Taking a trip

Hi guys. The day of departure is here; in about six hours I'll board a plane for Copenhagen (with a stop in Germany along the way). After a long and pleasant night sleep, I'm feeling in good spirits and excited to start.

The weather here is about as nice as one could hope in August, the morning cool and crisp and redolent of Autumn, with dew on the grass and a few wisps of cloud in the sky. Cycling to and from work has been a treat of late, as has our evening walks down to the park and back. For these and many other things I am very grateful.

Whilst riding yesterday afternoon I passed through a cascade of leaves coming down from a nearby tree. It reminded me of many pleasant runs on the perkiomen trail with my old cross country buddies in college, how we would make a game of catching the leaves before they reached the ground. With that image in mind, I reached up and snagged a crisp yellow one from the air--whether by luck or skill that I caught it, I will take it as a good omen for the trip.

Our itinerary for the trip is not firmly established, but at this point the main cities we'll be visiting are Copenhagen, Roskilde, and Aalborg. From the wikipedia entries they all seem like interesting places, and with luck I will have much to report when I return.

Well, that's about it. I'm looking forward to the trip, and the adventure it's bound to entail.  Farewell for now, and happy Friday :)

jc

Assorted Links

1.) First World War: "A war that finance didn't want"

2.) Another positive result if stem-cell research for spinal-cord injuries:

"These findings indicate that intrinsic neuronal mechanisms readily overcome the barriers created by a spinal cord injury to extend many axons over very long distances, and that these capabilities persist even in neurons reprogrammed from very aged human cells."

3.) President Obama talks with Thomas Friedman on foreign policy:

“Our politics are dysfunctional,” said the president, and we should heed the terrible divisions in the Middle East as a “warning to us: societies don’t work if political factions take maximalist positions. And the more diverse the country is, the less it can afford to take maximalist positions.”

4.) Is average over? Overrated? Scott Beaulier thinks so:

"The new normal will be a more jobless normal, but here's the silver lining: new technologies, such as driver-less cars, promise to free up time and bring about significant cost savings. In education, for example, students everywhere will have access to classes taught by some of the best teachers on the planet at a fraction of today's cost. Education in 50 years will look a lot like the journalism business today; more information than ever will be produced by far less people, and the "go-to" sources of opinion or expertise--the stars of the industry--will be doing remarkably well. The fortunes for the rest of Americans, meanwhile, seem sure to stagnate."  

5.) "Why your brand-new plane doesn't have a seat-back tv"

6.) Hiroshima's Genbaku Dome through 69-years of history:

7.) The "Instant-Gratification" Economy: Or how the mass adoption of smart-phones is changing the world

An approaching adventure

At the end of last December I found myself thinking about how I could challenge myself in the new year. This in itself proved something of a challenge, as historically I haven't thought this way. In the past challenges would arise of course, but usually not at my instigation; they just came along as I went about life. They still do, but for this year I decided some would be set to my own terms, or as close to those terms as possible.

As it stands, the last eight months have proven a deal more interesting than I might have expected. Among other things, I started investing, transferred an IRA from one company to another, filed my own taxes for the first time, participated in a track-coach interview, found a new job, started cycling to said job, and took on a 30-day novel challenge. Nothing here is particularly extraordinary, but for me at least they were all firsts, and all began as goals in my mind. That some proved successful and others didn't matters little to me--taking them on was and remains a victory in and of itself.

Now as we enter August a new challenge approaches. It might be the "boldest" one yet by my admittedly low standards, but more than the others I think, this one takes me furthest from my element. The challenge: flying to a foreign country on my own.

Broadly speaking the challenge involves more than the transit, but it begins with the plane-ride. I'm going to Denmark to see an old friend, who has graciously offered to meet me at the airport and play host for the duration. I've wanted to visit this friend for a long time, but always found the prospect of traveling there daunting. Experienced travelers may scoff at my hesitancy, particularly since money or time as rarely been an issue; but nerves are what they are, and as the old saying goes, can make mole-hills seem like mountains. Or something like that.

Anyway with the trip less than two weeks away, I find myself growing both nervous and excited at the prospect. I'm excited because here is an adventure like no other I've attempted, to an interesting country where a very dear friend calls home. Routines--physical and mental--will be disrupted, leaving space to see things in new ways. There is also the prospect of encountering another culture first-hand, with a language, history, and set of traditions all their own. The explorer,writer, and history student in me can hardly wait to get started.

On the other hand, there are always the nerves that go with travel--navigating airports, finding one's gate on time, and accidentally offending or embarrassing people whose customs and expectations might be different from one's own. Strange as it sounds, this last point is the one that worries me most, and naturally, is the one over which I have the least control. In general I dislike offending people, particularly when the offense is unintended. On the other hand, if experience is any guide, some folks can be very prickly about things I would never expect. This holds as much for people from my own country as those from others.

As it is I think this concern, while relevant, looms over-large in my mind. If we become so concerned about stepping on other's toes that we miss all the interesting and nuanced features of their culture--or fail to convey such elements of our own--then I expect no one would benefit from such an encounter. There is perhaps an element of trust involved--trust that if something we do or say isn't "cool" in another country, that someone familiar with such things will politely let us know and see the breech of decorum as the act of ignorance it is, rather than the ill-intent it might seem. To worry extensively over this point may be akin to putting the cart before the horse--that is, worrying about offense given before any offense can possibly be given. Indeed, the discussion is almost absurd, now that it's framed in language. I suspect putting our concerns into writing goes a long way toward alleviating them.

In any case I'm looking forward to the adventure; of seeing my friend, and the country where she grew-up and calls home; and challenging myself to overcome those fears and lack of experience I have in this matter. We'll see how it goes.

Assorted Links

1.) It's apparently possible to "try too hard" in learning a language.

"The findings support a theory of language acquisition that suggests that some parts of language are learned through procedural memory, while others are learned through declarative memory. Under this theory, declarative memory, which stores knowledge and facts, would be more useful for learning vocabulary and certain rules of grammar. Procedural memory, which guides tasks we perform without conscious awareness of how we learned them, would be more useful for learning subtle rules related to language morphology. 

"It's likely to be the procedural memory system that's really important for learning these difficult morphological aspects of language. In fact, when you use the declarative memory system, it doesn't help you, it harms you," Finn says."

2.) Talent vs. Training in Runners: More support for the idea that one can't teach speed. The charts are illuminating, and worth a gander.

3.) Thomas Friedman asks, "What is News?"

4.) A great youtube channel on life in Japan: Stumbled upon this earlier in the week, full of fascinating reporting.

5.) The Great Instability: on the changing economics of the family

Assorted Links

1.) Tim Ferriss and Gabriel Wyner discuss how to learn a foreign language

2.) Another breakthrough in solar-energy efficiency

3.) The rapid growth of Airbnb

'“There used to be a romanticism about ownership, because it meant you were free, you were empowered,” Chesky answered. “I think now, for the younger generation, ownership is viewed as a burden. Young people will only want to own what they want responsibility for. And a lot of people my age don’t want responsibility for a car and a house and to have a lot of stuff everywhere. What I want to own is my reputation, because in this hyperconnected world, reputation will give you access to all kinds of things now. ... Your reputation now is like having a giant key that will allow you to open more and more doors. [Young people] today don’t want to own those doors, but they will want the key that unlocks them” — in order to rent a spare room, teach a skill, drive people or be driven.'

4.) Misconceptions about lactate, lactate-threshold, and training

"A typical training mistake that many athletes and coaches do is training at “lactate threshold” in order to improve lactate clearance capacity. This is not correct as we know that during exercise lactate is mainly produced by glycolytic fibers (fast twitch) which are the ones recruited at “lactate threshold”. However, lactate is mainly cleared by adjacent slow twitch fibers that have a very high mitochondrial capacity and a much higher amount of mLDH enzymes and MCT-1 transporters. Therefore to improve lactate clearance capacity, and although totally counterintuitive, it is key to train those slow twitch muscle fibers to stimulate mitochondrial growth and function as well as increase MCT-1 and mLDH. Training at lactate threshold is essential to improve glycolytic fibers and their machinery (our “Turbo”) and to upregulate the number and function of glycolytic enzymes as well as to increase the number of MCT-4 transporters necessary to transport lactate away from fast twitch fibers to then be cleared by slow twitch fibers. Spending too much time at lactate threshold is very tasking as well, as it is a high effort and can lead to overtraining which is something we constantly observe in our lab."

5.) From August 2010: Japan and the Ancient Art of Shrugging

30-day Novel Challenge: The Conclusion

Yesterday, the 30-day novel challenge I began last month ended. A short summary of the tale would state that I managed about 16,000 words, starting well and fading around half-way. In the end I became a bit frustrated with the whole process, and wrote nothing the last five days of the challenge.

(For those who don't remember, the original goal involved writing a 50,000-word novel in 30-days)

Taking time away from writing helped I think, and with a clearer head than I had a few days ago, I'd like to share some of my "findings" from the experience.

Scheduling 

First, as mentioned in the post from the half-way point, I scheduled the challenge during a high period of distraction for me, beginning right with the World Cup and passing through the 4th of July holiday, a race, and a busy stretch at work. I'll not say these alone prevented me from finishing the challenge, but they did occupy my attention to varying degrees, and made it more difficult  to sit down and work through knots that arose in the story. What's more, the need to write could occasionally get in the way of enjoying other experiences, drawing attention away from the moment and toward the abstract notion called "the story". This was unfortunate, and a lesson worth learning. Writing is a lovely exercise, but not at the expense of enjoying life.

Now it must be said, there will likely be times when deadlines pay no mind to one's personal schedule, and care not a fig that the next month is full of other preoccupations for you. If a project comes due at a certain time, then all distractions aside, the project needs to get done. We don't always get to pick the date, or interval of time, when an important (and consuming) task comes along. Sometimes it seems we must be able to bring ourselves together no matter what the time of year. In that respect, this challenge was a helpful exercise in working on a difficult project through a busy stretch. I wouldn't have planned it that way, but so it went.

Creating a Story

With the challenge behind me, one thing at least seems clear: if you're going to write a story in 30-days, it should either be meticulously thought-out, or blended together one whim at a time. My own approach fell somewhere in the middle, and in this instance ended with the negative aspects of both methods. I had a fairly rigid notion of how I wanted the story to go, but had not sufficiently planned how to get from one set of scenes to the next. Does this idea,which sounds great in my head, actually work in the context of a written text? To my dismay, the translation from thought to text proved, in many cases, less than ideal.

One way to get around this problem is to abandon all notions of what the story "should" be, and let whims and fancies be your guide. I actually find this approach liberating at times, because it tends to expand one's idea of the possible, leaving the mind freer to think about old problems in new ways. Alas, during this particular challenge I had a very fixed idea of the kind of story I wanted to tell, without a very fixed idea of how to get from beginning to end. Ultimately this inflexibility-without-a-plan meant that when the original idea hit a snag, I was ill-prepared to develop a new one, or modify the old.

Conclusions

This was a very useful experience for me, even if the desired product didn't pan out. The challenge stretched my ability to think creatively and write under pressure. That I failed to deliver in this controlled setting is only part of the story, and to my mind at least, only relevant to the extent it revealed where improvement is most needed. Success has value and is certainly desirable; but a healthy dose of failure, taken constructively, is perhaps where and how we learn to do better next time. I suspect we only fail completely when we give-up completely--that we become so discouraged as to never try again. In that spirit, I intend to keep working on writing, and at some point in the future, re-attempt the 30-day novel challenge.

Thanks for sharing the journey with me :)

Assorted links

1.) An essay by Joan Didion on "Self-Respect" (1961).

"Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception."

2.) New indoor farm in Japan.

3.) Book review from The Economist of Clive Finlayson's, "The Improbable Primate: How Water Shaped Human Evolution." An interesting theory, echoing a common refrain of survivalists everywhere--you'll die of thirst long before you'll die of hunger.

4.) Dylan Matthews interviews Morten Jerven about the short-comings of economic statistics on poor countries. In short, it's hard to collect, and easy to think we know more than we do.

5.) A young engineer's idea for clearing plastic from the world's oceans.

6.) The power of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake tsunamis (video). 

I've lately been reading David Pilling's book, "Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival" (2014), (see review here), an excellent work that deconstructs modern Japan within the context of the 90's asset bubble, and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear disaster. Not even Mr. Pilling's remarkable account could prepare me for footage of the actual tsunami. Truly astounding.