DeaneBarker.net

Adult education: How The Tyee wants to maximize its readers : Apparently a small trend is developing for newspaper to get into the education business.  This article is about how The Tyee, a small Vancouver paper, is offering weekend classes.

The Tyee’s classes are made up of seven weekend courses led by the site’s staff and contributors. Topics range from photography and memoir writing to document sleuthing and how to run low-budget political campaigns.

The New York Times has precedence here.

Four Deficit Myths an da Frightening Fact: This WSJ article is spot-on about the deficit.

Myth No. 1 is that the American people now demand deficit reduction as never before. Don’t believe it. Yes, if you ask Americans about the deficit, they’ll tell you they hate it—as they always have. […]

Furthermore, once the discussion gets down to specifics, it is difficult to find anything the public favors that would make a serious dent in the deficit. No higher taxes, please, except on millionaires. No cuts in big programs like Social Security or Medicare.

Maybe defense cuts; attitudes about that vary from time to time. The one thing Americans consistently want to cut is foreign aid, which constitutes a minuscule share of U.S. government spending. Thus the attraction to lower deficits is only skin deep. It has always been thus.

As I’ve said before, we all hate the deficit, we all say we need to cut spending, but no one wants to actually cut spending.

This part was also quite interesting.

Myth No. 4 is that America has a generalized problem of runaway spending, one that requires cuts across the board. No. The truth is that we have a huge problem of exploding health-care costs, part of which shows up in Medicare and Medicaid spending.

In any driving course, when learning how to recover from a skid, the instructor will always hammer the same thing into you: “Look where you want to go because you tend to go where you look.”  It’s good advice, and I can vouch that it works (seriously).

The same thing is true of your self-image, I’m learning.  You tend to act how you see yourself.  You will live up to the image you see in the mirror.

In the last 13 months, I have lost between 80 and 90 pounds.  It started on January 3, 2011 as a classic New Years resolution.  Since then, I’ve been more or less obsessed with nutrition and exercise.  My diet is fantastic, by any measure, and I exercise six days a week.

But, unbeknownst to me, the most important thing I’ve done is shifted my self-image.  I think of myself as an athlete now.  Everything is relative, of course, and I know that compared to your average NFL player, I’m not much.  However, compared to your average 40-year-old suburban father, I do really well.

What I’ve learned is that since this is the persona I’ve given myself, I tend to live up to it.  I get up at 5:30 a.m every weekday and go to the gym.  Why?  Because I’m an athlete, and this is what athletes do.  I run five-miles in 15-degree weather, because this is what athletes do.  I don’t eat just because I’m hungry, because this is what athletes do.

More than just my actions is my attitude – I look forward, and I enjoy the challenge.  I constantly think about my next workout, and I can’t wait to keep moving incrementally forward.  The gym or the bike trail seems like a second home to me.  I see myself as a continual work in progress and I love the journey.

But I’m just now coming to this realization, and all because I went to Europe for a week.

In the beginning of February, I was speaking at a conference in Lisbon.  On the way home, I got stuck for a day in Paris for a day, and then went to Las Vegas to watch a rugby tournament with my Dad for a couple days.  I was gone for over a week.

During this time, I tried to workout, but it didn’t go well.  I was on the move all the time.  I tried to run in Lisbon, but the hotel was in a bad spot and there was no obvious place to run (the sidewalks in Lisbon have the smoothness of a minefield).  I did get a short run in Paris, but when I tried to workout in Vegas, the Rio wanted $22 to use the gym.  So, I went for a run on The Strip, which was a disaster because it was about 4 p.m. and the crowds were just ridiculous.

On top of this, I ate a lot.  No one told me about Portuguese bakeries – wow.  The pastries were just crazy (these things especially)…and then I got to Paris.  Holy cats.  I had a croissant at an otherwise non-descript hotel buffet that almost made me cry.  Throw in a couple Las Vegas buffets, and you have a significant calorie imbalance.

When I finally got back to Sioux Falls, I felt out of shape.  I hadn’t had a meaningful workout in 10 days, and I had gained about five pounds.

So, you’d think I’d instantly go running back to the gym, right?  Uh, no.  I made excuses not to go. And I kept eating.  There was something keeping me from starting back up, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I got back home on a Monday night, and I finally got off my ass and went back to the gym on Friday morning.

When I finally went back to the gym in Friday, it seemed…foreign.  I remember standing in the gym thinking, “What the hell am I doing here at six in the morning?”  I felt out of place.  It wasn’t home anymore, it was a place that other people went to.  A place where athletes went.

And there was the problem: I had stopped thinking of myself as an athlete.  I had let myself slip out of the persona.  Instead of an athlete, I now saw myself as a couch potato.  And, like a powerslide on a slippery road, you tend to go where you look, and I wasn’t looking in the right direction anymore.  Couch potatoes don’t go to the gym at six in the morning – they sleep in.  And they don’t eat well – they stuff themselves every chance they get.  I was living up to my persona.

On Saturday (today), I went for my weekly five-mile run on the bike trails.  I’ve been chasing the U.S. Army Ranger test for a few months now, and my pace has been steadily coming down.  Two days before leaving for Europe, I clocked in my best time yet.  But I approached today’s run with dread.  I wasn’t an athlete anymore, I was a couch potato, so the run was going to hurt, and I was going to have to watch my hard-earned pace backslide.

But, amazingly enough, my pace dropped by two seconds.  I don’t know why – perhaps my body had been beaten up for the last year and it enjoyed the rest.  But 42-some-odd minutes after I started, as I was walking off my run in the parking lot, I felt…elated.  I was on top of the world.  I felt like I was heading back in the right direction.  I felt…like an athlete again.

And now, as I write this, I’m looking forward.  I can’t wait for tomorrow’s workout, or Monday’s run.  I know that next week, I’m going to take a few more seconds off my time.  Every workout is another chance to get better, and I’m looking forward to the challenge.

Why?  Because that’s what athletes do, and when I look in the mirror, I’m an athlete again.

The fact is, you go where you look.  And you look in the direction you see yourself.  See yourself as a couch potato, and you’ll act like one.  Likewise if you see yourself as an athlete.  Or an addict.  Or a successful professional.  Or a Christian.  Or a sleazebag.

How do you see yourself?

Update: My friend Greg from CrossFit Sioux Falls commented below, partially in response in an email exchange he and I had about CrossFit.  We discussed the fact that something CrossFit does really well (aside from apparently being a great workout in general), is that it teaches people to think of themselves as athletes.  I know of no other organized workout program that does this – that pays attention to the persona that its participants have for themselves.  I honestly think this is a huge part of the exercise equation, and one that few programs other than CrossFit are paying attention to.  (Disclaimer: I do not CrossFit.)

The German economic colossus: I really enjoyed this short Q&A article about Germany’s economic resurgence.  It paints the picture of an unglamorous commitment to hard work and low debt.

How did Germany become Europe’s dominant economy?
Mostly through simple diligence. Germany doesn’t owe its success to spectacular innovations or new industries; it’s largely the product of steady, stable growth in existing niche industries, a government/private sector partnership, and the German aversion to excess spending and debt.

Bad Apple: Damn nature.  You scary.

The danger is real — and easily encountered. Eating the fruit will almost certainly require hospitalization, but not consuming the “apple” is not enough to avoid harm. The tree’s sap is incredibly poisonous — and seemingly instantaneously so. The milky white sap causes the skin to blister if even a drop gets on you, which happens to unsuspecting travelers who make the enormous mistake of using a manchineel tree as shelter from a rain storm. The bark is also poisonous; burning it yields smoke which, apparently, causes temporary (and perhaps permanent) blindness. In fact, the fruit may be the least poisonous feature of the tree; while legend has it that the “apple” is fatal, there are no known deaths from eating one.

Living with a brain-damaged ex-husband: Amazing story here.  A man has a stroke and is mentally impaired.   His wife and two young children solider on, and then she meets someone else and falls in love…

They had been good friends as kids, co-editors of the high school newspaper. He vowed to contact her the next time he was in Richmond to visit his mother. Six months later, he did. And soon after, with Allan in the midst of a divorce, they began talking regularly. It was nice to have an adult to talk to, Page says, and she began to wrestle with feelings that they could be more than friends. "It had never occurred to me at that point to be in a relationship," she says. "It felt disloyal to Robert."

The ending is pretty remarkable.

Bracing for $40,000 at City Private Schools: Annual tuition at two of New York’s private schools is more than Harvard.

[…] this year’s tuition at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory ($38,340 for 12th grade) and Horace Mann ($37,275 for the upper school) is higher than Harvard’s ($36,305). Those 41 schools (out of 61 New York City private schools in the national association) provided enough data to enable a 10-year analysis. (Over all, inflation caused prices in general to rise 27 percent over the past decade.)

It’s Gotta Be the Shorts: When Michael Jordan hit the NBA, he wanted to keep wearing his North Carolina shorts, for luck.  To do this, he wore them under his NBA shorts, which forced him to wear longer, baggier shorts.

Michael Jordan’s UNC short shorts wouldn’t fit under his Chicago Bulls short shorts, so he had to wear baggy, knee-length Bulls shorts instead, as seen here. In doing so, he broke the mold set forth by players before him. […] But soon, these extra long shorts became the favored style.  By 2003, almost every single NBA player had jettisoned the short shorts for the longer variety.

This is a great PBS Frontline from 1994 about the De Beers diamond cartel, and how that company has manipulated the availability of diamonds to create a false scarcity and keep prices high.  It tells the story of a pretty wretched state of affairs.  De Beers essentially defines the phrase “evil corporation.”

The thing is this: diamonds are not inherently scarce, and therefore not inherently valuable. This is a grand charade perpetuated quite effectively by De Beers.  To be clear: the value of diamonds is purely a result of market manipulation, nothing more.

The key is the phrase towards the end:

After a century of maneuvers to control the supply and price of diamonds, the cartel’s greatest accomplishment may be that it has transformed the illusion that diamonds are valuable into a hard reality, and the future of the diamond empire may now rest with the complicity of millions of consumers all invested in the myth that diamonds will be valuable forever.

Between the Lines: Interesting article about the dynamics of designing parking in Los Angeles.  Thoughout the article weaves the fact that L.A. is a city built around parking lots – that type of land usage is the single biggest thing that defines the city.

Our downtown contains more parking spaces per acre than any other city in the world and has been adding them at a rate of about 1,000 a year for a century. If you grew up here, the earliest and most essential phrase drilled into you by adults—“Remember, we’re in blue Mickey”—was uttered in a parking lot bigger than Disneyland itself. Angelenos can immediately recognize outsiders, lost souls seen wandering through parking garages with no memory of where the Corolla sits

Lots of information about parking theory – how it works, how cities attempt to manage it, and how it has defined Los Angeles over the years.

(Of course, if you’re Miami, you just build a parking ramp so gorgeous that people want to hold wedding receptions in it.)