March reading slowed down quite a bit.  I got four books read, which gives me 19 for the year.  Still on pace for my goal of 75, but off my stretch goal pace.

• The Prisoner’s Dilemma
  A discussion of game theory, John von Neumann, and the history of the American nuclear arsenal.  I had a passing interesting in game theory, and this book satisfied that.  Enjoyable read, but meandered quite a bit.
• The Crisis Caravan
  Alarming book about the state of humanitarian aid. The author was a journalist in crisis zones for 15 years, and if the stories she tells are true, then most aid to the third world does more harm than good. It either aids the bad guys, is stolen by criminals, or becomes yet one more thing that people fight over.
• Condi
  A biography of Condoleezza Rice.  It was overly positive – to the point of gushing – and it was written in 2002 (this was the first edition) so it missed her stint as Secretary of State, but it was a good introduction to her life and history.  A truly amazing woman.
• Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life
  A young adult novel that my daughter read and wanted me to read too.  The story of a 13-year-old boy who lost his father in an auto accident.  His Dad has left him a locked box which contains “the meaning of life,” and the boy must find a way to get it open by his birthday. The writing was a bit simplistic and snarky, but the story was good with a really fantastic surprise ending.

Once, when I was in the military, I was doing a PT with the Marines.  I was 19-year-old gym rat at the time, never far from my copy of Muscle and Fitness, and I thought it wise to explain to the drill sergeant that sit-ups were inefficient.  They used too much of the hip erector muscles, not the abdominals.  If we switched to crunches, I reasoned, we’d all see a lot better ab development, and isn’t that the point?

The drill sergeant paused, took a deep breath, and responded:

Son, the United States Marine Corps doesn’t give a sh*t what your stomach looks like.  The Corps only cares THAT YOU CAN SIT THE F*CK UP WHEN WE TELL YOU TO!

Profanity aside, that’s a pretty profound thought.

For the record, I was right – sit-ups are technically inefficient if the point is to develop your abs.  However, they’re not inefficient if the point is to get better at sitting up.  If that’s your goal then full-range sit-ups are exactly what you should be doing.

More generally, if you’re a soldier in an active combat zone, do you care what your muscles look like?  Or do you simply care that they help you perform work?  The brick wall at the end of a dead-end alley doesn’t care how many strict bicep curls you’ve done standing in front of a mirror at the gym.   All the bicep curls in the world aren’t going to save you if you can’t crawl over that wall in 60-pounds of gear.

For as long as I can remember, the American exercise industry has been muscle-centric.  Most everything we do in a gym revolves around specific muscles.  In the average health club, they have machines to isolate almost every individual muscle and this is how they tell us to work out.  Go muscle by muscle, making sure you exercise them all.

We’ve been told that it’s essentially a three-step process.

1. We should do Exercise A, which will
2. Develop Muscle B, which will
3. Improve our performance on Movement C

A “movement” is defined as a coordinated use of multiple muscles to perform some type of work in the real world.  Getting better at a movement is really the entire point of strength training.

For instance, we might do a shoulder lateral raise (the exercise) to develop our deltoids (the muscle) so that it’s easier to lift something over our heads (the movement).

But what if we just cut out A and B?  What if we just went straight to Movement C and practiced that?  Instead of doing a specific exercise like shoulder laterals designed to isolate and develop our deltoids, what if we just started lifting stuff over our heads?  I mean, that’s the entire point, right?

This is a movement-centric method.  Instead of doing exercises to work out muscles so we get better at movements, we just do the movements, and, in the process, we work muscles.  The movement is the thing. The muscles are just along for the ride.

This flies in the face of everything I ever learned in the gym as a teenager.  Back then, we obsessed at what “lifts” were the best to develop each individual muscle.  Isolation was key – you tried to find some lift that just destroyed a single individual muscle, to the exclusion of everything else so you contorted yourself into increasingly contrived positions that had nothing to do with reality and only existed inside the walls of the gym.  But it was okay, because movements were just a means to the end of developing muscles.

Then I went to CrossFit, and all this changed.

In CrossFit, you isolate nothing.  CrossFit is almost totally movement-centric.  You do movements, which end up developing muscles, but that’s just a side-benefit.  The focus is on the movement.  Yes, yes, your muscles will get bigger over time, but that only matters insofar as it makes you better at the movement.

I’ve never done a shoulder lateral raise at CrossFit, but I’ve done a hell of a lot of lifting stuff over my head.  I’ve never done a crunch either, but I do sit-ups all the time – either all by themselves, or as part of some other movement that requires me to get up off the ground (Reverse Burpees, anyone?  Turkish Get-Up?).

For example, take the dreaded Toes 2 Bar.  For this movement, you dead hang from a bar, and then you swing your feet all the way up until you touch them to the bar where your hands are. (As you might suspect, this sucks very, very much.)

When explaining this movement, at no time did a CrossFit coach ever tell me which muscles I was supposed to be working.  That wasn’t the point.  The point was to get my toes to touch the bar, full stop.  Any muscle development that occurred because of that was, well…incidental.

An outsider could critique this movement a dozen different ways: “If you stop halfway, you’ll isolate the abs better,” etc.  But these critiques would be mostly misplaced. The idea of a Toes 2 Bar as an exercise specifically designed to isolate the abdominals is a strawman that’s easy to tear down.  The fact is that the Toes 2 Bar is nothing more than you touching your friggin’ toes to the bar.

You might not know exactly what muscles you’re working, but that’s cool – while you’re intellectualizing about it, some dude half your size just did a dozen of them. Stop over-thinking it, dumbass.

Does not knowing what exactly muscles are involved detract from this exercise?  Nope.  The morning after I did these for the first time, everything hurt.  My forearms, my biceps, my lats (upper back), my abdominals all the way down through my groin to my upper thighs.  The entire front of my body was a seething mass of pain.  Turns out, I worked a lot of different muscles, and to this day, I can’t tell you what they all are.  But I still do Toes 2 Bar, and I get better at them every week.

At CrossFit, you don’t think about muscles. No movement is ever done with the primary intent of developing any specific muscle.  The movements are done with the primary intent to get better at the movements.  Secondarily, you’ll develop the muscles involved, but you’ll also develop all the ancillary functionality necessary to do the movement well – things like coordination, timing, balance, stamina, and kinetics.

Remember that our physical lives – you know, the stuff we do outside the gym – are a series of movements.  Muscles are just a means to an end. We should be doing strength development to get better at movements, not just work muscles.  Do you care if your shoulders are strong, or do you care that you can lift a box over your head and put it on a shelf?  If you concentrate on the latter, the former will come.

Admittedly, you can do it the other way around, but I maintain that this is inefficient.  The movement of lifting a box over your head requires perhaps a dozen muscles working together – to say nothing of the balance and coordination involved – and if you’re isolating your shoulders, you’re just getting one of them.  But if you just lift something over your head a lot, you’re getting all of them together.

Like most things in life, this point is best summed up using zombies.

One day, the zombie apocalypse will happen and you’ll find yourself running away from a teeming horde of the rotting undead.  Sucks to be you.  Suddenly, ahead, you’ll see a tree branch hanging just low enough for you to grab it and pull yourself up.

When this happens, are you going to make sure you dead hang, then arch your back to ensure maximum isolation of the lats with no lower body movement so that the zombies stand back in silent awe and admire your form and range of motion?  No.  You are not going to do this because if you do, the zombies are going to eat your damn feet.

Rather, you will do anything you possibly can to complete that movement without giving a second thought to the muscles involved.  The zombies will make you completely movement-centric.  Your only goal will be to get up on the damn tree branch.  The exact muscles involved in completing that movement will be the furthest thing from your mind.

And therein lies perhaps the greatest marketing slogan CrossFit will ever know:

CrossFit: Because Zombies Like to Snack on Toes

I don’t believe in traffic cameras.  These are the contraptions that take a picture of cars that speed or run red lights, then send the owner a ticket in the mail.  These things need to end.

I’m not opposed to them because of privacy concerns.  I’m not on a high horse about too much government.  I’m not worried about my liberty.  I’m not even bothered by the massive percentage of ticket fees the camera companies keep.  (Though, other people are.)

These things have got to go because they are an insult to simple logic.

We do not give tickets to vehicles.  We give tickets to drivers.  And a traffic camera can tell very clearly what vehicle violated the law, however it cannot reliably tell what driver violated the law.

I’ve been caught by these things twice.  At the same intersection.  Both times it was because I was turning right on red, which I didn’t notice wasn’t allowed.  I did it in two different directions over the course of a couple months.

On both occasions, the ticket came in the mail.  There was a picture of my car, clear as day.

However, what wasn’t clear was who was driving the car.  I’m assuming it was me, but there’s no way the traffic camera could know.  In neither picture was the driver depicted clearly enough to identify them.

At the time, I had a 15-year-old son who had a driver’s license.  He borrowed my car often.  It could have just as easily been him, and given his inexperience, it probably had greater odds of being him.

And this is the unavoidable flaw in these systems – we don’t give tickets to vehicles, we give tickets to drivers.  So unless you can tell exactly who the driver is, don’t bother sending a ticket.

End of rant.

I went on vacation in February, so lots of time for reading.  Put another seven books away, which gives me 15 for the year, and puts me on pace for 90 (though March is looking slow).  No fiction this month, sadly.  Need to correct that.

• The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well
  A disappointment.  It was a series of interviews with people who are the best at what they do, but instead of concentrating on the larger principles of success, it instead actually attempted to teach me how to do things like win the Indy 500, hunt big game, act on Broadway, or decorate department store windows.  Somewhat pointless.
• The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office
  Very interesting examination of the modern organization and how it functions (or doesn’t).  Everyone complains about bureaucracy, but the fact is that the alternative to the organization only works in very specific circumstances, and above a certain size, you will start turning into the organization you so dread, whether you like it or not.
• Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea: The History and Discovery of the World’s Richest Shipwreck
  One of my favorite books.  I read it on my honeymoon, and bought it to read again on vacation. An inspiring story of an almost impossible mission to recover one of the greatest shipwrecks in history.  Every time I read this book, I come away thinking I can do anything.
• Book was There: Reading in Electronic Times
  I really wanted this book to be great, because I’m keenly interested in how reading is changing with the adoption of ebooks.  Sadly, this book was vague and had an arrogance I didn’t like.  It was trying to be so incredibly profound, and failed badly.  I gained some insights, but it didn’t come close to what I hoped.
• Information: A Very Short Introduction
  A follow-up to a couple of books I read last month about information theory.  A solid book, but no new insights.  I think I’m done with information and communication theory.  I had some interest, but three books have explained the concepts to me and quenched my thirst here.
• A Concise History of the Caribbean
  I got this after I returned from vacation in Turks and Caicos, wanting to read a nice story about the beautiful islands and happy people.  Sadly, the history of the Caribbean is pretty wretched.  It’s summed up thusly: people were happy, then the Europeans arrived in 1492 and killed lots of them, enslaved the rest, and imported even more slaves to systematically rape the land and trade the islands like playing cards for a couple of hundred years.  A truly depressing read.
• Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto
  I read this on recommendation of a conservative friend (I’m a Democrat).  I thought it was a good summation of the conservative philosophy.  I didn’t agree with everything the author said, but it was well-written, well-reasoned, and he kept the vitriol to a minimum (well, low…maybe not “minimum”).  I learned a few things, and gained some perspective, which is always good.

Jury finds Detroit ex-mayor guilty on most charges: Kwame Kilpatrick is guilty as hell, it turns out.  See this post for an entertaining recap of all the stuff he was accused of doing.  This guy was a cliché of the classic corrupt politician.

Kilpatrick was convicted on 24 of 30 counts, including five counts of extortion, racketeering, bribery and several mail, wire and tax fraud charges during a five-month trial in which he was portrayed as an unscrupulous politician who took bribes, rigged contracts and lived far beyond his means while in office.

i’m not kenneth, there is no frequency: My friend Ian is swearing off all news.

But my soul is exhausted by deafening drum circle of broadcast news, and I’m done with it. These days you can stay well-informed just by incidental contact, whether it’s something on Facebook or even just floating in vague ether. There’s also "The Daily Show" to give you a curated meal of the goings-on with a sugar-dose of humor. And for those who think I might suffer from a lack of perspective or that I’m preparing myself for Vacant-Eyed Dumdumville, well, that’s a calculated risk.

Sometimes, I’m tempted to do the same thing, but I’m such a junkie for it.  “Junkie” might be a perfect word, actually.

I wonder how my addiction to politics and current events affects me mentally. I’m constantly consumed by it, which means I have a constant anxiety that I’m not consuming enough, and additional anxiety about the sheer horrible-ness of what I do consume.

You can’t win.

Inspired by my friend Matt, I am trying to hit a goal of 75 books read in 2013, with a stretch goal of 100.  I’m keeping notes on all of them, and at the end of every month, I’ll post the books I read for that month.

In January, I got eight books done.  This gives me a projected total of 96 books for the year, and I’m heading into a vacation in February, which will give me lots of time to read.

• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
  I’m trying to get through all of the Potter books.  This is four of seven.  Very long compared to the others, and a bit plodding in places. But the climax is thrilling, and – for what it’s worth – the movie was great.
• Personal History
  The autobiography of Katherine Graham, who owned the Washington Post through the tumultuous 60s and 70s, including during Watergate. A wonderful book that begins as a portrait of American aristocracy in the early 20th century, and ends as a fascinating study of journalism and the role of women in United States government.
• Profitable Brilliance
  A friend purchased this for me. It was supposedly about “thought leadership” and how to promote it at your organization. I hated this book. Poorly written and repetitive. I felt like taking a shower after I was done. Yuck.
• All the President’s Men
  This is the famous book from the early 70s about the research of the Watergate scandal. Written by Woodward and Bernstein themselves, this book is the ultimate evidence of the role of journalism in government and ensuring the public good.
• Making News: A Straight-Shooting Guide to Media Relations
  A guide about how to manage news and PR for your organizations. It was written by a former network news correspondent.  Not perfectly written, and gets a bit repetitive in places, but full of good advice.
• The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood
  The history of information and communication theory, this book is a love letter to Claude Shannon who defined the field of information theory just after the war. It’s fundamentally the story about the history of remote communication, from African drums through the telegraph, radio, television, and the Internet.  I was…okay. I admit to getting a bit lost deep in the heart of it.
• An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise
  This was an older book, written in 1961 and revised in 1980.  It was essentially a textbook on information theory, full of mathematical proofs and such. Some good information, but its age showed quite a bit when it got all enraptured with the technology of television. Still, quite interesting.
• Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better
  A book about how to practice anything better. This was written by a group of teaching consultants who work with teachers to help them practice classroom skills.  It’s a practical book and kills more than a few sacred cows. Lots of great information and ideas and I’m quite in interested in putting into practice.

I also did some other long-form reading. Not books, but longer than your average web article.

• The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance
  This is the famous study that purported to prove the “10,000 rule” that indicates that expert performance in anything requires 10,000 hours of practice. The authors did two studies at Berlin music school, and analyzed them to death. They “proved” two awfully obvious points: (1) the biggest indicator of skill is number of hours of practice per week, and (2) the age at which one begins practicing.  Good to read, but not really groundbreaking.
• The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World
  An except from a Harvard Business Review book about adaptive leadership, or leadership which isn’t dogmatic but rather identifies when problems are simple technical changes and when they’re more systemic changes requiring deeper adaptive changes.
• Decisions without Blinders
  This is another HBR except about how to increase situational awareness when making decisions as a professional. Some good advice about “unpacking” situations before making decisions to ensure you’re taking all the available information into account.

The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S.: This isn’t new, but it’s fun to read.  It catalog’s San Francisco’s apparently epic dysfunction.  It’s a polemic that runs so far off the rails, you can’t help but enjoy it.

The city’s ineptitude is no secret. "I have never heard anyone, even among liberals, say, ‘If only [our city] could be run like San Francisco,’" says urbanologist Joel Kotkin. "Even other liberal places wouldn’t put up with the degree of dysfunction they have in San Francisco. In Houston, the exact opposite of San Francisco, I assume you’d get shot."

I love this summation at the end.

As long as San Francisco is an alluring destination where residents will tolerate lunacy as a tradeoff for living the city lifestyle, and tourists flood the downtown, the city will lumber along, inefficiently and without accountability. "San Francisco is like the really good-looking coed who can get away with being a jerk, while a less good-looking one couldn’t," Kotkin says.

Gregg Popovich, Spurs won’t get away with resting stars: I find it amazing that the NBA commissioner can sanction a team for a coaching decision.  Popovich let his stars rest, and he’s apparently going to be fined for it.

[…] it appears the league’s commissioner is about to come down hard on Popovich for his decision to send stars Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili and role player Danny Green home to San Antonio on Thursday night while the rest of the team lost at the Miami Heat 105-100 on national television.

"I apologize to all NBA fans," Stern said in a statement that was released after the Spurs-Heat game had tipped off. "This was an unacceptable decision by the San Antonio Spurs and substantial sanctions will be forthcoming."

So, Stern can fine a team for running a bad offense too?  At what point is the coach allowed to be pre-empted by the commissioner for a decision on how to run his team?

Skills Don’t Pay the Bills: This is the second report in a week I’ve read about how there’s not really a “skills gap” in American manufacturing (the first was a bit on 60 Minutes).  The problem isn’t that manufacturers can’t find skilled workers, the problem is that manufacturing jobs just don’t pay enough to compete with other alternatives.

At GenMet, the starting pay is $10 an hour. Those with an associate degree can make $15, which can rise to $18 an hour after several years of good performance. From what I understand, a new shift manager at a nearby McDonald’s can earn around $14 an hour.

The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs.

[…] In a recent study, the Boston Consulting Group noted that, outside a few small cities that rely on the oil industry, there weren’t many places where manufacturing wages were going up and employers still couldn’t find enough workers. “Trying to hire high-skilled workers at rock-bottom rates,” the Boston Group study asserted, “is not a skills gap.”

Many manufacturers will complain that they can’t compete against low-wage countries in Asia, so they have to pay less. That’s probably true.  But that’s just math.  Don’t blame the worker.  Don’t blame McDonalds.

In the end, I guess just hope that Asian workers unionize and demand better wages.  So long as they’re willing to work for less, then the jobs which are going to pay better are ones that require a human being inside this countries borders. 

After all, you can’t manage a shift of unruly hamburger cooks from Asia.  Yet.