The Teaching Company

Remember sleeping through lectures in college?

OK, I didn't ever do that (cutting class, though - different story).\. Regardless, The Teaching Company found a way to learn about something new and ensure you get a quality experience. They travel the country visiting the top colleges and universities in the country, auditing the most popular, talked-about classes, reviewing professors, and then making those lectures available on CD or DVD.

I've been doing a lot of driving lately (over the past 4 months I've driven at least 5,000 miles) and finding some way to stay entertained on those long road trips can be tricky...but not with The Teaching Company. I've tried four courses so far (borrowed from friends), and each had something valuable to offer (even if it wasn't intentional).

The first was about Game Theory and Decision Making. I'd briefly studied some game theory in college statistics, and thought I'd appreciate the subject as it comes to decision making in my new role as a manager. However, I'd forgotten to take into account that appreciating a board full of equations and decision trees is impossible when you only have the audio version. After about 6 or 7 lessons I found myself getting lost quickly...and soon gave up.

The second was about how to appreciate the world's great music. I figured this would be great: it's well reviewed by other people who've listened to it, and I sure won't have the problem of needing to see the chalkboard this time. However, I was soon reminded that I simply don't care enough about the subtle differences of fugue among the great French composers. It got to be a little too much detail on a subject I just couldn't force myself to want that much detail on.

My next was Argumentation. The lecturer points out right away: THIS IS NOT ABOUT HOW TO WIN AN ARGUMENT. I was a little disappointed (haha), but rode through it, and I'm glad I have. It gets a bit detailed, but lecturer immediately backs off and explains terms when he gets too mired in detail, and it's been interesting to apply the technical framework of argumentation to the daily pitches I get on the phone, in email and in the story meeting. I've also been listening to it on the way in to work, and it's helped get me focused and thinking while I'm on my way in. I'm almost done too: I'm on lecture 19 of 24.

My favorite, without a doubt, has to be Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language by John McWhorter! Every couple of days I'd come away from one of his lecture with some new fact about how linguistics work, or why it's easier for children to learn language than adults, or whether there's languages that use sounds we don't make in ours (btw, yes...check out Kabardian...they have 48 consonants and only two vowels, and it's one of the most complex things ever!) This guy somehow found a way to make an imposing and obscure field seem so clear and logical, and especially entertaining. He's another one of those scary smart people in the world that have a gift for being able to share their knowledge in a way that not only makes you smarter, but also makes you feel smart during the process. All 36 lessons just flew by (yes...18 hours).

I'm now on The Evolution of the English Language, but it appears McWhorter has another course posted...who'd have figured I'd end up caring so much about Linguistics??

If you get the chance, try finding one of these CDs and giving it a whirl...you could find something fascinating out there in the world that you never knew was waiting there all along.

Who the hell is Proust??

Jonah Lehrer is another one.

There's this recurring quality I've found among some of the people I've been reading lately - an uncanny ability to distill the work and thoughts of world-changing geniuses into concepts I can appreciate and understand. Jonah Lehrer is one of those people. (I have to admit, though, most of them are people I initially heard on Radiolab).

His book Proust was a Neuroscientist, sounds overly intimidating.

Don't be intimidated. Even though it includes both the name of a long dead French author and the name of a notoriously complicated branch of science, isn't hard to enjoy.

The book compares the works of artists and finds connections between their work and a scientific field. One of my favorite examples is between Cezanne and our scientific understanding of human sight.

Cezanne is one of those names that I felt I should know, but wouldn't be able to say anything intelligent about until this book. I've pasted one of his paintings, titled Green Apples, to the right.

He was an artist who had to deal with the coming of photography, and knew that painting had to change. The old school was to make everything look as real as possible, but photography would soon be able to beat out the work of any human hand. Cezanne decided to do something different. His art, like the painting on the right, is kind of blurry...almost incomplete. When you look at that painting you can make out the apples, but that's not the point. The point is that he makes you interpret the work - the broad strokes that imply the apples are there, without simply showing them to you. Our brain resolves the blurry image on it's own, and clarifies it into a clear concept: apples on a table.

He could have made it look like a photograph, remember, this is one of the most talented painters of his day. If he wanted, they could've looked just like a photo. He didn't though - he left just enough clues for our brains to resolve this blurry canvas into a clear concept.

Turns out, many years later, scientists learned that this is how the brain works too. The brain doesn't resolve everything with crystal clarity immediately - it actually sends two images down two different neural pathways...one of them is fast, and one is slow. Lehrer explains:

The fast pathway quickly transmits a coarse and blurry picture to our prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in conscious thought. Meanwhile, the slow pathway takes a meandering route through the visual cortex...Why does the mind see everything twice? Because our visual cortex needs help. After the prefrontal cortex receives its imprecise picture, the "top" of the brain quickly decides what the "bottom" has seen and begins doctoring the sensory data. Form is imposed onto the formless rubble...the outside world is forced to conform to our expectations. If these interpretations are removed, our reality becomes unrecognizable. The light just isn't enough.

You've likely encountered something similar before: at a magic show. You know that what you've seen isn't possible, and magic hasn't been proven to exist. Yet, when you watch David Copperfield or Criss Angel, the reason you're so stunned is because the two pathways of your vision are giving you conflicting information. 'That couldn't have happened,' and 'I just saw that happen' go through your brain at the same time...and you're stuck, dumbfounded, trying to resolve the two.

The pinpoint observations brought to light by other famous artists mentioned in the book are just as astonishing. Igor Stravinsky (yep, another one of those guys whose name I know, but don't know squat about) composed a symphony that led to rioting the first time it was performed. He played with the human brain's desire to find a complete a pattern in music...by removing all the patterns. By taking out the patterns, he affected people on a very primal level.

Getrude Stein (yeah...I got nothin' on that one, actually..I'd never heard of her) wrote these obnoxiously long poems that didn't make any sense...but in doing so broke down the laws of grammar and syntax. A study of deaf people in Nicaragua found that people are innately wired to use certain rules in language. (Turns out deaf people in Nicaragua had no form of communication - they were isolated and abandoned into crowded orphanages. The first school for the deaf was formed in there in the 80's and a makeshift language of signs sprang up. Linguists found it followed the same rules of languages from all over the planet, though the people creating it had no exposure to anything else. The whole story is fascinating.)

The world can't be described just in the sounds and strokes of art and music...nor can it be described by the theories and equations of scientists. Our experience in this world is made up of a combination of the two. The emotions we feel and the facts we gather join together to make up our reality. Neither of them alone can fully describe our lives as they really are.

A great book lets you see the world in a new and novel way...Lehrer does exactly that. He's the nerdy guy you'd wanna have a beer with. Reading his book was a worthwhile substitute...not to mention it means two beers for me!

Change is comin'...

I've been saying that I thought that the increasingly desperate state of TV news is going to lead station to take novel approaches to the way they cover and present news.

An article in this months American journalism review discusses stations that are tryin g to do something different to lure in viewers with something other than the same staid newscasts of yesterday: a morning show with the rundown on the side of the screen, roving anchors who float through the newsroom doing impromptu Q&As with talent, a morning show with a set desdicated to live music acts.

Read all the details here: http://www.ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=4767

Some may think these changes are scary...but I find them encouraging: there may be afuture for our industry yet! What do you think? Would YOU watch any of these newscasts if they were on in your market? Do you agree that 'you [don't] have to be murdered for it to be called news'?

Welcome to Ft. Myers

OK...so let's say you're in my position. You just discovered that you're moving to Ft. Myers, Florida. You'll be in a small, coastal city near the Gulf of Mexico...the smallest city you've ever lived in. None of the people you know have any clue about what to expect or any advance guidance on what the place is like. All you've been able to glean is that you'll be close to Tampa and Miami.

From experience (I've moved to four different states in the past 8 years) I know that the first impression you get on a place really sticks with you. Those first few nights you have and the first random experiences you have make a really deep impression. Since this is now day 4 I'd like to share some of that experience...and some of those impressions.

The place I'm working for has corporate housing right near downtown...and that was what led me to my first quick lesson:

LESSON ONE ON FT. MYERS: THERE IS NOTHING DOWNTOWN.

Now, don't get me wrong, I've lived in places where there's not much to do downtown. For example, downtown Phoenix is nearly vacant once the big buildings shut their doors at the end of the business day. Ft. Myers is something entirely different. I've been through downtown Ft. Myers at all times of day and night, and I run into the same weird experience: empty streets absolutely devoid of cars, buildings with 'for sale' signs on the store fronts...and, the weirdest part: NO PEOPLE.

I've come to learn that there are, in fact, a couple little enclaves of activity in downtown Ft. Myers. I just went to 'Spirits of Bacchus' tonight, a cool little bar/gastropub with an absurdly delicious gourmet ham and cheese, a nice - though small - crowd, and a great bartender. That said - it's mostly a dead zone. It's as though you were driving through a movie set of empty storefronts...the nicely re-done brick streets have no cars parked on them and no people walking anywhere at all.

It's just something typical to the area: 'everyone knows there's noone downtown.'

The line you hear people here say is: they're really putting in a lot of work to build it up. Which may be true, but currently it looks as though there is a noxious cloud of poison gas in the air...and everyone else knows it but you.

Its important to point out that I got really lucky: my second afternoon here I got to go to a barbecue with an old family friend: Uncle Jimmy. Uncle Jimmy is Jim Thomas, a good friend of my brother's and a mainstay of his life when I was tiny. I got to know him pretty well (as well as any 8 year-old can know someone.) Jim moved to Ft. Myers about 10 years ago now, and he invited me to hang out with his family on Memorial day. It was especially nice in that it offered that little bit of familiarity everyone craves when faced with an entirely novel experience.

I asked about the area and Jim told me he'd get back to me with a few cool places to go check out in the city. This was when I learned my second big lesson.

I'd planned on living at the beach. I mean...obviously, we're so close to the beach, you'd be a fool to not live there. I found, though, that people would be nearly befuddled when I mentioned it. "Ohhhh," they'd say, "You don't want to live at the beach."

To any normal person outside of here, the statement sounds plain ridiculous! Why would you move all this way, be THIS close to the beach, and not want to live there. The answer has a few layers...but the truth is this:

LESSON TWO ON FT. MYERS: NOBODY LIVES AT THE BEACH.

The polite line is that, during tourist season the traffic is horrible (sometimes upwards of two hours on what is normally a 20 minute commute) but that's not the whole story. I got to spend a couple of days hanging out with people I met at the beach and found that the majority of them were...how do I put this:

FORMER 70'S FLOWER CHILDREN BOMBED OUT ON QUAALUDES.

I met only two people in that whole time who even approached my age, a 29 year-old girl who had just moved back, and just looked like she'd had a hard time of things....and a pasty mid-twenties girl who was so drunk she didn't even talk to me, she just tried to lure me with a drunken come-on look and a clumsy grab at my arm.

I refused those advances.

It's important to note that not EVERYONE on Ft. Myers beach is this way...I work with someone who lives there and he's a very smart, aware, and cool guy. However, that does not describe the lion's share of people I met.

Then there are the accomodations. They are normally descibed as "beach cottages" but that just means 'torn up one or two-story shacks that share coin-op washers.' While I understand that people will definitely put up with the shabby quality of living if it means they can live at the beach...I also realized that quality of life also means the type of people you're surrounded with.

In this case it means dealing with a place on the steep decline: one person told me that they could name 15 different bars that had closed in the past year...and the ones remaining were hardly standing.

The sparse nightlife, shabby living, and unfamiliar crowd (again, mostly 40's or older and dissociated from reality) meant that living at the beach wasn't really for me.

So, I wondered - where ARE the younger, professional people like me? I know there aren't a bunch of them, but there have to be a few. That's where Uncle Jimmy came out HUGE. A list of three places showed up as a text message the day after the barbecue, and I went to one of them. It's called 'Reserve' and I found a mostly empty place (it was Tuesday at 8:30) with a cute girl at one end of the bar, a cool bartender named Johnny, and a band setting up on the nearby stage.

I started chatting with the bartender, then the girl, then some other people who began to trickle in. I found out that lots of people live in central Ft. Myers. The nice places to go (the cool bars, the well-known sushi place, the creative restaurants) seem to be located there. Some people go to 'The Bell Tower' (though, I must admit I haven't been there yet) or Gulf Coast Town Center (another place I haven't been, but have heard some things about) but lots of people go out in central Ft. Myers. There's even a bar known as 'the buddha' for the gigantic buddha statue out front. It's a biker bar during most hours, but it's where most people end up after a night of going out.

I was told: "If you're gonna live anywhere, you should move to 'College Pointe'" It's a nice apartment complex in central Ft. Myers near the nice restaurants, the local school (Florida Gulf Coast University), some cool bars...and that buddha is a short walk away.

I met a girl that night who lives in that complex...and in addition to giving me a rave review of the place, she agreed to split the referral fee with me if I mentioned her.

The complex I'm temprarily staying in - the corporate housing - is in an 18 story tall building that is about 20% occupied. The parking lot is just as empty most times as the downtown streets.

When I went to College Pointe, the leasing office told me that they only had one single bedroom available. Otherwise, they're totally full. No twilight zone here.

I signed my lease today.

The Ridiculous Race

I think I initially read about this book in Wired magazine...and added it to my Amazon wish list. I got it for Christmas, and it's been sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. When I flew to New York last week, I figured it was the perfect opportunity to do so and brought it along.

Before my flight was over, I'd devoured 150 pages of it...nearly half the book!

The Ridiculous Race by Steve Hely and Vali Chandrasekaran is a true story about a drunken wager made between two professional comedy writers: who can travel the entire globe (every line of latitude) first without airplanes. The winner gets a bottle of 40 year old scotch (a Kinclaith 1969 )...and stories to last a lifetime.

It combines the clever writing of two former Harvard Lampoon members (one of whom now writes for the TV show American Dad) with enthralling stories ranging from the mundane (the bathrooms on the trans-siberian railroad) to the exquisite (The Cambodian temples of Bankor Wat).

Interspersed within the funny writing are mind-opening observations about the rest of the world from two people who have done as much international traveling as most americans (read: none)

One section near the end was so well stated I thought it warranted repetition here:

I got to thinking that America isn't like a bully, or a jock, or a cool kid. In the high school of the world, America is like one of those girls that's just effortlessly beautiful. So beautiful you can't even have a crush on her. A girl like that isn't deliberately mean, it's just that she can't possibly understand how lucky she is. And people always do what she wants, without her even realizing it, so she never bothers becoming smart, or savvy about the other kids in school. Just with her airhead remarks, she's always accidentally screwing up the whole order of things. She doesn't even realize it.

Now, when you have a girl like that, the other kinda-pretty girls sort of like her but sort of hate her. That's maybe Germany, or France. And the ugly girls talk about her in the locker room, but are still totally afraid of her. That's Venezuela and Iran. The regular-looking dudes can't help but be awed by her. Maybe they try to woo her with poems. That's Great Britain. And the really twisted kids develop unhealthy obsessions about destroying her, just because they're so infuriated at how unfair things are.

The quick chapters, fast-paced writing, and juvenile gamesmanship of it all kept me in rapt attention all the way thorough. I didn't expect a book endorsed by Seth Macfarlane (creator of Family Guy) to provide such a good read on so many different levels. If you have a few hours, and want to be entertained with the TV off...check it out.

Sports Night

Sports Night came on the air in the 90's, and only lasted two seasons, but that was plenty enough time to make an impact.

When I started at my very first TV station in Orlando, I asked our sports director Penn Holderness (a UVA grad with a degree in Philosophy of all things) what TV best conveys what its like to work in a TV newsroom. Without pausing a beat he answered 'Sports Night.' More questions around the newsroom confirmed it showed the practical world of working in TV...

Curiously, the show talks very little about sports...instead it focuses much more on the team putting a show on the air every day. And while conveying the practicality of the TV news world, it sprinkles in some of the best writing on any television show.

The monologue below by William H. Macy about glass tubes is a perfect example, and conveys exactly the kind of impact I want to make in any newsroom I work in.

Scanwiches

Every once in a while someone comes along with a crazy idea that just might work.

Frans Johansson says that the best innovations are often an amalgam of two existing ideas or technologies that are melded together in a new and unique way.

With that definition at the top of your mind, allow me to present: scanwiches.

This is a site that provides what Anthony Bourdain would call "food porn" in a new and unique way...people (normally the site administrator, but some events allow others to provide content) provide a sandwich to be scanned by a color scanner. Then the image is posted along with a brief description of the lunch in question.

The scans, performed crisply with a stark black background look almost artistic.

Thanks to Julia Im for initially facebooking about this.