, they were images of a place that I knew intimately from my moments of make believe. It was as if someone had reached into my head and made real the world that I believed in, but up until that point thought was only in my mind. This world existed and I had documented proof. While the thoughts that ran through my brain were a blur, I distinctly remember thinking, “I must find this island”. It became my mission whenever and wherever I could, to seek out the “Wild Things”. I carried that book with me all the time. I often hid it in the library behind other books that no one would read so that I would know exactly where it was to check it out and keep it just for me. I had my book and I wasn’t about to share it with anyone. “Where the Wild Things Are” taught me about adventure, about exploration. It made me realize that monsters aren’t scary. It made me love books. It was my first book, and I love it to this day.

So, what makes up the “stuff books taught me”? I think, above all other lessons books have provided, beyond all the questions they have posed, assumptions they have prodded and poked, past the heartbreaks and adventures; above all of this, books have taught me how to stay forever young. For any time I’m feeling too caught up with the world, events of my life, the stresses of jobs, the stresses of relationships, family, etc., I know that I can always, always pick up “Where the Wild Things Are” and instantly be transported to that day in the library when I first discovered my love for books, and the feeling that someone could write not just for me, but to me, about me. That I could always revive the kid in me, and fully believe that there is an island out there just for me and my adventures with the “Wild Things”.

I only hope that the movie adaptation (which is hitting theatres October 16, 2009) lives up to the beauty that is “Where the Wild Things Are” [5] I know that I will be one of the first in line to see the movie and will, without a doubt, be instantly 7 years old again when I watch it. I can’t wait!

Dan
Official Statisitian and Tattoo Consultant of NTBTWK

[1] Although, for the life of me I don’t understand who wouldn’t want to read about that! Go Stats!
[2] Copyright!
[3] I’d do the math, because I’m all I-love-Math-all-the-time, except I’m a little rough due to the beer consumption from the previous eve. Hence, you’ll have to forgive my laziness for not calculating the appropriate age.
[4] Both fantastic reads. Of course, I think the latter holds more value to me than the former.
[5] Check out the trailer here: http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/wherethewildthingsare/

Don’t forget to donate!

Read about the charity that I’m supporting, Options for Sexual Health!