voluntaryXchange

Be Coachable

Bob Bowman: “The most important thing is, he’s very coachable.”

That’s a lesson most people could stand to learn. I know I could (although I’ve gotten better at this, with effort).

This video came from the vXyoungman, who was a competitive swimmer in high school.†

He brought this up to me in trying to explain what he got out of athletics (he’s a music major who wants to be concert pianist). He’s fairly assertive that a big problem in music is that a lot of players aren’t very coachable, and a lot of music “coaches” aren’t very constructive.

FWIW: He loves VV, the professor he’s worked with for 2 years.

† The video comes from an ABC show I’ve never heard of from 2009-10, Shaq vs.

Flying Saucer Rebuttal from 1952

JF Ptak Science Books, an antiquarian blog, reproduced a two page report from 1952 in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society regarding the large number of flying saucer sightings over the previous 6 years.

It’s a short, even-handed, and fascinating read. Here’s an excerpt:

I couldn’t agree more. I’d rather like if the sightings that are still happening to be extraterrestrial.

For my part, what age has done for me is convinced me that the speed of light can’t be exceeded, and we’re unlikely to ever find anything that wasn’t launched from another star system as an inhabited probe. I’m also much more inclined to think that if observations are real, that they are something interdimensional rather than interstellar, perhaps even something from our own neighborhood of space but from a different neighborhood of time. When I was younger I put much more weight on interstellar and much less on interdimensional. Too much Star Trek I suppose.

Some Local Economics

From our mayor’s newsletter:

Due to the increased cost of recycling … City Council has made the decision to discontinue our recycling binnie programs as of January 1, 2020.

I am not against recycling (and do some pretty questionable “save the trees” things myself … don’t ask the vXwife about my compost).

Having said that, “saving” the planet through, say, recycling, has costs. And the approach of many is to assume that the implicit benefits will cover the explicit costs. Not always so.

In our case, the opportunity costs of recycling are huge. We are distant from larger population centers, and our landfills are old strip mines: huge pits or canyons that you can drive into that will take decades to fill.

Go SUU, Sort Of???

My school, Southern Utah University, was just ranked the 6th most conservative public college in the country.

I wouldn’t disagree. We had a sexuality class taught by biologists discontinued a few years ago due to complaints. And our last president and provost had us designated as Utah’s liberal arts university … and had to backtrack because locals didn’t understand the usage of the word liberal in that context.

Having said that, I wonder what other places are like: we had progressive student protesters saying bigoted things about economists last month.

When the Editors Don’t Read

For many years, people speculated about what journalism would look like when the kids who weren’t taught to write well grew up.

I’ve noticed a few times over the last 5 years that we seem to have reached that point. Consider:

How did an editor miss a word that is wrong outright, and a word deletion that’s merely kludgy in “… on score three points in first quarter …”?

This is from an unattributed Associated Press piece entitled "Fred Cox, former Vikings kicker, dies at age 80" on Foxnews.com.

FWIW: I remember watching Fred Cox play when I was little, and once upon a time owned his Topps card:

It’s worth $10 now. Thanks for throwing that out around 1977 mom. I was an investor with a plan. Promise.

An Interesting Compliment

I got a nice thank you from Google.

I didn’t intend on taking a photo that would be used by Google, but apparently I took a few back in 2017-18.

And one of them has been hit over 5K times. It’s of the chandeliers in Abravenal Hall in Salt Lake City (where they symphony plays).

They are rather striking, and I do remember taking the photos in January 2017 while a blizzard raged outside. If you put Abravenal Hall into Google Maps, there’s almost a thousand photos posted there. I have no idea whether or not 5K hits is a lot or a little (no rankings are provided). I do see quite a few photos of those lights though.

So True: Are the Patriots the Best Team Ever?

Check this out. It’s a scan of the front page of the weekend section of the Wall Street Journal  from November 2, 2007.

First look at the headline I circled at the bottom left: “Is New England the best NFL team ever?” Arguably, yes.

Second, look at the circled date at the top right: November 2, 2007. That’s 12 years ago next week.

And we’re still dealing with New England being the best team ever. Yikes.

N.B. I grew up a Buffalo Bills fan. It’s still hard to deal with the fact that New England made the Super Bowl in 1985 before the Bills did (in 1990). Geez … they didn’t even make the playoffs much in the old days.

Eva Mendes On Parenting

I normally would not read this sort of thing, but:

“People are so sweet – they really try to warn you, prep you, when you’re pregnant, but nobody can prep you. Nobody,” Mendes said of her new role.

“And nobody told me it was gonna really be a job. And a job that I needed an incredible amount of skill for, in different areas,” she continued. “A chauffeur, a cook, a personal assistant to an abusive boss.”

[Kelly] Clarkson, 37, retorted, “They don’t appreciate it!” …

“No, they don’t! They’re not grateful!” said Mendes. “Oh my God, do they get grateful? Does that happen at some point?” she asked the audience.

We got some genuine gratitude from the vXteengirl last night. And wow was it appreciated, and very hard work.

This point was made in the 1989 movie Parenthood:

“In any other profession, you’d need to take a test or pass tests,” she said. …

I loved this one; I think this is what our kids think of us:

“We’re very controlling,” she said. “I think what the term is — we’re always laughing at these terms — I think we would be ‘bulldozing parents.’”

That’s most of the article, but here’s the rest.

I Keep Returning to the “Brutally Honest Emmy Ballot …”

It’s been a month, but I have found the Hollywood Reporter piece entitled “Brutally Honest Emmy Ballot: "Detested" 'Sharp Objects,' 'Pose' Is "Pretentious," "Too Much Trump" on 'SNL'” to be something that has stuck in my head.

I did not watch Pose. I find Ryan [Murphy’s] stuff to be the same over and over again — pretentious — and it held no appeal to me; I’d rather watch RuPaul, to be honest, than have Ryan lecture me about drag.

I haven’t heard a single thing about Pose since the night of the awards. To me it seems like Modern Family: I don’t watch it, I don’t know anyone who watches it, and I don’t know anyone who knows anyone who watches it.

… Ozark jumped the shark in season two. … Better Call Saul is great and Jonathan Banks is the best actor on TV — I don’t understand how he hasn’t won yet. I have voted for Game of Thrones in the past, but it went the bro-iest it’s ever been — it was frat-boy central — and even though I didn’t mind the ending that everybody else did, I do think they lost their way when they didn’t have a book. I loved Bodyguard — [Richard] Madden was amazing and I binged it in a weekend. Succession is brilliant, and its second season, so far, is even better than its first — but the truth is, its brilliance is mostly in the writing. Killing Eve is the best drama on television

Agree on Ozark.

Mostly agree on Jonathan Banks, although we’ve yet to binge the last season.

Agree on Game of Thrones, although heck, George R.R. Martin lost his way with a book. I watched the whole thing twice, and it’s merely very good, and deeply overrated.

I am seeing bits of Succession while getting ready for bed. Very intrigued.

I can’t wait to watch either of Waller-Bridge’s shows. And I loved Sandra Oh since … wait for it … Arliss.

I was hugely disappointed by Russian Doll — it’s Groundhog Day, but without a point. Schitt’s Creek is lovely, but I don’t know how it got nominated. I’m happy to see a network show, with The Good Place, but it’s not of the caliber of network shows of yesteryear — you can’t put that in the same universe as Cheers. I didn’t love this season of Maisel, although I could watch Tony Shalhoub read the phone book. Veep is great, but I’m not voting for it again — there should be a mercy rule where you can’t win something more than three or four times. So it came down to Fleabag and Barry. You cannot imagine how much I’d love to vote for Phoebe, but she’s up against Barry, which is the best show on TV.

Natasha Leone is always a disappoint for me; which is weird because I do think she has some sort of charisma that appeals to me. And then it doesn’t work.

Groundhog Day had a point? I’ve tried harder with that movie than any other … I think you’re all nuts.

I like The Good Place. I would not go out of my way to watch it though.

Totally agree on Tony Shaloub.

I have not watched much of Veep. But I love the idea of a mercy rule.

We have not done Barry yet. Honestly, I’m tired of mobster stuff. I’ve experimented with watching little bits of Lilyhammer again, and I just can’t commit to for a second go round.

Escape at Dannemora was good — I loved the directing more than the writing, and I wasn’t crazy about the casting, apart from Patricia Arquette. …Chernobyl is the best thing that’s been on TV in the last 10 years.

I did not have a lot of interest in Escape from Dannemora; it’s such a f***ed up story. But I have heard good things about it.

Chernobyl. No. It was good. Leave it at that.

… Documentary Now has had better seasons. I liked Who Is America?, and I love Drunk History, but both are sort of one-joke. This season of Saturday Night Live was very hit and miss — they did way too much Trump, and, like a lot of people, I’m feeling Trump fatigue.

Couldn’t agree more on these.

… Last year I voted for Oliver, and I was going to vote for him again — but I thought about it, and Colbert has to do it five nights a week! He’s funny, smart and, when he needs to be, poignant. He can sing. He speaks truth to power … There’s really nothing he can’t do. For me, since Carson, he’s the best.

I am not a late night talk show person, although like most Americans I’ve watched quite a bit over the years. And yeah … Colbert is special.

This may be the only time I can ever put this in writing, but I miss Craig Ferguson like you would not believe. I hope, somehow, that show becomes available through streaming.

Ask More Sensitive Questions

New research, check out the abstract [emphasis added]:

Within a conversation, individuals balance competing concerns, such as the motive to gather information and the motives to avoid discomfort and to create a favorable impression. Across three pilot studies and four experimental studies, we demonstrate that individuals avoid asking sensitive questions, because they fear making others uncomfortable and because of impression management concerns. We demonstrate that this aversion to asking sensitive questions is both costly and misguided. Even when we incentivized participants to ask sensitive questions, participants were reluctant to do so in both face-to-face and computer-mediated chat conversations. Interestingly, rather than accurately anticipating how sensitive questions will influence impression formation, we find that question askers significantly overestimate the interpersonal costs of asking sensitive questions. Across our studies, individuals formed similarly favorable impressions of partners who asked non-sensitive (e.g., “Are you a morning person?”) and sensitive (e.g., “What are your views on abortion?”) questions, despite askers’ reticence to ask sensitive questions.

I’ve gone through life having many people think I ask things that I should not. I’ve told a ton of people this: I generally know exactly what I’m doing. Get over it.