And that absolutely does not jive with the corporate move, where they expect and want you to do absolutely as little as possible.  Don’t pack your things, let the packers do that, even if it means they’re going to pack an ashtray full of cigar butts (actually happened to a friend of my parents).  Don’t move your things, let the movers do it, even if it means they’re going to load a garbage can full of garbage onto the truck (which I caught them doing and told them to not do).  And let the relocation company handle finding you a temporary place to live, even if it means that they’ll hire someone else to find the place and set you up.

Milton Friedman talkes about the four ways to spend money.  The best is when you spend your money on yourself, because you maximize your value, minimizing cost and maximizing quality.  The worst way is to spend someone else’s money on someone else, because you have no incentive to minimize costs or maximize quality.  We knew we were being set up with an apartment that cost $155 per night, over 30 days, so you do the math and think “~$4500 a month in rent for an 800 square foot apartment must mean it’s one swank-ass place, right”?  And you’re wrong, because it’s not.

Like we said, not a bad place.

It doesn’t look like that bad a place.  Little dated on the outside, but the leasing office and pool are in good shape, the hedges are trimmed, etc.  It’s better than the kind of places we lived in college, more like the kind of places we lived in grad school.  It’s 4 pm when we arrive and there’s some appliance installers getting off work and drinking Miller Lite on their patio.  A couple of old Mexican women pushing kids around in strollers.  A fat, bearded 25-year old who looks uncomfortable in the sun and whose attire (sweatshirt, shorts, dark socks with Tevas) screams “computer programmer”.  Friendly enough and should work well enough until we find our house to rent.

But the trouble is the one thing we cared about isn’t there.  We’re not picky, we didn’t lay any requirements on their search other than “within 5 miles of work”.  When they first found a place for us and asked if it looked OK, Betsey responded, “No, it’s on the 3rd floor, we need something on the first floor, because I don’t want to cart the stroller up and down the stairs five times a day”.  And they said, “no problem, we’ve got an identical unit on the first floor.”  Which wasn’t the case.  Either they were lying, incompetent, or European, but in America an apartment that is up a flight of stairs from the ground is called a “second floor apartment.”  So we weren’t to happy about that an called our contact to straighten things out.  And then she called the middle man agency who was supposed to call the apartment complex and find out if there were any real first floor apartments.

So after this not happening in 20 minutes I walk fifty feet to the leasing office to check on the status of a ground-floor unit, ascertain that there is not such thing, and go back to gather up Betsey and the kids and the dogs, thinking we’ll go pick up my car (which was shipped from AVL to AUS).  We start walking back to the car, and we can her some sort of shouting/yelling noise in the distance.

As we’re rounding the parking lot, a couple walks into view on the other side of the lot, pushing at each other and yelling in each other’s faces.  They’re early 20′s, white; she’s blond, barefoot, wearing shorts, a halter top, and tattoos; he’s got dark lanky hair that looks like it’s plastered to his skull, wearing sneakers, athletic pants, and a black wife-beater.  And to give the name to his attire and prove that sometimes you can judge a book by its cover, he punches his girlfriend in the face, about 10 feet from where we’re standing.

She starts shouting “Call 911, he hit me and is stealing my cell phone”.  A part of me wants to help her, call upon my long latent Tae Kwon Do skills and knock the asshole down, but a much, much bigger instinct takes over and I hustle my kids to the car in double-time, point off towards the office and telling her “go to the leasing office over there, they can help you.”  Wife Beater stalks off stage left while her dog now enters from stage right: her unleashed, untagged, uncollared American Pitbull.  Who proceeds to defend his owner by jumping onto my dogs, and my wife, and my children, wanting to play; but if there’s one thing I’ve tried to teach my kids it’s “never, ever ‘play’ with an damn pitbull, because their idea of fun in suddenly turning on you and ripping off your face”.

So while Blondie alternates between chasing Wife Beater and her dog around the parking lot, we get the boys into the car.  I get Elliott strapped in and hop in the passenger seat.  Betsey is getting Grady in, but before I can close my door, the pitbull shows back up and jumps across me and sits down in the drivers seat, looking for all the world like he’s ready to go for a ride.  And in a moment of freakout strength and speed I manage to lunge across the car, throw open the drivers side door with my right hand, grab the (50 lb.) dog by the scruff of its neck with my left and throw it out the car door.  Betsey gets in, we slam the doors and hit the gas and we’re gone.

So now we’ve decided to forgo having other people do our short-term leasing for us, and we’ve taken up residence at the Homewood Suites in the Austin Arboretum for the next 30 days.  A nice, clean, professional chain hotel.  With free breakfast every morning.  And free dinner (and beer!) 4/7 nights a week.  And nobody getting punched in the face.  And, to boot, it’s only $145/night, which is $10/night cheaper than the North Austin Domestic Violence and Unleashed Pitbulls Villas.

So, again, Milton Friedman is right: you get better results when you’re spending your money (or budget in our case) on yourself.

The point of this post isn’t to knock the exceptional palate at MALT, or the comments of the BJCP certified tasters who are part of the club.  They’re absolutely right; I taste it now.  Next time I brew that beer it’ll be in a bucket of chilled water.  Yet, there’s something that’s happening there that I’m not sure I want to be a part of; it’s a rabbit hole I realized I’m not ready to go down.  And it comes down to boobs, and why pictures of boobs no longer excite me.

You see, about six months ago, I started getting more into portraiture, especially the Strobist/external lighting/etc side of portraiture, and I started to study photographs.  And as I learned about lighting and gels and diffuse vs. hard lighting, I started to look at every interesting photograph I saw in a new way; namely, I look at the lighting first, and the subject second.  I’m appreciating the photograph now on primarily technical grounds, seeing what went into its construction more than I’m seeing the finished result.

I wasn’t even aware this was going on until a few weeks ago, until a friend of ours asks Betsey if I can take some boudoir photos of her (for her husband, for his birthday).  After the important logistical questions (Are you sure?  Will he beat me up for this?  How much can you pay?), I dive into the research, because that’s what you do when you have a Ph.D., you read and read and read and figure out how things are done.  And while I’m reading all these boudoir photography guides I’m looking at all these pictures of beautiful women in sexy lingerie (or less) and I realize something: I’m not excited.

Seriously, I’m not that interested or excited in seeing these women in provocative lingerie.  I’m more interested in figuring out how to reproduce the shot.  I’m interested in the gear, the settings, the instruction given to the model (raise your hips and turn them slightly to the camera… no hold on, the rim lighting is a stop low).  I’ve lost the ability to appreciate a picture of boobs or a butt for what it is.  Which kinda sucks.

I mean, the constant search for pictures of boobs and buttocks was the primary activity of my late adolescence and early teenage years.  It was only eclipsed by my search for the real thing once I realized there were women in the world who would actually want to date me.  But still, the pictures were there to fill the gaps when I had that long-distance girlfriend (no, not Canada, but GA to Durham was far enough), or was home from college over the summer, or I had 5 minutes between classes.

And now?  Nothing.  Not even a minor titillating winkle.  Just the cold eye of the semi-wannabe-professional:  42″ inch umbrella shoot-through at 45/45  to subject face at 1/18 power, rear bare strobe at 30 degrees to rear of subject at 1/16 power.  Get her to hold her arm angled that way because otherwise it looks too fat.  Set up a better background.  Switch to your prime lens and drop the aperture to f/2.0.

So there it is.  I love photography, and I love improving my craft.  I’ve started to find ways to monetize that love (is there any greater dream or tragedy than the idea of “monetizing love”?) and, yes, that means adopting a cold, professional eye to the subject at hand.  And through that I’ve killed my love for pictures of boobs.  They just don’t do much for me anymore.

I was never into football, so without boobs and beer, it’s arguable that I’d no longer be a red-blooded American male (by my own calculus I need to take up hunting to restore an overall positive rating in the RBAM index).  Therefore, I must hold on to loving beer.  And that means I probably shouldn’t pursue learning that much more about beer than the occasional tip from other homebrewers.  Just brew what I love, and enjoy it, and make sure my friends enjoy it; I shouldn’t ask for more than that.  And if gaining that extra knowledge, that next level of the craft means that I need to give up on just enjoying a beer for what it is, well, I’ll pass on that round.

That’s not to say that Outliers is a bad book; it’s not.  It is well-written, contains interesting stories, and I could finish it in 2 bathtubs worth of reading time (during the summer months, this could possibly be finished in a single bathtub, due to a lower rate of heat dissipation), which gives me a good excuse to burn some propane and take two long and extraordinarily hot baths.  So Malcolm Gladwell’s pretty much on my good side for that alone.

But… there’s a few problems.  The first is taking 200 pages or so (the type is big so I’m guessing at most there’s 30,000 words here, its the nonfiction equivalent of the typical Y.A. novel; you could read this book or “Are you there God, Its me Margaret”) to say “Be at the right place at the right time”.  Which could have easily have been said in 9 words.  Pasteur used thirteen French words to say it quite elegantly way back in 1854: “Dans les champs de l’observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés” In English we can get it down to five: “Chance favors the prepared mind”.  So there we go, with only four more words than the title, Louis Pasteur has summarized Gladwell.  To me, this means Pasteur is something like 30,000/5 = 6,000 times more awesome than Malcolm Gladwell.

So, okay, we heard a lot of personal stories about successful people and we learned that gasp successful people aren’t magic meta-humans born with the supernatural power to bend the world to their will.  They’re well, people born of a certain culture that pre-disposes them to certain things.  i.e., people from a work-hard-plant-your-rice-and-tend-to-it-or-die-when-you-have-nothing-to-eat culture are more likely to succeed when the world transitions to an economy based on hard work and math prowess than people from an economy based on picking your nose and updating your Facebook status 25 times a day.  Also, because the world is going to make that transition in 2025, you better have been born in 2006-2007, because only 18 year old when the magic time comes is important.  So Elliott is set for life!  He’s got the magic age and I’ve turned his Buzz Lighyear pool into a rice paddy and as far as I’m concerned, my job as a parent is done.

Except now what to do with Grady, right.  I mean, the little guy was born 4 years too late.  I’d better start wondering what’s going to big in 2028-2030.  Transplanting human brains into dogs? Sounds about right.  Sascha!  Molly!  Come! … Sit!  Down!  Good dogs.  Now take this pill, hold still while I apply the saw.

Wait, this was supposed to be a critique of Outliers.  OK, sorry.  So, the whole thing is that if you ever took a graduate course in nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory, this shouldn’t be surprising.  Wait, you didn’t?  Well what the hell did you do in college?  Marketing management?  feh?  What’s that good for?  Really?  You’re making what!?  You’re business is growing that much each year!?!  Really!!?!!!  Can I have a job? Please?

Dammit, I lost focus again.  OK, the whole point that I’m getting at is that the idea that circumstances and chance matter as much as will and drive, etc., is nothing new.  Its old.  Its not even very interesting.  I mean, yes, Randroids will tell you that the Howard Roarkes and John Galts of the world can bend the universe to their will, but sane people understand intuitively that the baby born in a hut in a Bangladesh in 1684 is less likely to become a computer genius that a a baby born in Palo Alto in 1982.

In some ways, Outliers is a individualized take on, but there’s a holdover here from Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was a much thinkier and heavily researched type of book that basically said that societies and cultures arose and propsered not because of any inherent awesome traits of their peoples’ genes or philosophies (like Jesus, or rule of law, or let your women work in the fields), but rather by a series of completely unlikely and uncontrolled factors of development like the black plague and iron ore.  And because of that western society came to dominate the world.

So I think that Diamond and Gladwell would agree that everything is basically where you’re from and timing, etc. You need to be in the right place.  You want to be a Broadway star, its better to be born in New York with  couple of high-powered producers as parents.  Got it.  Paulie Shore didn’t become a great actor in Peoria IL, he did it in Hollywood.  Got it.

So there’s the first problem.  We all pretty much get it to begin with that circumstances matter.  we probably don’t agree with Gladwell/Diamond that they’re the ONLY thing that matters, but most sane and rational people would intuitively understand that the circumstances of your life matter as much as what you put into your life.  And here’s where we get to my second problem with Outliers, which is that Gladwell makes no attempt to quantify or explain the extent of “circumstances matter”, or to even prove it exists (and yes, I’m saying that he should prove the existence of something that is intuitively obvious.  Because, otherwise, the sun would still revolve around the earth).

Gladwell never, ever supports his ideas with anything that even remotely approaches statistical validation.  Everything is raw data and “did you look at those numbers and see the trend?”  And  ”almost 50% of the students on this roster were born between Jan1 and April 30. Less than 20% were born after October 1″.

Let me take the Canadian Hockey story, which is what prompted my friend to recommend the book to me in the first place.  Although there is what looks like a selection bias in Canadian hockey toward players born on Jan 1, Gladwell never takes any means to explain how severe that selection bias actually is and to quantify it based on any kind of serious analysis.  A real analysis would take into account the birth distributions by month of canadian children.  From what I know of Canadian reproduction, their pods hatch in intervals, and those tend to cluster around November (because February is so cold in Canada that nobody can go outdoors.  They must stay home and make their pod-babies).  This might actually help Gladwell out, but he is either unable to appreciate the purpose of real analysis or unable to package it in a way that appeals to his demographic, so we don’t really know if this is meaningful insight or just a pile of spit.

He actually, at one point, tells  a story about someone who can’t get his data published in a journal because it’s “too weird”.  No, it’s not “too weird”.  The scientist just hasn’t consigned himself to a 2nd- or 3rd-tier journal yet.  Or he hasn’t sufficiently blown the editor of Nature.  Or, maybe, just maybe real statistical analysis proves that the amazing effects in his “weird” data don’t actually exist.

Then again, it might.  Gladwell doesn’t possess the intellectual curiosity enough to learn basic stats or explain them to his readers.  If you don’t understand the nature of basic stats and probability, which most people don’t, it’s very hard to understand when something is real and when it’s BS.  It’s much easier to glom on to cool-sounding terms from statistics and nonlinear systems theories (Tipping points!  Outliers!), and then try to build a coherent thesis around them; but for all his skill as a narrator, and the interesting nature of his subjects, his theories aren’t backed up with anything but his magicians tricks.  Its not to say he’s wrong, its just that he fails to quantify and prove his theories.  There’s also the niggling point that he’s forgetting that of all the Canadian babies born on Jan 26, there’s only one Wayne Gretzky (actually, he does recognize this fact, there’s at least half a dozen times in the book where he says “that’s not to say that hard work doesn’t matter, it does”, but those statements are easily tossed aside  and ignored because they don’t fit the thesis and thrust of his book).

Monty Python has a brilliant line of reasoning in the Holy Grail that reasonably convinces that we burn witches because they weigh the same as a duck because they float in water which means they’re made of wood and which can be burned because they’re witches!  The scientific method and statistics are necessary to keep nonsense away.

So, the judgement here is to read Outliers if you want to take 1-2 hot baths and hear some interesting stories about Hockey and Jews in New York and a burn out from Reid College and Malcolm Gladwell (yes, he uses the end of the book to plump up his own family story, a hypocritical ego-boosting way to say “I, the amazing Malcolm Gladwell, am really not so amazing after all.”).  Don’t read it for new poignant insight into the human condition, or for any attempt to proof or quantify said insight.

[Also, the cover has some really poor and obvious Photoshopping going on; or maybe I've just spent too much time in Photoshop lately that I notice such things]

A portrait of Elliott that I shot at Betsey’s practice.

Betsey came home from work and we made a last run out for supplies. Betsey has already made sure we were taken care of for food, batteries, blankets, candles, etc., so we went looking for a sled. No dice. We did find new boots for Elliott, thankfully, because he’ll need them. We get home around 3, driving through light flurries. Within an hour, there’s an inch on the ground. Elliott wants to play, and who am I to deny him? So we get bundled up in boots and snow gear, and start to trek to Glen Arden Elementary, about a 1/4 mile away. On the way, the neighbors lend us a sled. By the time we reach the school, we’re in 2.5 inches or so of powder. We spend 15 minutes sledding down the hill before Elliott gets cold and we head back. There’s 4″ by this time. And it keeps coming and coming all night. At 8:30, the power goes out, so we head to bed early.

In the morning, we’re greeted with one of those classic Americana snowfalls. A thick blanket of powder with a crust of ice across the top. Its hard to walk through, and slow going whenever we head outside. At most we can handle 30 or 45 minutes at a go before Elliott loses his energy and needs to come inside. But its wonderful, and joy to see his delight in it. A bit of a meltdown on our first journey out, but our second one is a great time, throwing snow at dad, and sledding down the big hill at Glen Arden:

So, in the end, he reaches the conclusion – on his own – that jumping on the ball probably isn’t the best thing to do (“that ball is so hurting me”). And that’s probably a good conclusion to this episode. We watch him, guard against the worst impulses, and let him figure out his own limits. And we get some funny footage to boot (as a side note, Elliott finds the video hilarious).

This is Christmas, this year, in Houston:  Betsey and I wake up in the dark, quarter to six, Elliott is in the hallway outside Bruce and Carole’s guest bedroom, penned in by a dog gate and silhouetted against the dim light of the kitchen.  “Elliott, son, what are you doing?”, I ask him.

The natural response, “Did Santa come?”.

“I think he did, I think I heard him last night, did you?”

“Yeah, I did, I heard him sayin somethin”

“And what did you hear him saying?”

“HO HO HO”, he responds in the best deep voice a 3 year old can.  Betsey double checks that he heard the reindeer and sleigh on the roof, then encourages him to settle back down and cuddle for a while.  But its Christmas, and neither Elliott nor I are settled enough to wait long in bed.  So we’re up just after 6, surveying what has been left in the night, the empty glass of milk, the cookie crumbs left on the plate by the fireplace.

There’s such a short time in our life when we can wholeheartedly accept and believe in the stories we’re told, a time when we can experience wonder and joy undiluted by our reason or experience.  Watching our son this morning, I can remember that feeling, and I can take such pleasure in bringing that joy to him; for me, that’s the greatest Christmas gift of all.