Sunday, August 30

Feast for Two

Last night for dinner Shannon and I had a feast for two. It was a lot of food. Salad, garlic bread, pasta, pizza, root beer and cookies that we passed back and forth underneath the table. In the end, we couldn't quite finish all the food, so we had to get a box to take it home. (And yes, all three of us signed it.)

For those of you who haven't already figured it out, St. George now has a Brick Oven! Maybe for the start of next semester we can get some other people to join us here.

Saturday, August 29

Zion

Let's just clear this up right now folks: it's Zion National Park. It is NOT Zions National Park. Nor is it Zion's National Park. There is but a single Zion. One Zion canyon, and it doesn't possess anything. Now, if you'll all kindly quit calling it "Zions", I'll be very grateful.

Friday, August 28

Fake Numbers

In the last few days, I've noticed a few instances of fake numbers. Take any statistic, any measurement, any anything, and you're almost guaranteed to get a non-round number. So, when you see a number that is particularly round, you should get curious. The number on my mind today is 10,000. Evidently that is how many hours it takes to become an expert at something, according to Malcolm Gladwell. (Disclaimer: I've never read anything he's written, other than a lame piece on ESPN.com that was NOT worth my time.) Now, I have no idea how he arrived at that number, but it doesn't make sense. Why would there be something magical about 10,000 hours?

Now, you might be thinking that his point isn't the exact number of hours it takes to master something, he's just driving at the idea that it takes a long time. Well, if that were his point, he should have said, "it takes a long time". Or "it takes years and years". But the one thing I'm almost certain of is that it doesn't take 10,000 hours to become an expert. And when you think about it, you know that number can't really be calculated the way it should be, unless Gladwell managed to somehow measure how much time Bill Gates spent working on computers decades ago, or how many hours John Lennon spent fiddling with his guitar and writing bad songs. In the end, what I think Gladwell did is determine that it takes a really long time to become an expert at something (surprise, surprise) and then picked a nice, round number that matched up with that.