Category Archives: Random

Dutch drivers are taught that when you are about to get out of the car, you reach for the door handle with your right hand — bringing your arm across your body to the door. This forces a driver to swivel shoulders and head, so that before opening the door you can see if there is a bike coming from behind. Likewise, every Dutch child has to pass a bicycle safety exam at school. The coexistence of different modes of travel is hard-wired into the culture.

Related:

Cyclists can’t carry six bags of groceries; bulk buying is almost nonexistent. Instead of shopping for a week, people stop at the market daily. So the need for processed loaves that will last for days is gone. A result: good bread.

It's from a piece on the Dutch and bicyles, via Bobulate.

Fill out this structure:

• Once upon a time….
• And every day ….
• Until one day ….
• And because of that ….
• And because of that ….
• Until Finally ….
• Ever since that day ….
• And the moral is….

And you've got your story.

It's from Chris Yeh.

Things I would blog about were I blogging more regularly (normal pace will return in August):

Peter Beinart on Rep. Anthony Weiner:

How many of the pundits mocking Weiner have marriages that could survive the kind of scrutiny they have been giving his? The realization that everyone’s private life is messy and flawed should produce humility and compassion. Instead, pundits enter the public arena as disembodied Olympian figures, entitled to render the harshest of verdicts, secure in the knowledge that no one will ever investigate their most intimate of domains.

The kick-them-while-they're-down culture was also on display after the Mavs beat the Heat and LeBron hate escalated to epic levels. Speaking of LeBron, here's Bill Simmons on LeBron, which may be relevant to anyone born with multiple natural talents:

Is it possible that he's so talented that he never ended up concentrating on one great thing? He never developed a go-to gimmick like Dirk's high-post game, Wade's one-on-one game, Kobe's one-on-one game, Duncan's low-post game … he's like one of those fancy diners that has a six-page menu loaded with options, only when you ask the waitress what's good, she says, "I don't know, everything!" But wait … I asked you what's good.

Simmons recently launched Grantland. From his excellent opening post, on why he's running a collaborative site instead of penning solo columns:

Writing is a fundamentally lonely thing. It's just you and a blank Microsoft Word document. The process can drive people crazy. (And has.) It's much more fun to create something with other people. It just is.

The Last Psychiararist on Julian Assange:

Assange believes that truth needs no intent, which is obviously false. Without a context, the truth can mislead.  Excluding the context on purpose, when you know that it will be misunderstood, is often as good as lying.  This has always been my/everyone's concern about Wikileaks.

Robin Hanson quotes the following, in a post about wearing helmets while biking:

Ordinary cycling is not demonstrably more dangerous than walking or driving, yet no country promotes helmets for either of these modes.

An interesting account of how someone went to therapy to deal with severe social anxiety. He gives a nerveracking presentation in front of others, and then:

But then [the therapist] played back the video of my presentation, and I was even more surprised. The thoughts rushing through my head really were not apparent at all in the video. I seemed a little nervous, but nothing compared to how I actually felt.

Here are the 20 Thiel Fellows under age 20 who won the $100k grant. They look great.

Seth Godin writes:

If you're going to work…

work hard.

That way, you'll have something to show for it.

The biggest waste is to do that thing you call work, but to interrupt it, compromise it, cheat it and still call it work.

In the same amount of time you can expend twice the effort and get far more in exchange.

Agreed, so why don't people work hard? Here's a non-obvious reason: working hard is risky. If you work hard and fail, you don't enjoy the self-protection that less than 100% effort affords. If you get a C on a test in school, and you didn't study much, then it's no big deal — you just didn't study enough. If you get a C on a test in school, and you studied really hard for it, then you must just be dumb.

In other words, if you work hard and fail, there's the presumption that you're innately not very talented. If you don't work hard and fail, you can credibly preserve the belief or illusion that had you only put forth 100% effort, it would have worked out.

(A hat tip on this idea is owed to some writer I can't remember, maybe Gladwell.)

In the film Baisers volés, Delphine Seyrig explains to her young lover the difference between politeness and tact: "A visiting gentleman accidentally opens a bathroom door and discovers a woman completely nude. He quickly takes a step back, closes the door, and says, 'Pardon, Madame!' That is politeness. The same gentleman, pushing the same door, discovering the same completely naked woman, then says, 'Pardon, Monsieur!' That is tact." It is only in the second case, by pretending not to have seen enough even to make out the sex of the person in the shower, that one displays true tact.

— from Slavoj Zizek's essay in the January 20 issue of the London Review of Books, via April issue of Harper's, pg 13.