What's So Funny (My Hilarous Life) by Tim Conway

Tim Conway and Jane Scovell provide a generally warm hearted look at the life of Tim Conway from his beginning as Tom Conway through his life on television, video and touring the country with Harvey Korman.

He has great affection for costars Carol Burnett, Harvey Korman and Don Knotts.  He noted that when you work on a Disney film you get to meet your fellow actors and that usually includes an animal costar. 

Tim explains how he came up with the Dorf concept.  His best experience was spending a day shooting scenes with golf legend Sam Snead.  He kept failing to make a trick shot and Sam was able to do it in one take.

Tim had great respect for Earnest Borgnine.  Earnest was making a significant amount of money on McHale's Navy but was upset his costars weren't given proper respect on the set.  Joe Flynn and Tim Conway got along great on the set and even worked briefly together on the short lived Tim Conway show.

Tim Conway on McHale's Navy 4 min.

 Tim Conway Show 1970





Imagine by Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Lehrer offers an epidemiologist view of creativity starting from the neurons in the brain and ending with strong praise for the creativity produced from high density interactions with a wide variety of people and places.  He credits the compulsory military service of the Israeli army with the recent high tech boom in that country.  The high density of the population in the country provides for the rapid exchange of ideas.  The mixing in the military allows for collaboration between people of different backgrounds. This can be achieved at an office by having single central locations for restrooms and cafeterias.

The central theme of the book is that creativity is hard work.  It requires different parts of the brain for different segments of the creative process.   We need to hit the wall and experience the frustration of a seemly unsolvable problem.  At this point we can back off and let the right hemisphere do its work. The right hemisphere provides the flash of incite when we are calm relaxed almost day dreaming.  The left hemisphere and portions of the prefrontal cortex are needed to provide the critique and the grit needed to perfect and complete the creation.

He offers a well referenced criticism of the inadequacies of brainstorming.  People's brains shut down when they can not criticize or evaluate the contribution of another person.  The process works much better if each individual person contributes separately and others critique the idea often producing a "yes and" solution found in the discipline of improv comedy.  We recently used this tactic when doing a job hazard analysis for cooling tower workers at the U of MN.  Each person  at the table contributed one idea and people were encouraged to discuss and build off of the contribution. This process is used by Pixar animation when they review the previous day's work.

Successful projects work best when there is some degree of familiarity between the people on the project and there are a few new contributors brought into keep the collaboration fresh.  He illustrates this with an extensive analysis of successful vs. unsuccessful Broadway productions.  I've found this works by having different age  groups and people with different levels of experience working on a problem. 

Jonah mentions InnoCentive as an excellent website that rewards creative problem solvers.  Most creative solutions arrive from people working at the edge of their expertise.  The individuals know enough about the problem to be able to help but aren't locked into the orthodoxy of the discipline which prevents them from coming up with a creative solution.

Designing cities, workplaces, immigration policies and research grants with the expressed purpose of maximizing creativity is part of the designing an environment where creativity flourishes.  He advocates developing a support structure for creativity similar to the support structure for athletics in the United States.  He advocates HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute)  grants over NIH grants because they produce more fundamental breakthroughs.  The HHMI grants also produce more failures and we need to accept that risk.

Creation is maximized when there if a free flow and mixing of ideas.  Non-compete clauses in corporations kill innovation and allow the corporations engaging in it to become insular and die slow deaths.  He compares the closed East Coast corporate culture of Wang Computers and similar companies to the more open corporate cultures of Silicon Valley California. 

Summary of the book from Collectivenext -  http://collectivenext.com/blog/transcribe-live-lab-1

How Creativity Works -Jonah Leher -1 min.

Teach Like a Pirate - David Burgess

David Burgess offers Teach Like a Pirate to educators wanting to up their game and make attending class a memorable experience.  He encourages experimentation and a willingness to fail in an attempt to make class entertaining and informative. 

He rejects the notion that classes have to be rigorous in the strict definition of the term.  These classes make learning hard, inflexible and painful.  He prefers offering challenging learning experiences that engage students.  He does not  sacrifice content for entertainment but encourages educators to go for it and make their classes memorable and unforgettable.

This took me back to an experience in practical math during a high school vocational agricultural class.  Our teacher Mr. Larson asked us to measure the height of a light pole in the parking lot.  The seniors measured it by climbing up the pole.  He asked us if there was a different way.  I asked him if the sun was shining.  He said it was.  We measured the length of a the poles shadow and the length of the shadow of a shorter object of known length and used it to calculate the height of the pole.  It helps negate the effect of situational dependent learning and allowed us to take mathematics into the real world. 

I recently worked with our local 6th graders at JA BizTown.  Each of the students in the class had to do various tasks in the  town from running a corporation, a rental agency, a bank, a newspaper or radio station.  Each company needed to make a profit, pay taxes, do billing, collect payments and budget for expenses.  I was impressed with several of the students ability to pick up the skills, following up on unpaid bills and cleaning up the balance sheet.

40 minute discussion with the author

Roughing It - Mark Twain

Mark Twain's Roughing It read by Grover Gardner offers up Mark Twain's observations of the American West during the 1860's.  I highly recommend the audio version of this book as a few of the passages are full of archaic slang.  Reading the text silently does not provide as rich an experience as listening to entertaining work of Grover Gardner.

Mark Twain deftly illustrates the development of slang in the mining community made up of people from around the world. A miner makes a simple slang filled request for a local parson to conduct a funeral for a friend. The two of them enter into a mighty struggle in an attempt to comprehend what the other person is saying. The parson in particular grasping, dodging and weaving through the slang filled thicket of words attempting to understand the miner. The miner in turn can not comprehend the parson's studied choice of words. The parson searches for a way to offer words the miner can comprehend.

At the beginning of the book a young Mark Twain sets out to the Carson City Nevada on a stage coach from Missouri. He provides a great description of ride, the passengers and the employees of the stage company. The mail bags on the coach provided make shift beds for passengers on the coach.  Twain does not shy away from describing the brutal violence of the west and young readers may wish to bypass these sections.

While they stay over for several nights in Salt Lake City, Mark describes the Mormon Culture and offers a less than flattering critique of the Book of Mormon. He equates reading the text to taking a dose of chloroform. He also offers a second hand account of a discussion with Brigham Young on the downside of polygamy. In particular, he lays out the hazards of a guest giving only one child a penny whistle. The multiple wives request equal treatment of their offspring and the misery ends only when the newness of the musical instrument has worn off for the more than 60 children. 

Twain's less than successful attempts at being a silver/gold prospector are laid out in detail. He also works briefly in a gold and silver ore processing plant. Mark lasted a week but accurately described the use of mercury to extract the gold and silver metals out of the raw ore. The mercury was saved by heating, vaporizing and then condensing the metal for reuse.

He also ventures over to San Francisco and offers an eyewitness account of the great earthquake of 1865. 

His trip to the Sandwich Islands (modern day Oahu, Hawaii) as a news reporter provides a look at the Islands in the 1860's.  He describes the island being overrun by cats of all kinds.  This matches my observations over a hundred years later on my two trips to the islands.  He also describes walking on trails and noting a vast graveyard of human bones with no certain description of how they got there.  He describes the Saturday festivals where native men and women would ride horses down the street dressed in festive attire.  At the time of his arrival the government was clamping down on this practice along with restrictions on hula dancing.

This is a great piece of writing providing a glimpse into the origin of Twain's growth as an author with his excellent historical description of the American West.  I found it entertaining and informative.

Google Earth Tour of the book - 52 minutes

Part one of the full audio book  8 hours and 14 minutes

Part two of the full audio book 8 hours and 50 minutes

Extraordinary Ordinary People - Condolezza Rice

Condoleezza Rice's Extraordinary Ordinary People provides a view inside the life of the former Secretary of State's parents and the journey they took together.  Condoleezza was the daughter of a Presbyterian Minister and a school teacher. She spent her early childhood in segregated Montgomery, Alabama.  She was taught by her school teachers that they had to be twice as good as the next person to get ahead.  Her parents solid middle class values viewed education as the pathway to success and invested considerable resources in to assure their daughter's success.

There were problems with the Klan in Alabama and her father would take his turn with the shotgun on the porch as part of the neighborhood watch program as the police department were either part of the Klan or would not respond to acts of violence in their neighborhood.  This influenced her perception of gun rights as the government was not there to protect her family from armed members of the Klan.

She describes the subtle class distinctions made between dark skinned and fair skinned black people in the south.  Her fair skinned mother was only asked to name the first President of the United States when registering to vote.  Her darker skinned father was asked to give the exact number of marbles in a jar.  The father later was told of the lone Republican registrar who would take anyone as they were trying to increase the number of registered voters.  That event cemented his party affiliation along with his daughters. 

The family left Alabama a year after the church bombings that killed one of Condoleezza's friends at a church not far from her father's.  She also describes the difficulty for a black family to travel in the south as they could not stay in hotels or find a place to eat when travelling so they had to get a very early start in the morning and pack their own food. 

Her parents pushed her along in school and by the time she entered college at Colorado State she had moved up two grades.  Her parents supported her love of piano and figure skating.  She dated Rick Upchurch, the U of Minnesota receiver for the Denver Broncos and became a member of the football wives/girlfriends club of the Denver Broncos.  She shared a passion for professional football with her father.  I am sure she would jump at the chance to become NFL commissioner.

She also describes her time at the NSC during the first Bush administration, her time as provost at Stanford and the time she spent campaigning for George W. Bush in 2000.  Her background in Russian studies was put to good use as the administration worked to handle the collapse of the Soviet Union.  She was a strong administrator at Stanford helping cleaning up a fiscal mess because of Stanford's higher overhead cost for government grants. 

The health problems of her parents and her own health scares are described in detail.  The book's final chapter deals with events leading to her father's death on Christmas Eve of 2000. 

 

Brief section of her book read by the author - 7 minutes

 

Discussion about her book - 54 minutes

 

Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath

Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath offers a guide to making decisions in life and work.  I am currently using it for some difficult decisions at work helping determine the best course of action for stadium security.

When do you trust your intuition- When feedback is immediate.  When you can't trust your intuition.  When feedback is delayed for a long time.  Will this stock go up or down? 

Following the process of decision making was much more important than narrowly focused analysis.   If it is an important decision we need to follow a process- Use a wide focus,

The authors recommend to "Ooch" first before going all in.  This means try out several small pilot projects prior to making a full commitment on something new.  A lot can be learned with low risk.  Running several small projects at speeds up the learning curve and allows the success of each project to be compared and the lessons learned from the failures and successes to be combined for a better final  decision. 

Our ability to predict the future is not very good.  We are overconfident about our abilities.  The authors point to an inverse correlation between the accuracy of predictions and the amount of time an expert is on TV.   

When making a choice have more than two options avoid narrowing the focus too early and avoid the spotlight effect.  Spend some time scanning the environment. Having more than two is better because it pulls people out of a binary vision.  My favorite bad binary choice from the 20th Century: Choose between door #1 Fascism or door #2 Communism?  I'd really like a door number three.

We also must make an active effort to seek out information that does not confirm our original assumptions. 

 

The 4 Villians of Decision Making - Narrow framing, confirmation bias, short term emotion and overconfidence.

 

 

Synopsis of Decisive by Randy Mayeux of First Friday Book Synopsis.

Read books by people with whom we disagree.  Read books outside of the field of our expertise.

 

The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington

The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington by Jennet Conant covers the story of Roald Dahl from a WWII pilot shot down in the early part of the war to his espionage efforts for the BSC (British Security Coordination) in coordination with the OSS run by Wild Bill Donavon in the United States.  The book outlines the strategies the British used to influence America. This was done with the secret approval of Roosevelt over the objection of J. Edger Hoover. 

Dahl along with Ian Fleming and other unconventional spies were recruited by a Canadian businessman William Stephenson to assist with the British efforts to move the US out of its isolationist mindset and bring them about to support the British in their fight against Germany.  Many of Ian Flemings ideas for the James Bond character and the gadgets used came from his wartime experience spying on the U.S.  He described William Stephenson as the real James Bond.   He was played by David Niven in a TV miniseries "A Man Called Intrepid."

Roald Dahl befriends some of the most influential people in Washington, DC, including FDR and his wife Eleanor.  He befriended Charles E. Marsh a Texas newspaperman who is one of the power brokers behind LBJ's rapid rise to power in Congress.  Dahl and Marsh engage in an extended satirical correspondence with British Ambassador Halifax being the main target.   Marsh was a good friend of Henry A.Wallace the wartime VP for Roosevelt.  As part of his job, Dahl woos then discards a significant number of women including Clare Boothe Luce.

 

Jennet Conant on the Irregulars- 2 min.

 

 

 

Roald Dahl wrote Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

 

 

 

A Man called Intrepid - William Stephenson

 

 

 





Anti Fragile- Things that Gain from Disorder - Nassim Taleb

Nassim Taleb's book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto) , covers a lot of ground including medicine, finance, religion and politics.  The book represents a capstone to his other books - Black Swan and  Fooled by Randomness.  He provides evidence that modernity's attempt at suppressing variability makes the affected systems more fragile and susceptible to Black Swan events.  The rare unpredictable events with large consequences. 

Efforts to reduce variability in all aspects of our lives make us much more fragile.  We need small diners to rise up and defy the odds and be successful.  We also need other diners to fail and these need to happen.  Big payoffs often occur after repeated small failures. 

He uses the human body's ability to respond to good stress as an example of antifragility.  The more the body is gradually pushed to higher performance the more resilient it becomes.  This is the opposite for a machine, which wears out faster the more it is used.

He provides a table with a list of items that are categorized as fragile, robust and antifragile.  Soccer Moms are listed as fragile, street fighters and those who learned from experience rather than from didactic learning are antifragile.  He offers a strong critique of the didactic learning system at schools and universities.  These systems allow people to qualify for jobs that provide a comfortable living but do not produce the innovators and risk takers needed to improve society.

He gives examples on humans failed attempts to improve nature.  These include, trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners.  He also discourages spending money on supplements that attempt to optimize good health as there is only minor possible gain with the high likelihood of unintended side effects. 

Medicine: Go after the really bad stuff.  Trauma and serious diseases.  Give the body a chance to fix the minor stuff and allow for the fact that there will be some natural variability in blood pressure and other health measurements.

Our bodies are not clean physics experiments with calories in and out being the sole determination of weight gain.  We also have complex feedback loops that provide signals for the body to regulate many systems. 

Introducing chemicals that have not been selected through the evolutionary process is more often than not likely to be harmful at worst and not beneficial at best. Humans have been produced by an evolutionary process of tinkering, adjustment to the environment.  Adding something foreign to that environment for example: cigarette smoke, requires the proof of  benefit not just the absence of harm.   Harm which may come 10 to 20 years after the minimal benefit (Thalidomide for example).

He also encourages increasing the amount of variability in our lives to make us more antifragile.  It's OK to occasionally fast and skip a meal to give the body a bit of stress.  Food taste better after you do physical labor.  Being comfortable makes us fragile. Consider the region of the world your ancestors came from to determine your diet and possible intolerances.  If you came from parts of the world where cow's milk was not a staple, you are more likely to not tolerate lactose. 

Nassim is a strong advocate for skin in the game.  If you take a risk you get the reward or the loss.  He condemns systems designed to allow one group to reap all of the benefits with the risk of failure transferred to other people.  He includes banks that "are too big to fail" in this category.   He expresses extreme pessimism about banks in general as they historically provide minimal gain while periodically collapsing leaving a wake of destruction.

Antifragile explained

Embracing Antifragile

Antifragile explained - mild profanity - 7 min.

This is How - Augusten Burroughs

In This is How  author Augusten Burroughs describes in brutally frank sometimes profane terms how to deal with the worst life has to throw at us.  This book is not a fuzzy warm blanket but a reasonably good guide to surviving hell on earth. He describes how he supports a friend with a terminal illness.  He regrets planning the funeral when he should have spent time with his friend.

Examine why something is only a want.  What is preventing it from being a need? What is the benefit to the status quo?  If something isn't changing in our lives and we want it to change but it is just not happening then its because we don't need it to change.  The author describes need with this analogy.  Your car has sunk into the bottom of the lake.  You need to open the door or the windows or you will die.  You do everything you can to get it done.  Motivation is not a problem.

Life isn't fair.  When something bad happens an apology is nice but it can not change the past.  Move forward and deal with what is happening now. Do not wallow in self pity hoping some adult will come along and make it all better.  People attend self pity parties alone because no one else wants to be there.

My Precious - Gollum

Living in the past is a trap.  Reliving it and creating a myth about it is attempting to mold invisible clay into something no one can see.  However, if we use the past as a source of inspiration for creation it allows for artistic expression to improve or inform the present and future. In my interpretation of his writing,  we can choose to treat memories from the past like Gollum's Precious Ring.  We bring it out on special occasions and carry it us with us everywhere showing it to only a special few.  It weighs us down as we obsess about it and prevents us from living it the moment.

He ends the book with the story of a 15 year old girl who changed the world by seeing the truth and bravely naming it.  The author encourages us to do the same.

James Lileks Interior Desecrations

James Lileks: Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible '70s looks at the 1970's brass age of interior design.  He provides photographic evidence of modern designs from yesteryear.  Bold color schemes including yellow, lime green, brown and tangerine orange come to life again.  He wrote the book in part to head off any nostalgia for the interior design of the 70's.  He succeeds.

Relive the inch deep shag carpet, the round furniture and the multicolored drapes captured in faded Kodachrome.  Examine futuristic recycled furniture and interior furnishings decades before their time.

The perfect waif's sitting room - James Lilek's book

Typical photo from James Lilek's book advocating attractive repurposing of items

Visions by Michio Katu

Michio Kato's Visions was published in 1997.  The book offers predictions about ways science will change the twenty first century and beyond.  The topics cover the computer revolution, the biomolecular revolution and the quantum revolution. 

Most of his near term predictions about the computer revolution have come to pass regarding the expansion of the internet and e-commerce.

His discussion of energy and civilization classification was very thought provoking.  At present, the earth is a class 0 civilization obtaining most of it's energy from decayed plants or uranium.  With the expansion of energy needs additional resources will be needed for the planet using energy from the whole planet and the nearby solar system. 

Planetary societies to become "immortal" need to advance in their technological expertise to protect the planet from external forces, comets and asteroids and control climate and weather.  The species will need to expand the civilization across the galaxy to protect the survival of the species in the event of a local supernova event.  He advocates sending self replicating robots to progressively colonize other planets. 

The book Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century is available from Amazon.com and other retailers

2057 Humans Michio Katu 8 minutes

The world in 2030 64 minutes

 

Can nanotechnology create a utopia? 6 min.

 

The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor

 

 

The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor reviews the positive psychology research and provides seven principles to happiness at work.

I applied one of the principles: The Zorro spot- to cleaning my usually cluttered office.  Concentrate effort on one small aspect of the problem and defend that territory.  It can also be applied to writing a book or a screenplay.  You do not write a book, you write one page at a time.

He also reviews the literature on willpower:  It is an easily exhaustible resource and when it is gone performance on subsequent tasks suffers.  In my interpretation, the person transitions from caring about the problem and working hard to a state of "whatever".   He used the example of a chocolate cake temptation destroying a diet.  The way to break through the willpower resource depletion problem is to make an activity habitual so it can be done without much thought or effort like brushing teeth.    Initially establishing the behavior is difficult, like learning to juggle.  At first it impossible to attempt to juggle the balls without complete concentration. After weeks of practice,  the same task can be done while carrying on a conversation.

He also recommends interpreting a negative outcome or failure as falling up rather than falling down.  What can I learn from this adverse situation that will make me a better person?  When I was briefly disabled,  I decided to start to write blogs for several reasons, to improve my writing and to keep track of information I was discovering and off load part of my brain.  The larger purpose was to help others improve themselves through learning.  People can interpret bad situations as "Why did this happen to me?" or I recognize that what happened to me is awful but I will use it to appreciate what I have left and be a more grateful caring person.   

Shawn is also a believer that repeated failure leads to success if we do not fall into the trap of learned helplessness.  This was explored in more detail in the book Adapt by Tim Harford.  Students can apply a self identity model of "I am a smart person" as a fixed personality trait to be defended or as I am a person who learns from my mistakes.  The latter person is more willing to learn new things while expecting to fail.  This was noted in Jan McGonigal's book Reality is Broken.  People learning how to become better at computer games expect to fail initially as they start out.  The key is to start small and do the preparation first. 

Shawn describes a high powered executive who wanted to become a marathon runner in one month.  She failed miserably because she was not willing to do the small initial steps to prepare herself for her larger task.  If you want it all now you will never have it.

Shawn provides a lot of helpful advice and it is a good review of other author's and researcher's work on positive psychology.  Use your creative brain and not let circumstances define who you are but allow yourself the grace to be grateful for what you have and use this information to fall up to a becoming a better person.

Shawn Achor is available as a public speaker on many topics.  His book The Happiness Advantage is available at Amazon.com and other retailers.

Happiness Advantage - 3 minute summary

 

Shawn Achor at Ted Ex in Bloomington, Indiana - 12 minutes

 

Black Swan by Nassim Taleb

Black Swan by Nassim Talib covers the topic of predicting the future when it is chaotic an opaque.  People often foolishly believe they have much more control over the future than they actually have. 

When compensating the performance of people predicting highly random events it is important to note that pure chance may have more of an influence than skill.  Individuals will take very small snippets of information and construct beautiful idealized theories that utterly fail to predict reality.

Black swan events cover things with a low probability of occurring but with a big impact.  These events are difficult to predict.   I was fortunate enough to anticipate the need for a back up power supply for the sump pump in my house.  Roughly once in every five to ten years a strong rainstorm will cause the power to go out and I was fortunate to be able to run the sump on back up battery power.  I had purchased the back up unit approximately 5 years ago for just that event.  If I had used evidence from the past three years when we had no loss if power I would have had a wet basement.

The misuse of mathematics to predict the future in a random unpredictable world is fraught with problems.  It is also easy to fall in love with a theory and to cherry pick evidence for it.

Evidence based medicine when properly applied is a way of getting a better sense of the truth.  I've watched cancer tests on research animals that have been very helpful in accurately predicting the efficacy of treatment regimes.   Anecdotal evidence does not control for the random positive effects that occur and cause people to chase treatment options that may be harmful, useless or less helpful than a placebo. 

Nassim does not suffer fools.  He is in a position to call them out and speak truth to ignorance.  I found the book to be refreshing and helpful in making decisions about predicting and unpredictable future.  We need to assume that our assumptions about the status quo are wrong. 

Black Swan - A book review (11 min)

Nassim Talib - Google book talks (60 min)

For further information about Nassim Talib go to his website Fooled by Randomness.



Jared Diamond - The World Until Yesterday

Jared Diamond's book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? , compares and contrasts paleolithic cultures with present day western cultures.  Jared was able to visit some of these areas because some cultures were untouched by civilization.  Portions of New Guinea have made the 10,000 year transition from primitive to modern culture in the space of 70 years starting with their discovery in the 1930's.

He advocates constructive paranoia in dealing with dangers in society.  These change based on location.  In the  primitive cultures, death from falling or from dead trees falling on people is a major problem.  That is why smart people in these cultures do not sleep under dead trees.  These would fit the definition of Nassim Talib's Black Swan event.   I was surprised at the high number fatalities from thorn scratches resulting from untreated bacterial infections. 

He does not romanticize ancient cultures finding the brutal inter tribal warfare and the practice of killing strangers, killing widows and the high rate of communicable diseases in the primitive cultures to be undesirable.  He does find the basic creativity of building your own toys and making your own fun to be more desirable than having the fun created for you.  If you build it yourself you know how it works.

He compares and contrasts state society and primitive cultures concluding that the legal system provides a cap on revenge killing.  He also asks the question of why people choose to have a parasitic ruling class over anarchy and concludes that people prefer stability and security to anarchy.

The scourge of modern culture is the NCD's - Non communicable diseases.  He focuses on type II diabetes and high blood pressure as examples and explains the natural selection process that makes groups of individuals more susceptible to these chronic illnesses. 

In primitive cultures far from salt water, salt is a difficult commodity to acquire requiring natives to ash leaves, dissolve them and rehydrate bitter salts.  When these native cultures are converted to modern diets they find the readily available salt to tempting to pass up and the rates of hypertension and heart attacks in these groups is very high. 

Type II diabetes is problematic in cultures subjected to periodic bouts of starvation.  Only the members of the culture who most efficiently process food survive by acquiring a "thrifty gene".  When these people start eating three meals a day and reduce their activity level as they don't have to work as hard to acquire food, the rates of obesity and type II diabetes go from zero to 30 to 40 %.

Jared provides a thoughtful discussion about religion and why people invest so much time into it. He notes the reasons for religion have changed over time.  Karen Armstrong covers this in greater detail in her Short History of Myth.  The original need to explain how the world works has declined.  The need for comfort in times of trouble is still present as is the need to ascribe meaning to life and the need for group support.  As most of us will hit a crisis of religious belief in our life it is important to understand what we want out of it.  Belief in magical thinking such as the need for water diviners increases when the outcome is highly variable as in areas with a complex geology and unpredictable aquifers.  These people are not needed when the outcome is predictable. 

Jared Diamond - The World Until Yesterday -21 minutes

Go to Jared Diamond's Book page for further thoughts from the author.  



Out of the Blue - 1968 Tracy, MN F-5 Tornado by Scott Thoma

Scott Thoma's book Out of the Blue provides eye witness accounts of an F5 tornado that hit Tracy, Minnesota during the summer of 1968.    This is a review by Audrey Kletscher Helbling  in MinnPost. 

It is a brutally honest story about the survival, death and destruction caused by one of two F-5 tornadoes in Minnesota history.  The story is relevant to me as I moved into southwest Minnesota in the fall of 1967 and visited the site after the tornado with my dad in the summer of 1968.  I remember seeing the destroyed elementary school.  

He places three people, a birth mom, a soon to be adopted baby and the adoptive mother at the center of the story.  We learn about the move to Tracy Minnesota and the deployment of the husband to Vietnam and the tragedy that strikes on the day of the tornado.

The town's emergency response to the tornado is covered in great detail and can serve as a guide to other emergency management personnel in preparing for a natural disaster.  The nearby communities worked rapidly together to provide additional resources for security, hospital workers, electrical generators, shelter and food. 

Railroad operators also acted to warn residents as the train was coming into town just before the tornado hit the town.  They blew the train whistle and ran the train back and forth on the tracks to get the residents' attention. 

The book also provides information about the best place to be in a tornado.  It is not the SW corner of the  basement.  It is in an protected interior room on the lowest level of the house.  Cover yourself with blankets to protect yourself from flying debris. 

The book provides a clear eyed look at how people respond to an emergency and the results of their decisions. 

Thirty minute radio interview of Scott Thoma on KMHL radio

Double Cross by Ben MacIntyre

 

 

I thoroughly enjoyed Ben MacIntyre's book Double Cross about the British effort to mislead the Germans about the location of the D-Day landing.  The British acquired a misfit band of people to mislead the Germans about the allies. 

 

The book covers the largely unsuccessful but enthusiastically pursued carrier pigeon war.  I was struck by the bravery, the pettiness and the creativity of the people in the double cross project.  Recruited British spies were created out of thin air and used to gather fictitious reports about people that were not there.

 

There was even an elaborately planned rouse to convince the Germans that General Montgomery was in Africa when he was in fact in England.  

 

 

 

Richard and Judy talk to Ben MacIntyre about Double Cross

The book, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies is available from Amazon.com.

The Next 100 Years by George Friedman

George Friedman's book The Next 100 Years covers primarily the political, economic and military conflicts that he predicts will occur from now until the year 2100. 

Far from heading into the twilight he sees America's ascendancy during the next century primarily based on geography.  One of three large countries with sea ports on the Atlantic and the Pacific gives the US a big advantage with respect to shipping material goods.  The dominance of the US Navy also allows for unfettered control of trade on the ocean. 

Conflict between Mexico and the US over the boarder region between the two countries is predicted to escalate.  Because the Mexican community in the US is not a diaspora he argues that the loyalty of Mexican/American citizens is in question at least in the boarder regions. 

The mastery of space and the development of space based energy production and space based weaponry will also be a large source of conflict and prosperity in the latter half of the 21st century. 

He predicts that Russia will attempt to reestablish some of the USSR first through dependency on energy production.  Poland will again be caught in the middle with the US and UK needing to make a decision if the country is worth defending.

 

George Friedman - America's strength: destroy the old and let it go.

 

 

Turkey will dominate the Islamic world in the future

The book, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century, is available from Amazon.com.

One from the Hart by Stephanie Powers

One from the Hart by Stephanie Powers covers her life starting from birth through the present.  She grew up in Hollywood and worked through several marriages.  Her marriage to William Holden provided the strongest emotional bond.  His troubles with alcohol, rehab and relapses made the times when he was sober more special to her.  He was at his best working on a Kenyan game reserve with Stephanie. 

Stephanie strongly bonded with her mother who served as her adviser while she was getting started in Hollywood.   She did not take her mother's advice and married Gary Lockwood a relationship that did not go well. 

With in two weeks she and her Hart to Hart costar Robert Wagner lost their spouses.  Natalie in a drowning accident and Willaim to alcohol related issues.  She also had to deal with her smoking related lung cancer. 

This account of her life provided a woman's perspective of an age in Hollywood covered with different vantage points by James Garner, Robert Wagner, Tony Curtis and Roger Moore.  They started out towards the end of the contract system and made it on their own.

 

Connie Martinson interviews Stephanie Powers part 1 - Why she wrote the book

 

 

Connie Martinson interviews Stephanie Powers part 2 - Traveling with Bill

 

Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal

Reality is Broken by Jan McGonigal offers a fascinating look at the application of game theory to our everyday life.   The first section covers why games make us feel happy.  We set up artificial obstacles and make being successful progressively harder as we become better keeping the gamer in a state of flow.  For most of us this state is not present in our daily work and is one of the reasons games can be addictive.  She uses the Italian word fiero to discribe the bold and prideful emotion people  have when they overcome an obstacle to win in a game or in sports.  Athletes will signify this by raising both arms up  with fists clenched and hands at either side.  It is a modification of a referee's touchdown signal in American football. 

She has also created unusual games, one is Graveyard Texas Hold em Poker.  Five cards are dealt in a graveyard.  People in pairs have three minutes to find another pair of "cards" (tombstones) to add to their hand.  The restriction is the two Tombstones must be close enough for two people to touch the stones and also touch each other.  The shape of the tombstone determines the suit.  For example: A flat grave marker is a diamond.  She has people touching because this releases the hormone oxytocin allowing the two people to form a bond.

She discusses the evolution of gaming.  It needs to evolve from World of War Craft to games that allow people to accomplish something like helping the UK's Guardian Newspaper investigate Member of Parliaments (MPs) Expenses. The government gave the Guardian a massive jpg. dump of MPs expense reimbursement and the newspaper crowd sourced the evaluation of the information to the public through an online evaluation tool.  As a result several MPs resigned and the government was refunded over a million pounds for excess reimbursements. 

There is also the Stanford University FoldingatHome project where the excess processing capacity of personal computers and Sony PlayStation's are used for computing power to research the topic of protein folding.  Improper protein folding is linked to Alzheimer's disease and many cancers.

Jan McGonigal succeeds in illustrating how appropriately applying game theory can make our reality and the lives of others much better.

Reality is Broken - 8 minutes

Jane McGonigal - Gaming can make a better world - Ted Talk 25 min. 

Reality is Broken - 79 minute discussion

The book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World is available from Amazon.com.

Pieces of My Heart - Robert Wagner

Robert Wagner (RJ) offers a very emotionally honest description of his life.  His loving relationship with Barbara Stanwyck changed him and made him a more complete person with a better perspective on life.  His two marriages to Natalie Wood both ended tragically but his second was the best part of his life.  David Niven Helped pull him out of his depression after his first divorce from Natalie and her tragic death from a boating accident.  It is unfortunate that David's second marriage was a poor fit with Roger Moore and RJ maintaining decorum after David's death.

Robert Wagner on his relationship with Barbara Stanwyck

After completing the biographies of Roger Moore and Tony Curtis this was an excellent third perspective on this era of film making.  The three men were friends although Tony and RJ had a brief falling out after Tony's public and messy divorce from Janet Leigh.  RJ turned down the part for James Bond when offered it by Mr. Broccoli and suggested that Roger Moore would be a good fit. 

RJ on his book

Jill St. John, Natalie Wood and Stephanie Powers were all in the same dance class together as children.  Jill's marriage to RJ is described very positively as she helps ground him and gives him excellent advice such as do not do Dancing with the Stars.  Stephanie and RJ had a good working relationship.  The TV series Hart to Hart was based on the relationship between Nick and Nora Charles in the Thin Man movies series.   RJ thought of it as an ideal marriage and wanted to portray that in the TV show.

The book, Pieces of My Heart: A Life is available at Amazon.com

The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins

The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins was written for two purposes.  The first was to provide evidence for the theory of evolution.  The second is to explore how creatures and the planet change during the long course of history and sometimes in only a lifetime. 

His writing on the evidence for plate tectonics provided the clearest explanation of the mechanism and the geologic evidence for the split of Africa and South America.  Igneous rock is created at roughly the midpoint between Africa and South America.  The youngest rock is at the middle and the oldest rock on the ocean floor is adjacent to the east coast of South America and the west coast of Africa.   Periodically over the course of the earth's history the north and south magnetic poles reverse.  The magnetic position is fixed when the rocks cool after being formed.  The bands of magnetic polarity form a mirror image of each other from the center point in the Atlantic as the ocean floor moves in opposite directions.

The ability for humans to force changes in the evolution of plants was fascinating.  I was unaware that a wild cabbage plant was the original source for  broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage.  Humans have been custom designing dog breeds for centuries starting from the wolf and then increasing the diversity to the wide number of breeds we have today.  An interesting Russian study started during the 1930's on grey foxes that selected for tameness transformed the foxes into very friendly animals that looked a lot more like dogs with their tails up instead of down.

Richard Dawkins reads from his book.  (17 minutes)

I appreciated his irreverence.  He directly quotes the Monty Python song All Things Dull and Ugly the parody of the British children's song All Things Bright and Beautiful.  The parody appeals to teenage boys everywhere for its comedic honesty and its unflinching willingness to not sugar coat the reality of our existence.  With this book Richard Dawkins largely succeeds in doing just that.  

All Things Dull and Ugly - Monty Python

The book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution is available from Amazon.com