Craig Constantine

Non sequitur to Geography geekiness

Published April 7, 2018 · All posts on Apr 7

Ironic, as it is actually Mackenzie who holds the distinction of leading the first recorded crossing of North America, not Lewis and Clark. In 1793, Mackenzie made a second attempt to cross the continent, over an extremely rugged section of modern-day British Columbia. He reached the Pacific north of Vancouver, and in so doing, beat Lewis and Clark by a dozen years. Mackenzie’s published memoir of the trip inspired Thomas Jefferson to send Lewis and Clark at all, and they carried a copy of the best-selling book in their canoe.
~ Brian Castner from, Revisiting an Explorer’s Northwest Passage ‘Disappointment’ After Nearly 230 Years

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If you are not following Atlas Obscura you are seriously missing out. I had an idea much like it, about 20 years ago and I never followed through. Meanwhile they have done it WAY better than I think I could have. Every day they post a couple of obscure things about our world.

This particular item is SOOOOO MUCH FUN! I thought (ie, I was told, in primary school and high school) that Lewis & Clark were these great adventurers who set out across the …. NOT. They took a copy of this other guy’s book with them.

Meanwhile, Internet for the win! As you read the story — seriously. go! — it talks about a “bend in the river” where they misjudged how much it was redirecting them. (Complicated by no maps, bad magnetic north issues in that area, etc) And TODAY you can go to this Google map link and you can see it’s like… “Yay! We’re going west on this river and we’re going to reach the Pacific ocean by going below Alaska…” *sad trombone* and the river makes this VICIOUS hard-right turn and “booooo! We’re going to the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean….”

Mackenzie River

Psych-itis

Published April 6, 2018 · All posts on Apr 6

So basically all of these systems are intimately interconnected, and probably before this is done with researchers will find five more systems intimately interconnected with all of these. It might be that inflammation is the master system which causes a cascade of events in all of the others. It might be that one of the others is the master system. It might be that depression is a collection of multiple different diseases, and some are caused by one thing and others by another. It might be that looking for a “master system” is silly and that the true mathematical relationship between all of these things is such a chaotic process that all you can say is that they all stumbled together into the wrong attractor point and things deteriorated from there.
~ Scott Alexander from, Chronic Psychitis

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This is one of those stories where science has been carefully teasing something apart for many years, only to find out, in the end, that they had it all wrong along the way.

Clarity: SCIENCE FOR THE WIN.

But — via my confirmation bias — this jumps out as another place where being “certain” about things turns out to be — wait, no — I’m not certain. Dammit. Oh well, it’s just turtles all the way down.

How much harder is it?

Published April 4, 2018 · All posts on Apr 4

How much harder is it to do the right thing when you’re surrounded by people with low standards? How much harder is it to be positive and empathetic inside the negativity bubble of television chatter? How much harder is it to focus on your own issues when you’re distracted with other people’s drama and conflict?
~ Ryan Holiday from, The Daily Stoic

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I consider myself lucky that I’m surrounded by such a terrific group of people: loving, supporting, listening, encouraging– just so many ‘ings.

Also, I’ve built upon my intial luck (parents, gender, skin color, country of birth, the century, etc) by working hard to seek out people who require me to improve. I don’t particularly like the old adage, “you are the average of your five closest friends,” because it’s so trivial as to be of little help. I prefer…

People are like goals in that they pull (or push, this is a choose-your-own metaphor) you in some direction. Sometimes, one person pulls you in several directions at once. Each person pulls you in “lurches” and “yanks”; The more time you spend with them, the more of a concerted effect they’ll have. Some people you cannot choose (to add or remove them from your life, to change their behavior or innate qualities). So you best think very carefully, and act very intentionally, to choose those whom you can.

Well that escalated quickly

Published April 3, 2018 · All posts on Apr 3

Warning, this post is so meta even this acronym…

This blog just had it’s first month with more than 10,000 page-views.

Wanna guess where most of my traffic comes from? Ok, sure, most of my traffic comes from the Goog. That’s trivial. But where does most of the non-goog traffic come from?

https://www.stumbleupon.com/

By a long measure too. Years and years of all the other social channels, nary a bump — deleted. Bookface? nary a bump… I think about 7 (s e v e n) people click through from Bookface.

I urge you to click over and join my growing email list before Facebook implodes entirely ;)

Type 2 diabetes

Published April 2, 2018 · All posts on Apr 2

The traditional approach—which is clearly not working—is to “manage” this chronic condition with medications and the ever-ubiquitous “eat-less-avoid-fat-exercise-more” lifestyle interventions. At best, this approach only slows down the progression of the disease.
~ Peter Attia from, Is Type 2 Diabetes Reversible at Scale?

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Often the things I’m commenting on are “close to the ground” — things that are immediately actionable, or suggestions of things to go explore or do directly.

This one is different. Peter Attia sits in a certain niche — if you know of him, you are nodding knowingly — but this particular article is a neat attempt to zoom way out to think about wether the more “on the ground” sort of “do this”, “do that” personal direction is inherently scalable out to population-wide solutions to problems.

Meditation

Published April 1, 2018 · All posts on Apr 1

People who haven’t tried to meditate have very little sense that their minds are noisy at all. And when you tell them that they’re thinking every second of the day, it generally doesn’t mean anything to them. It certainly doesn’t strike most of them as pathological. When these people try to meditate, they have one of two reactions: Some are so restless and besieged by doubts that they can hardly attempt the exercise. “What am I doing sitting here with my eyes closed? What is the point of paying attention to the breath?” And, strangely, their resistance isn’t remotely interesting to them. They come away, after only a few minutes, thinking that the act of paying close attention to their experience is pointless.
~ Sam Harris from, Taming the Mind

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I don’t consider myself “very good” at meditating. Beginning in ’98, through 15 years of Aikido practice and beyond, I have spent “some” time sitting in seiza, meditating and breathing. It was only after many years that I realized how wonderful the sitting, meditation, and breathing was for me personally.

There’re approximately 10 gazillion intros and primers on meditation and breathing on the Internet, so I’m not even going to give a hand-waving explanation. I’ll just say: Yes! Do! You can mail me a Thank-you card later!

…and I suppose also: If we meet in person, strike up a conversation and I’d love to talk shop.

Beware the man

Published March 31, 2018 · All posts on Mar 31

But I worry that most smart people have not learned that a list of dozens of studies, several meta-analyses, hundreds of experts, and expert surveys showing almost all academics support your thesis – can still be bullshit. Which is too bad, because that’s exactly what people who want to bamboozle an educated audience are going to use.
~ Scott Alexander from, Beware the Man of One Study

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The way our civil discourse currently works, one has to be loud (or strident, or be an animated-GIF) to be heard. If one thinks, “This topic is complicated. I should learn more about it before engaging…”, then by definition you are not [yet] participating in the civil discourse.

Meanwhile, the discourse continues led by those who are willing to engage, and who may [or may not] be better informed than you.

So here’s a challenge — something to consider trying, not a challenge in the sense of me saying, “I challenge you, sir, to a duel!”…

Actually start those conversations where you don’t feel well-equiped. So for example, I should more often say, “I disagree with you because I’m not convinced that yours is the correct position . . . but I’m not entirely certain of my position either . . . can we help each other by unpacking our thinking a bit more?”

There’s a real skill to being fine with not winning the discussion. I engage, I discuss, and the other person holds their position not moving one iota. We each walk away disagreeing but at least we better understand that other individual human being. That would be civil discourse.

The filter bubble

Published March 30, 2018 · All posts on Mar 30

Well, personalization is sort of privacy turned inside out: it’s not the problem of controlling what the world knows about you, it’s the problem of what you get to see of the world.
~ Eli Pariser from, The Filter Bubble

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There are thousands — that’s not a typo — of companies which trade (buy, sell) data about users. We’ve reached a point where it is no longer possible to hide. You might also be interested in reading this:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/facebook_and_ca.html

Code of conduct, and Principles

Published March 28, 2018 · All posts on Mar 28

[We] spent weeks drafting the core principles that would support our classroom. We scribbled them down, and over the years they have become clearer and more concise:
Defining humanity, both masculinity and femininity based on the strength of your relationships and the contributions you make to society.
Developing relational skills with teammates, parents, siblings, teachers and friends and learning to maintain and sustain strong positive friendships.
Developing empathy toward others so that you can be supportive and understanding.
Practicing good sportsmanship before, during, and after practices, games, and events, and in life.
Defining success in life as being relationally successful and having a cause bigger than yourself.
Acting with integrity in every area of your life
Contributing to society by taking it upon yourself to get invollved in actions and projects that make the world better in some way.
Becoming an advocate of justice and an ally with others by speaking up on behalf of others and against injustice.
Refraining from committing acts of injustice, including bullying, harassment, racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of hurtful behavior and not accepting or tolerating this kind of behavior in others.
Refraining from violent behavior and learning how to resolve conflict in a postiive and productive manner.
Developing a coherent narrative by making sense of your life experiences, good, bad, and ugly.
~ Joe Ehrmann, InSideOut Coaching pgs 166-7, https://www.librarything.com/work/11172773

And…

COACHES’ CODE OF CONDUCT
The purpose of our coaching is to help boys become men of empathy and integrity who will lead, be responsible, and change the world for good.
Be mindful never to shame a player, but to correct him in an uplifting way. Affirmation!
Believe in every player. Remember, “In youth is where miracles are made.”
Protect our players. Be big enough to build up, not tear down. Our kids are getting attacked from many places that we don’t often see and of which we are not aware.
Remember our job is to put our players in a position where they can develop to their fullest potential through proper teaching and nurturing.
Each player is part of our family, deserves every chance to succeed, and deserves the utmost respect.
Coaches can disagree in meetings but never in front of our players or anyone else outside our family. Disagreements are saved for private meetings.
Our players are student-athletes and we are teacher-coaches. We hold ourselves accountable as teachers of young men and the lessons they need in order ot navigate masculinity and life.
If you do not know, say so and get approprate information. Don’t bluff our kids! They know the difference.
Remember that parents are our parnters. We strive to work with each family in helping their sons succeed. “Every boy is a son to his mother and father.”
Love your players and the other coaches.
No profanity!
Know the difference between shaming and coaching. No screaming, shaming, swearing, or sarcasm.
Don’t be afraid to apologize! We all make mistakes. When mistakes are made publicly, apologize publicly; when mistakes are made personally, apologize personally.
We are nurturing successful people, not just successful athletes.
Treat all opposing coaches and their taems with the honor true competitors deserve.
Respect all referees, officials, and timekeepers. They are imperfect and trying their best just as we are.
Regardless of our wins and losses, we will be successful if we carry out the above items.
Because I am a role model who has the power, position, and platform to make a positive difference in the lives of my players, I commit to this code of conduct. When failing to live up to our standards I will allow for accountabiity and take responsibility for my actions.
~ Joe Ehrmann, InSideOut Coaching pgs 191-3

These are much bigger than my usual pull-quotes. …both in the sense of word-count and in the sense of potential value if they were more widely known.

Ehrmann is writing in the specific context of sports-coaching boys in primary schooling, but one could easily trim out the parts that are specific to sports and still be left with a very useful set of principles, and a well-thought-out code of conduct. If you coach– no actually, scratch that– If you are a human being, I highly recommend you read this book.

Blood test results

Published March 27, 2018 · All posts on Mar 27

You’ve gotten your blood test results back, but you have no idea what they mean. Here’s a short overview (from a ketogenic perspective) on how to translate the numbers, and what they mean. The information in the table below will help you sort out the numbers and figure out what you need to address in terms of your health.
~ Ellen Davis from, Your Blood Test Results

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Nothing heavy today. Just a reference to a short post that is useful for understanding the results of a typical blood test.

Ten bucks at a time

Published March 26, 2018 · All posts on Mar 26

Ten Bucks is a lot of money. So you need to respect it. Ten dollar bills are not just food stamps or amusement park coupons that you fork over by the dozen to get restaurant meals, smokes, strippers, drinks, tourist attraction admission, and assorted domestic services. Each Ten is a critical brick in the Early Retirement castle you are building.
~ Peter Adeney from, A Millionaire is Made Ten Bucks at a Time

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His pseudonym is silly, but don’t be distracted. Don’t mistake a fun way to discuss things with not having excellent advice.

…also, go read it all, flip –– via one small change here, another tweak there — your entire westerized consumerinsane lifestyle on its head.

Your clear conscience

Published March 25, 2018 · All posts on Mar 25

Your clear conscience gives reason to be confident; still, since many external factors have a bearing on the outcome, hope for the best but prepare yourself for the worst. Remember above all to get rid of the commotion. Observe what each thing has inside, and you will learn: there is nothing to fear in your affairs but fear itself.
~ Seneca from, Seneca to Lucilius

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What — exactly, specifically — is under your control?

Sincerity

Published March 24, 2018 · All posts on Mar 24

To live with sincerity in our culture of cynicism is a difficult dance — one that comes easily only to the very young and the very old. The rest of us are left to tussle with two polarizing forces ripping the psyche asunder by beckoning to it from opposite directions — critical thinking and hope.
Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is naïveté.
~ Maria Popova from, Hope, Cynicism, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

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Sometimes the best pull-quote is what she quoted from her reading.

Often the best insight is something she herself has written.

Go follow Brain Pickings. Support her work — she’s one of the few wordsmiths building great content on the Internet.

Small-b blogging

Published March 23, 2018 · All posts on Mar 23

Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Small b blogging is deliberately chasing interesting ideas over pageviews and scale. An attempt at genuine connection vs the gloss and polish and mass market of most “content marketing”.
~ Tom Critchlow from, Small b blogging

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…and of course, my having just linked to him is one the affect he’s talking about (among several others.)

Zooming out: This reminds me to get back to writing. Several months ago, I began an intentional hiatus from writing every day… and I really miss it. Hop to it, Craig!

Novice and expert learners

Published March 22, 2018 · All posts on Mar 22

There are two important takeaways from this idea. The first is that this is a sliding scale not a pair of absolutes. Almost everyone sits somewhere between. Secondly, by virtue of their position, teachers coaches and educators will always be experts. They have deep domain specific knowledge about an issue and understand it in a very different manner from the novice learners they are invariably teaching.
~ John “Hedge” Hall from, Novice and Expert Learners – The impossible rift

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I am not a parkour coach. But John most definitely is. He gave a wonderfully lucid and thought-provoking discussion at the last Art of Retreat which has left a permanent idea/mark/lesson in my mind about the “journey” each of us goes through in our learning process. (Just because I feel I learned the lesson, doesn’t mean I’m necessarily any good at passing it along.)

Anyway, John has a lot of really good thoughts on inclusivity in practice!

Knuckle walkers

Published March 21, 2018 · All posts on Mar 21

Walking on your knuckles is absolutely as odd as walking bipedally, a very peculiar way to get around. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s bothered anthropologists for years. Only chimps and gorillas do it. No one has come with the reason why—until now.
~ from Why aren’t humans ‘knuckle-walkers?’

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Having done quite a bit of walking on all-fours (aka “quadrapedie movement”, QM) I consider myself well-informed on this topic. Here’s my take:

Walking on knuckles sucks, but it is almost far superior to walking on the flat, open hands. Why does it suck? Because we humans are missing the fat pads (check the balls of your feet, and palm-side of your hand knuckles) that the Great Apes have on the back of their knuckles. When I walk on my knuckles in QM — and I do do that — I have to be very careful not to injure my knuckles. But in grass, it is delightfully more comfortable then flat, open hands. On your knuckles, the wrist is neutrally positioned and the wrist muscles are naturally activated, but not overly strained. The upper arm is easily kept inwardly rotated keeping elbows rotated/tucked rearward for a strong shoulder position. Meanwhile the forearm offers a nice range of rotation allowing comfortable hand placement.

Take a few steps on your knuckles and you cannot help but feel like a gorilla. rrr rrr RRR!

No instruction manual

Published March 20, 2018 · All posts on Mar 20

The fact that you can’t remember an agreement you made with yourself doesn’t mean that you’re not holding yourself liable for it. Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list you dumped: zero. It’s all present tense in there. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it only in your short-term memory, that part of you thinks you should be doing it all the time. And that means that as soon as you’ve given yourself two things to do, and filed them only in your head, you’ve created instant and automatic stress and failure, because you can’t do them both at once, and that (apparently significant) part of you psyche will continue to hold you accountable.
~ David Allen, from Getting Things Done

…yes another quote from the GTD book.

In the first half of my life — say to age 40 — I made a HUGE MISTAKE: I presumed that I had a reasonable understanding of how my brain worked. I don’t mean at a physiology level; I still don’t really understand that. I mean at a day-to-day-doing-stuff, when-I-do-this-then-this-happens, this-is-how-one-lives sort of level. Like how I thought I knew how to use my brain to decide what to eat, what to work on, what to read, what to do with my time . . .

Now why on earth did i think I had any idea?

Seriously: You think of “me” as this “self-thing” located behind your eyes, but that “you” is just “running” in/on your brain. So have you ever tried different ways of running your life? How do you know reading some such book will or won’t change your life? Maybe you should experiment with everything. Try something radical: Pay attention to the results. You’re ALREADY following lots of advice — my advice, your mother’s advice, the TV ads’ advice, your doctor’s advice — but have you ever bothered to figure out what the results are? Then make a deliberate change intended to move you toward a specific goal. Observe results. Then make another change. Then another. And another.

I mean, it’s not like your entire life depends on the choices you … oh wait. *lightbulb*

Shuttle launches

Published March 18, 2018 · All posts on Mar 18

I earn my living in comedy, but science is my hobby. I’m a fan of science: I hang out with scientists at science places and I read about science and scientists. My mom always says, “If you walk like a duck, talk like a duck, and hang around with ducks, people will start thinking you’re a duck.” This may be true for juvenile delinquents and waterfowl, but, unfortunately, if you walk like a scientist, talk like a scientist, and hang around with scientists, people will still know you’re a dumb-assed comedian.
~ Penn Jillette from, NASA’s Successful Quantifying of Comedy Timing

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When you get there, you will learn that SYMFTR is an acronym.

The piece begins with an apologwarning about it being long. It is not. …and if you have trouble reading pieces of this length — I weep for your soul and you really need to read more.

I once stood in the VIP area, 3.7 miles from a space shuttle when America EXPLODED HUMANS INTO SPACE. It was everything Penn describes. I should probably write about it, but it was so soo long ago.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anger is a temporary madness

Published March 17, 2018 · All posts on Mar 17

This includes people who get angry, which is why Seneca calls anger a “temporary madness.” This class of individuals can certainly be held morally responsible for their actions, since they are perfectly capable of reason, they just don’t use it well.
~ Massimo Pigliucci from, Stoicism and Emotion, V

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Once more, louder for those in the back: Stoicism is not about suppressing emotions. It is about [among other things] having appropriate emotional responses.