Monday, July 30, 2012

6 Productivity Principles to Live By

6 Productivity Principles to Live By (My Personal Productivity Manifesto)

6 Productivity Principles to Live By

Here are six principles I strive to live by. This is my own "personal productivity manifesto": it summarizes what works for me about personal productivity.

Whenever I follow these guidelines, I am at my very best, feeling productive and joyful. If I feel that I am doing things outside these guidelines, I know I can refer to them and quickly get back on track.

Since these principles work so well for me, I figured they might work for you, too. Here they are:

Principle 6: Devote Time

No matter how capable or gifted we may be, it's an illusion to think we can do it all. As my favorite productivity adage goes, we can do anything, but not everything. At every moment, we're presented with infinite possibilities — we really could be doing anything! But freedom to do whatever we set our sights on comes at a price, and the price is that we need to constantly make choices about what really matters to us.

These choices, at the most fundamental level, always boil down to how we allocate and spend our time. The value of our achievements is primarily determined by what we consistently invest our time in. We need to be aware of that every day, diligently investing the time in what matters and having the courage to let the unimportant stuff go.

How to Apply this Principle

Principle 5: Focus Your Attention

If the previous principle was about allocating time for the things that matter, this one is about how well you're able to spend that time.

Very often it seems we just can't concentrate, even though we know what we should be doing, right? Resistance, procrastination, allowing ourselves to get sidetracked by distractions: these are formidable obstacles even for the most resolute people. Developing a strategy for overcoming resistance and dealing with distractions, then, is essential for maximum productivity.

How to Apply this Principle

  • Use time boxing. Time boxing is a technique I use every day to overcome procrastination, conquer perfectionism and maximize overall efficiency. The concept is really simple: delimit blocks of time to work on tasks. But don't let the simplicity of the concept deceive you: you really got to try it to see how effective it is in overcoming resistance, focusing your attention and actually doing what needs to get done.
    To learn more about time boxing, check out 15 Time Boxing Strategies to Get Things Done.

Principle 4: Honor Thy Commitments

Personal productivity is not about cramming as much stuff as we possibly can in our days. Here is a situation that sometimes happens to me, and I am sure it must have happened to you too: in a given day we write down a gazillion tasks to do, cross a lot of them off but, at the end of the day, still feel anxious about the tasks we didn't do. Why is that?

The feeling of being productive comes not from the quantity of tasks we do, but from honoring the commitments we set for ourselves. Doing what we said we would do is what we should primarily strive for. Tasks that keep being left undone in our to do lists are broken promises to ourselves, and are a sure recipe for frustration: no matter how much we do in our days, we'll always look at them and feel bad about ourselves.

Before trying to get more stuff done, make sure you honor your current promises (to yourself and to others): Be clear about them, drop those that you know you won't be able to honor and then ensure that you really complete the ones that remain.

How to Apply this Principle

  • Use will-do lists. 'Will do' lists replace a bunch of intentions (the traditional to do's) with a small set of commitments. It's not only much shorter than a to-do list, but also doesn't grow as your day progresses — and you feel just terrific when you cross off 100% of it day after day.
    To learn more about 'will do' lists, check out Overwhelmed by Your To-Do List? Go With a 'Will-Do' List Instead.

Principle 3: Develop a Sustainable Pace

We need to strike a balance between work and play — between engagement and rest, between creation and recreation. In the productivity game we should take our leisure time as seriously as our work time. Even if we feel energetic and motivated to work long hours, the most effective long-term strategy is to hold ourselves back when feeling too enthusiastic and follow a sustainable pace instead.

Also, defining clear boundaries between work and rest is very important: "Work when you're working, rest when you're resting", I often say. Whenever I forget this, I end up in a very ineffective 'not-quite-working/not-quite-resting' zombie-like state.

How to Apply this Principle

The two tools I use for the previous principles also work wonders here:

  • Will-do lists. As soon as I'm done with the will-do list for the day, I'm done: I must resist the urge to work longer. I admit that sometimes — especially when I'm feeling highly energetic — I still stretch and go "get the most out of the day". However, I always regret it the day after, as I can't sustain the pace for too long and end up much worse than if I had just stopped working at the right time instead.

  • Time boxes. also help keep work activities together. That helps a lot in making the boundaries between work and recreation very clear.

Principle 2: Keep Moving On

More important than setting big goals is to just keep going. I know this goes against most of the "set bold goals for yourself" advice you see everywhere, but it's what works for me. Going after a "big vision" is something that always felt awkward, and it always made me more anxious than it helped.

Now, what does work for me is to constantly think about how to improve my life and define little steps to make it happen. Think continuous improvement. Take small steps and see how things change. Experiment. Sure, it's perfectly fine to have a general direction, but don't get too obsessed about it: circumstances will change — you will change. It's in each step that you learn and adjust your direction.

How to Apply this Principle

  • Daily and Weekly Reviews. Assess your projects and tasks every day and make sure that you define next steps for all your projects. Make them small, but ensure you make progress every single day. Forget New Year's Resolutions. Plan, review and adjust your steps every day and every week.

  • Ask "How can I take a step so small that it is impossible to fail?" This is one of my favorite questions ever (I got it from the book One Small Step Can Change Your Lifesummary here). I ask it every single day when reviewing my projects and task lists. It melts resistance away and, when asked frequently, keeps you on track and energetic to keep going.

Principle 1: Feel Good. Now.

"Being productive" only makes sense if you're enjoying yourself as you work on the stuff that's relevant. If you're not, none of the things we discussed here really matters. Personal productivity is a state of mind: a feeling that you're doing what you believe is important and that you're happy about it — not that you're making sacrifices day in, day out.

For me, a good rule of thumb is that we should feel tired at the end of the day. Yes, tired, but in a good way: that's very different from feeling spent or drained: it's feeling that we poured our energy into the stuff we care the most. The feeling that our energy was put to good use. Going to sleep looking forward to the next day is, in my opinion, the ultimate measure of personal productivity.

How to Apply this Principle

  • Take a one-minute self-assessment at the end of the day. How was your day? Did you invest your time and energy doing what really matters? Forget for a minute about your goals, focus on your journey. After all, if you're only making sacrifices and not enjoying your days, what's the point of being productive?

What about You?

What do you think of these principles? Anything missing? Do you have your own productivity principles? Please share in the comments! I'm eager to know about what works for you!




The Only Way to Fix Campaign-Finance Regulation Is to Destroy It - Ron Faucheux - The Atlantic

The Only Way to Fix Campaign-Finance Regulation Is to Destroy It

Spending laws have become become complex, senseless, and indecipherable. One counter-intuitive way to fix it: Repeal contribution caps.

Reuters

Insanity is doing something over and over, but expecting a different result. That pretty well describes campaign finance reform in America. The worse the system gets, the more we regulate it. The more we regulate it, the worse it gets.

It all started in 1974, when Congress capped campaign contributions and spending. The public rationale for the caps was that smaller donations and less spending would reduce the corrupting influence of money. A less apparent agenda, of course, was also less noble: Help reelect incumbents. Incumbents are usually better funded and better known than their challengers, so making it harder for all candidates to raise and spend money often puts newcomers at a disadvantage.

The Supreme Court, in the 1976 Buckley decision, knocked down mandatory campaign spending caps, saying they violated the First Amendment on free-speech grounds, but kept caps on campaign contributions. This essentially left us with what we have today: a government-regulated system in which individual contributions to federal candidates are limited, but spending by candidates and outside groups is unlimited.

Has government regulation of campaign finance achieved its goal of reducing the importance of money in politics? A simple statistic can answer the question. Since 1974, total congressional campaign spending has gone from $77 million an election cycle to $1.8 billion (in 2010). You decide whether that sounds like success.

Over the last four decades, the campaign finance system has become a Rube Goldberg-esque contraption of complex, senseless, and indecipherable regulations. To fix it, new "reforms" (a.k.a. regulations) are routinely proposed, and some are even passed -- such as the McCain-Feingold Bill in 2002. But the gush of money into politics continues unabated.

It's time to recognize reality and do something we should have done years ago: Repeal campaign contribution caps.

This suggestion will no doubt horrify some people. But when they think about it, cooler heads will prevail.

When businessman W. Clement Stone contributed nearly $10 million to Richard Nixon's presidential campaigns in 1968 and 1972, appalled editorial writers and good-government types demanded Congress make it illegal for any person to contribute such a large amount of money. And so Congress did -- spawning a massive array of rules and bureaucratic red tape to make sure contribution caps are obeyed, not to mention a slew of ways to legally get around them (in deference to free speech principles).

Since then, contribution caps have given birth to a lot of the things today's editorial writers and good-government types detest, including super PACs and, of course, the new whipping boy of campaign finance -- the misunderstood Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. (Citizens United did not create unlimited "independent expenditures," as many pundits think. They have been around for years.)

Contribution caps were intended to keep wealthy individuals -- like Clement Stone -- from dropping millions into campaign treasuries. They have not succeeded. The millions casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg have pumped into this year's elections through super PACs proves the point. And they are only the most obvious examples.

The existing $2,500 cap on individual donations pushes money into independent entities such as super PACs, 527s, and 501(c)4s -- legal avenues for individuals and organizations to pipeline unlimited money into presidential and congressional elections. If we did away with the cap, we'd also do away with the need for these entities (after all, they only exist to legally circumvent the cap).

The current system, with its limits on donations to candidates and complete lack of limits on donations to super PACs, diminishes candidates and breaks the chain of responsibility between voters and elected officials.

Under the current system, candidates have no responsibility for what super PACs do or say. They can deny -- in fact, legally, they must deny -- any involvement with them, even though these entities are, in essence, speaking for them through ads that are virtually indistinguishable from their own campaigns' ads (only the hard-to-read disclaimer at the end tells them apart).

If we eliminated contribution caps, political actors like Adelson and Katzenberg would give their money directly to Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, not the super PACs, and the candidates would each be publicly on the hook for accepting and spending this largesse.

The super rich are already spending without limitation, so let's recognize that reality and make the candidates responsible for taking and spending the money. We get to vote for and against candidates. Their names are on the ballot. We don't get to vote for or against super PACs -- groups with ambiguous names like "Restore Our Future" and "Priorities USA Action."

In addition to eliminating contribution caps, we should make two other changes to our campaign laws: First, require full disclosure of all political donations and expenditures and, second, reinstitute the $50 campaign-contribution income-tax credit that existed between 1972 and 1986. Now, with online giving, this tax credit would encourage more small donations and broaden the base of political fundraising without multiplying rules and bureaucratic red tape.

These changes would make our campaign system, if not perfect -- nothing will make an electoral system in any democracy perfect -- at least more honest and simple to understand. These are worthy, and achievable, goals.






Sunday, July 29, 2012

Paraprosdokians

Paraprosdokians (Winston Churchill loved them) are figures of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected; frequently humorous.
  
1. Where there's a will, I want to be in it.

2. The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it's still on my list.

3. Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

4. If I agreed with you, we'd both be wrong.

5. We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.

6. War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

7. Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

8. To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research.

9. I didn't say it was your fault, I said I was blaming you.

10. In filling out an application, where it says, 'In case of emergency, Notify:' I put 'DOCTOR'.

11. Women will never be equal to men until they can walk down the street with a bald head and a beer gut, and still think they are sexy.

12. You do not need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute to skydive twice.

13. I used to be indecisive. Now I'm not so sure.

14. To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.

15. Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.

16. You're never too old to learn something stupid.
 
17. I'm supposed to respect my elders, but it's getting harder and harder for m to find one now.
 
 

Susan Sontag on Writing | Brain Pickings

Susan Sontag on Writing

25 JULY, 2012 by

"There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work."

The newly released volume of Susan Sontag's diaries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 (public library), from whence Sontag's thoughtful meditations on censorship and aphorisms came, is an absolute treasure trove of rare insight into one of the greatest minds in modern history. Among the tome's greatest gifts are Sontag's thoughts on the art, craft, and ideology of writing.

Unlike more prescriptive takes, like previously examined advice by Kurt Vonnegut, John Steinbeck, and David Ogilvy, Sontag's reflections are rather meditative — sometimes turned inward, with introspective curiosity, and other times outward, with a lens on the broader literary landscape — yet remarkably rich in cultural observation and universal wisdom on the writing process, somewhere between Henry Miller's creative routine, Jack Kerouac's beliefs and techniques, George Orwell's four motives for writing, and E. B. White's vision for the responsibility of the writer.

Gathered here are the most compelling and profound of Sontag's thoughts on writing, arranged chronologically and each marked with the date of the respective diary entry.

I have a wider range as a human being than as a writer. (With some writers, it's the opposite.) Only a fraction of me is available to be turned into art.
(8/8/64)

Words have their own firmness. The word on the page may not reveal (may conceal) the flabbiness of the mind that conceived it. > All thoughts are upgrades — get more clarity, definition, authority, by being in print — that is, detached from the person who thinks them.

A potential fraud — at least potential — in all writing.
(8/20/64)

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won't come through.
(8/30/64)

If only I could feel about sex as I do about writing! That I'm the vehicle, the medium, the instrument of some force beyond myself.
(11/1/64)

Science fiction —
Popular mythology for contemporary negative imagination about the impersonal
(11/1/64)

Greatest subject: self seeking to transcend itself (Middlemarch, War and Peace)
Looking for self-transcendence (or metamorphosis) — the cloud of unknowing that allows perfect expressiveness (a secular myth for this)
(undated loose sheets, 1965)

Kafka the last story-teller in 'serious' literature. Nobody has known where to go from there (except imitate him)
(undated loose sheets, 1965)

John Dewey — 'The ultimate function of literature is to appreciate the world, sometimes indignantly, sometimes sorrowfully, but best of all to praise when it is luckily possible.'
(1/25/65)

I think I am ready to learn how to write. Think with words, not with ideas.
(3/5/70)

'Writing is only a substitute [sic] for living.' — Florence Nightingale
(12/18/70)

French, unlike English: a language that tends to break when you bend it.
(6/21/72)

A writer, like an athlete, must 'train' every day. What did I do today to keep in 'form'?
(7/5/72)

In 'life,' I don't want to be reduced to my work. In 'work,' I don't want to be reduced to my life.
My work is too austere
My life is a brutal anecdote
(3/15/73)

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart

[…]

The story must strike a nerve — in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.
(6/27/73)

I'm now writing out of rage — and I feel a kind of Nietzschean elation. It's tonic. I roar with laughter. I want to denounce everybody, tell everybody off. I go to my typewriter as I might go to my machine gun. But I'm safe. I don't have to face the consequences of 'real' aggressivity. I'm sending out colis piégés ['booby-trapped packages'] to the world.
(7/31/73)

The solution to a problem — a story that you are unable to finish — is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
(7/31/73)

Talking like touching
Writing like punching somebody
(8/14/73)

To be a great writer:

know everything about adjectives and punctuation (rhythm)
have moral intelligence — which creates true authority in a writer
(2/6/74)

'Idea' as method of instant transport away from direct experience, carrying a tiny suitcase.

'Idea' as a means of miniaturizing experience, rendering it portable. Someone who regularly has ideas is — by definition — homeless.

Intellectual is a refugee from experience. In Diaspora.

What's wrong with direct experience? Why would one ever want to flee it, by transforming it — into a brick?
(7/25/74)

Weakness of American poetry — it's anti-intellectual. Great poetry has ideas.
(6/14/76)

Not only must I summon the courage to be a bad writer — I must dare to be truly unhappy. Desperate. And not save myself, short-circuit the despair.

By refusing to be as unhappy as I truly am, I deprive myself of subjects. I've nothing to write about. Every topic burns.
(6/19/76)

The function of writing is to explode one's subject — transform it into something else. (Writing is a series of transformations.)

Writing means converting one's liabilities (limitations) into advantages. For example, I don't love what I'm writing. Okay, then — that's also a way to write, a way that can produce interesting results.
(11/5/76)

'All art aspires to the condition of music' — this utterly nihilistic statement rests at the foundation of every moving camera style in the history of the medium. But it is a cliché, a 19th c[entury] cliché, less an aesthetic than a projection of an exhausted state of mind, less a world view than a world weariness, less a statement of vital forms than an expression of sterile decadence. There is quite another pov [point of view] about what 'all art aspires to' — that was Goethe's, who put the primary art, the most aristocratic one, + the one art that cannot be made by the plebes but only gaped at w[ith] awe, + that art is architecture. Really great directors have this sense of architecture in their work — always expressive of immense line of energy, unstable + vital conduits of force.
(undated, 1977)

One can never be alone enough to write. To see better.
(7/19/77)

Two kinds of writers. Those who think this life is all there is, and want to describe everything: the fall, the battle, the accouchement, the horse-race. That is, Tolstoy. And those who think this life is a kind of testing-ground (for what we don't know — to see how much pleasure + pain we can bear or what pleasure + pain are?) and want to describe only the essentials. That is, Dostoyevsky. The two alternatives. How can one write like T. after D.? The task is to be as good as D. — as serious spiritually, + then go on from there.
(12/4/77)

Only thing that counts are ideas. Behind ideas are [moral] principles. Either one is serious or one is not. Must be prepared to make sacrifices. I'm not a liberal.
(12/4/77)

When there is no censorship the writer has no importance.

So it's not so simple to be against censorship.
(12/7/77)

Imagination: — having many voices in one's head. The freedom for that.
(5/27/78)

Language as a found object
(2/1/79)

Last novelist to be influenced by, knowledgeable about science was [Aldous] Huxley

One reason [there are] no more novels — There are no exciting theories of relation of society to self (soc[iological], historical, philosophical)

Not SO — no one is doing it, that's all
(undated, March 1979)

There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work
(undated, March 1979)

To write one must wear blinkers. I've lost my blinkers.

Don't be afraid to be concise!
(3/10/79)

A failure of nerve. About writing. (And about my life — but never mind.) I must write myself out of it.

If I am not able to write because I'm afraid of being a bad writer, then I must be a bad writer. At least I'll be writing.

Then something else will happen. It always does.

I must write every day. Anything. Everything. Carry a notebook with me at all times, etc.

I read my bad reviews. I want to go to the bottom of it — this failure of nerve
(7/19/79)

The writer does not have to write. She must imagine that she must. A great book: no one is addressed, it counts as cultural surplus, it comes from the will.
(3/10/80)

Ordinary language is an accretion of lies. The language of literature must be, therefore, the language of transgression, a rupture of individual systems, a shattering of psychic oppression. The only function of literature lies in the uncovering of the self in history.
(3/15/80)

The love of books. My library is an archive of longings.
(4/26/80)

Making lists of words, to thicken my active vocabulary. To have puny, not just little, hoax, not just trick, mortifying, not just embarrassing, bogus, not just fake.

I could make a story out of puny, hoax, mortifying, bogus. They are a story.
(4/30/80)

As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh is exquisite in its entirety — I couldn't recommend it more heartily.

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Saturday, July 28, 2012

A Jeremiah for Everyone - John J. Miller - National Review Online

A Jeremiah for Everyone - John J. Miller - National Review Online

Right after Wendell Berry took the stage at the John F. Kennedy Center on April 23, he thanked the National Endowment for the Humanities for its "courage" in letting him speak. He was there to deliver the Jefferson Lecture, the annual address that the NEH solemnly describes as "the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities." Berry specifically praised the NEH for not demanding an advance copy of his text, a comment that provoked anxious laughter from the audience.

Then Berry — bald, bespectacled, wearing a dark suit and tie — spoke slowly, often gazing down at his notes. The man is not a gifted orator, but he writes well, and he held a crowd that included Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito for about an hour as he delivered a jeremiad on the ravages of the free market. "We live now in an economy that is not sustainable," he said (in the longer, written version of his remarks). "No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it, no pointless rhetoric on the virtues of capitalism or socialism, no billions or trillions spent on 'defense' of the 'American dream,' can for long disguise this failure. The evidences are everywhere." He grumbled about pollution, species extinction, soil erosion, fossil-fuel depletion, "agribusiness executives," "industrial pillage, "the profitability of war." Berry's list of complaints seemed an almost inexhaustible natural resource. "Much has been consumed, much has been wasted, almost nothing has flourished," he said. When Berry finished his lament, NEH chairman Jim Leach felt the need to lighten the mood with a joke: "The views of the speaker do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States government."

Yet they do represent the views of many conservatives — or so it would appear, judging from the love that they're showering on Berry. On July 20, Berry will receive the Russell Kirk Paideia Prize, named for the author of The Conservative Mind and awarded by the CiRCE Institute, which promotes Christian classical education, for "cultivating virtue and wisdom." Last year, ISI Books, the imprint of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, published The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, a collection of essays that seek to illuminate, according to the dust jacket, the "profoundly conservative" ideas of its subject. And although the 2012 Jefferson Lecture was a product of the Obama administration, Berry was regularly a candidate for the same honor during the Bush years.

What's going on here? Why has this market-bashing prophet of ecological doom won so many fans on the right? On June 17, I drove to Berry's home in Port Royal, Ky., to find out. He welcomes visitors on Sundays. "There ought to be a day when you don't work," he says. He's well known for these engagements, and for years admirers have made pilgrimages, seeking conversation or advice. On my visit, we sit on his front porch, discussing his life, his books, and his views on everything from farm policy to gay marriage.

The 77-year-old Berry lives in an old white house on a steep hillside above the Kentucky River, about 13 miles south of where it flows into the Ohio. He bought it in 1964 and moved in the next year, determined to live in Henry County, where he grew up and his family has deep roots. He had spent a period away, earning a degree at the University of Kentucky, taking a creative-writing course from Wallace Stegner at Stanford, traveling through Europe, and finally teaching at New York University. Yet he felt called to go home and stay put. Since his return, he has churned out essays, fiction, and poetry, in a rustic life of letters that many writers dream about but few dare to pursue. "This is my family's country, my own people's country," he says, in a border-state twang. "There was this idea that you couldn't live in a place like this and amount to anything. I'm not bragging. I may not have amounted to anything."




Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Congress Can't Be Trusted to Fix Itself - Bob Kerrey - The Atlantic

Congress Can't Be Trusted to Fix Itself

Returning to politics after 11 years, a former senator finds Congress changed -- for the worse. Here's what he'd do about it.

Former Sen. Kerrey at an event in 2007. (Reuters)

Rare is the American who does not look to Washington and feel despair over the failure to accomplish things that not so long ago were considered routine and easy. And rare is the American who does not feel more and more disenfranchised by the size and nature of the money spent to influence federal elections and national laws.

A growing number of wise and influential observers are focusing on the rules of Congress. They are arguing for fundamental changes in the rules that govern debate, nominations, oversight of the executive branch, budgeting, and the way campaigns for office are financed. I support many of these changes.

However, I do not believe the problem can be solved by urging Congress to change its rules. I believe the source of the problem is the first phrase of the second clause of the fifth section of Article One of our Constitution. It says: "Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings." The 55 men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to write a new Constitution apparently trusted Congress to write its own rules. I no longer do.

In 1787, the primary author of our Constitution, James Madison, wrote that "among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction." The current rules of Congress are not controlling the violence of faction. The current rules are rewarding these factions.

When factions -- partisan interests -- control government, everyone loses, because our common purpose is subordinated. In his farewell address, George Washington warned that service to the "will of a party" would "make the public administration the mirror of ill concerted and incongruous projects of faction rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans."

Before I made the decision to become a candidate to serve again in the U.S. Senate, I consulted with many friends. Almost without exception, their response was: "Are you crazy? It's not the same place as when you last served in the 1990s." The intensity of this sentiment was inversely proportional to the distance from our nation's capitol. Those with the strongest feelings that Congress is broken are those who live and work in Washington, D.C.

"Wholesome plans" are subverted to destructive tendencies. And the problem will not be solved unless our Constitution is amended.

I believe our nation has entered a dangerous period where "wholesome plans" are subverted to the destructive tendencies Washington and Madison warned us about. I believe the rules of Washington, D.C., are to blame. And I do not believe the problem will be solved unless and until the people of America insist that Article One of our Constitution be amended.

Perhaps the best example to make the case that Congress will not reform itself occurred in 2004, when the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, aka the 9/11 Commission, made a set of recommendations to reform the executive branch and a set of recommendations to reform the legislative branch. Congress quickly and impressively moved to change the executive branch but did nothing to change itself. The House never voted on the recommendations; Sen. McCain could not persuade a majority in the Senate to improve the quality of oversight of executive branch intelligence agencies.

I am campaigning for the U.S. Senate on a promise to propose what I will call the Norris Amendment to Article One. George W. Norris was Nebraska's most important and longest-serving senator. Frustrated with the undemocratic behavior of the Conference Committee and the Caucus, he returned to Nebraska and led an effort to amend our state's constitution to abolish both.

The Norris Amendment to Article One of the U.S. Constitution will not eliminate the Conference Committee. However, it will:

  • Eliminate the partisan caucuses and the four partisan campaign committees that make compromise between the political parties nearly impossible.
  • Prohibit the organization of Congress by political parties and establish a mechanism to reduce the number of committees, improve the quality of executive branch oversight, and increase the quality of congressional budgeting.
  • Establish a reasonable limitation on consecutive years of service. Twelve years seems reasonable to me, though I could also make the case for 18 years.
  • Allow Congress to ban the unlimited independent expenditures by corporations and unions permitted by the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, and impose limitations on campaign spending that have not been allowed since the Buckley v. Valeo decision of 1976.
  • Change the rules of the Senate and House to limit the use of the filibuster, open up the budget process, require that amendments to legislation actually relate to the subject of the bill, and increase transparency so citizens may see how their money is spent.
  • Fixing our political system first requires the will to do so. Will is expressed by voters. Voters expect far more of their elected officials than to merely serve as the tools of special interests. They understand that politicians are failing them and they're looking for solutions. Time will tell if their hope is misplaced or if we merit their confidence.






    Tuesday, July 24, 2012

    » 2011 :zenhabits

    A Compact Guide to Creating the Fitness Habit

    Post written by Leo Babauta.

    A new year, a new slate of resolutions.

    Perhaps the biggest resolution at New Year's is to get fit — start exercising, start eating right, and all that jazz.

    But resolutions never last. As you might already know, I'm not a fan of resolutions.

    Instead of creating a list of resolutions this year, create a new habit.

    Habits last, and they lead to long-term fitness (and more). They require more patience, but they are worth the wait.

    As some of you know, fitness habits are what started me along the path to changing my life. I quit smoking, started running. Then I started eating healthier, became vegetarian (now vegan), quit the junk food addiction, started doing other types of workouts (bodyweight, weights, Crossfit, anything that was fun).

    And six years later, I'm nearly 39 years old and in the best shape of my life. I have less bodyfat than any time since high school, more muscle than ever in my life, and I can run and hike and play longer than anytime in the history of Leo. That's not to brag, but to show you what can be done with some simple fitness habits.

    Reshaping Through Habits

    The appealing thing about many fitness programs is that they promise quick results. You see testimonials from people who have gone through the program and lost 30 lbs. and gain a washboard stomach in just 4 weeks!

    That's all complete crap.

    First, most people won't achieve those results. Second, and more importantly, if you do get quick results, you'll reverse those results very quickly … because you haven't created new habits. You've just done something intense and unsustainable for a short period of time. That's nearly worthless.

    You should be focused on long-term results, and more importantly on a healthy lifestyle. A healthy lifestyle starts with changing your habits and ends with long-term results.

    Changing habits takes time. I recommend one habit at a time, and give yourself about a month per habit. That takes patience, but you shouldn't try to see amazing results in just 30 days. You should enjoy your new lifestyle, which will be an amazing result in itself that you can achieve immediately. In a matter of months and years, your body and health will change too.

    Let's say you change one habit at a time, one per month or so. You'll have 12 new habits every year. Even if you only formed 6 habits that stuck and that you loved, you'd be amazed at what kind of changes those 6 habits would create in your life and fitness. If you did 6 habits a year for three years, you'd be transformed.

    If you don't have the patience to change one habit at a time, or focus on enjoying your new habits rather than getting quick results, you should stop reading now.

    Which Habits to Choose

    So let's say you're just starting out … what habit should you start with?

    My favorite habit is daily exercise, but if you're looking to lose weight probably the most important habits relate to eating.

    In truth, which habit you choose first matters very little in the long run. You will be changing many little habits over the course of the next few years, and the order of those habits is unimportant. What matters is that you start.

    Here are some habits that I'd start with, if you haven't created them yet:

    • Exercise for just 5 minutes a day, adding 5 minutes per week. Make it a fun exercise.
    • Drink water instead of sweet drinks.
    • Replace fried foods with vegetables.
    • Eat fruit and nuts for snacks.
    • Eat lean protein, including plant proteins, instead of red meat.
    • Add strength exercises to your routine — pushups, pullups, squats, lunges.
    • If you've been doing all of the above for awhile, add some weights — compound lifts like squats, deadlifts, bench presses, dips, chinups, overhead presses and rows.

    I've found that losing weight is simple: eat lots of veggies and plant or lean protein, reduce calories, do some kind of cardio, lift some weights to preserve muscle.

    Gaining muscle is also fairly simple: eat lots of veggies and plant or lean protein, increase calories, do some kind of cardio to preserve heart health, lift heavy weights to grow muscle.

    The weights should be compound lifts and heavy, the cardio should be enjoyable. Getting "toned", btw, is just gaining muscle and losing the fat that covers the muscle, whether you're a man or woman.

    Forming the Habit

    These are my top principles for forming habits. If you've read my writings on habits before, this won't be new to you, but often it's good to review these principles for things you've missed:

    1. Make it social. This is an incredibly powerful too. I highly, highly recommend Fitocracy to everyone, as it's a way to make exercise fun and social (invite code: ZENHABITS). It turns fitness into a game, and you log your exercises, get points, encourage others, complete fitness quests, get props for workouts you've done. Other great ways to make your habit change social: report on your daily progress to friends and family through Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or email, find a workout partner, get a coach, join a running group, join online fitness forums, join a class.
    2. Do one habit at a time only. People often skip this one because they think they are different than everyone else, but I've found this to be extremely effective. You increase your odds of success with just one habit at a time, for many reasons: habits are hard to form because they require lots of focus and energy, having many habits means you're spreading yourself too thin, and if you can't commit to one habit at a time, you're not fully committed.
    3. Make it your top priority. People often put off fitness and diet stuff because they're too busy, too tired, to stressed out by big projects or the holidays, etc. But in my experience, those are great reasons you *should* be exercising. So make your new diet or exercise habit one of your absolute top priorities for the day. If you don't have time, you need to make time.
    4. Enjoy the habit. This is extremely important, and most people ignore it. If the habit is fun, you will stick with it longer. And even better, if you are enjoying it, you immediately win. You don't need to wait for a bunch of pounds lost or other results — you get instant results because you're enjoying the change. I find activities I enjoy, I join challenges or races to make exercise fun, I enjoy a conversation with a friend during a run, I eat healthy foods that are delicious (berries — yum!) and focus on savoring those foods. Focus on the enjoyment, and don't make the habit change a big sacrifice.

    Final Recommendations

    Many people set fitness goals for the year. I've done it myself, but lately I've found that I can get fit without them. For one thing, when you set goals, they are often arbitrary, and so you are spending all your effort working towards a basically meaningless number. And then if you don't achieve it, you feel like you failed, even if the number was arbitrary to start with.

    You can create habits without goals — I define goals as a predefined outcome that you're striving for, not activities that you just want to do. So is creating a habit a goal? It can be, or you can approach it with the attitude of "it doesn't matter what the outcome of this habit change is, but I want to enjoy the change as I do it".

    So enjoy the habit change, in the moment, and don't worry what the outcome of the activity is. The outcome matters very little, if you enjoy the journey.

    The journey to fitness can have an infinite number of paths, and setting your path in advance by setting goals is limiting. Allow yourself to change course on a whim, without guilt of not achieving a goal, and you'll find new paths you'd never have anticipated when you set out.

    But the most important step of the journey is the first one. After that, the most important step is the one you're presently taking. So take that step, and enjoy it.




    Which Is Bigger: A Human Brain Or The Universe? : Krulwich Wonders... : NPR

    Which Is Bigger: A Human Brain Or The Universe?

    This is one of those fun-to-think-about questions. A brain isn't much to look at, after all. It's about the size of your two fists put together, three pounds to hold, but oh my, what it can do.

    Brain with exclamation point
    Robert Krulwich/NPR

    With our brains, we can think backwards, imagine forwards, conjure, create things that don't exist, leap vast distances. For example, suppose I say to you, close your eyes and imagine this:

    ...let's you and I rocket off the Earth and keep going, out past Neptune, then past the nearest star, then on and on across a patch of cold empty space until we reach an interstellar gas cloud glowing pale blue, and when we get there, let's fly to the top, hover near a small baby star softly glowing, and move in closer to see it peeking out from the top of the cloud...

    Can you see this with me? I bet you can. You can fly with me across vast distances, go to impossibly faraway places because you have the tool that lets you — that hunk of flesh in your head.

    Brain cloud
    Robert Krulwich/NPR

    "Our creatures are our thoughts," said the poet John Donne way back in the 1620s, and our thoughts "reach from east to west, from earth to heaven; that do not only bestride all the sea and land, but span the sun and firmament at once; my thoughts reach all, comprehend all."

    If a brain can make crazy leaps across the cosmos and bring extra passengers along (like you when you listen to me), then in a metaphorical way, the brain is bigger than what's around it, wrote 19th century poet Emily Dickinson.

    The brain is wider than the sky,
    For, put them side by side,
    The one the other will include
    With ease, and you beside.

    I like her confidence. The brain reaches where it pleases "with ease," so she figures it's bigger than everything. It can do things the physical universe can't, like go backwards. ("Let me tell you what happened to me yesterday...") And while I agree with Dickinson, the brain is formidable — does it get the crown?

    Brain with crown
    Robert Krulwich/NPR

     

    Well, let's hear from the Universe; As critic Kathryn Schulz wrote recently, if you think of the cosmos the easy way, as a giant expanse with stars, planets and gas clouds, then yes, a mind can imagine all that ("and you beside"). But what if we make it a little harder, and consider the mysteries of dark energy, the space/time continuum, Higgs fields, teeny bits of energy popping up out of nowhere and then vanishing into the smallest imaginable spaces? What if I tell you that the faster you go, the bigger you get, until at the speed of light, your mass increases enormously?

    That's Silly

    "Many people think that this is silly," wrote astronomer Carl Sagan, "and every week or two I get a letter from someone who complains to me about it," but no matter how strange it seems, this happens to be true, experimentally, verifiably true. But truths like these aren't easy to take in. Our minds boggle.

    "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose," said the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, "but queerer than we can suppose." In Haldane's view, the universe is bigger than the brain. There are things we just can't know, or even conjure with the brains we've got.

    There are philosophers and scientists who say we will never understand the universe, we can't fathom the endless details or make good sense of the whole. We can try, but the universe is too big. The writer John Updike once explained the argument this way to reporter Jim Holt:

    "It's beyond our intellectual limits as a species. Put yourself into the position of a dog. A dog is responsive, shows intuition, looks at us with eyes behind which there is intelligence of a sort, and yet a dog must not understand most of the things it sees people doing. It must have no idea how they invented, say, the internal combustion engine. So maybe what we need to do is imagine that we're dogs and that there are realms that go beyond our understanding."

    Our brains are magnificent compared to other creatures here on Earth, but up against the universe, we are pitiful. That's the argument, anyway. So does the universe get the crown?

    Sun behind clouds
    Robert Krulwich/NPR

    I don't know. Carl Sagan thought that we humans are good at finding patterns in nature, and if we know the rules, we can skip the details and understand the outline, the essence. It's not necessary for us to know everything. The problem is we don't know how many rules the cosmos has. How many rules does it take to explain the mystery of non-life becoming life, the finite becoming infinite, matter becoming mind, nothing becoming something? A few? Millions? We don't know.

    Yet the brain has its champions. "Consider the human brain," says physicist Sir Roger Penrose. "If you look at the entire physical cosmos, our brains are a tiny, tiny part of it. But they're the most perfectly organized part. Compared to the complexity of a brain, a galaxy is just an inert lump." Yes, it's small, but the human brain has a power that nothing we know of in all the galaxies can match.

    So which, then? Brain? Universe? Curiosity versus mystery, which is bigger?

    Go Universe!

    Speaking personally, I'm rooting for the universe. I don't need, don't want, don't like the idea of one day knowing all there is to know. I don't think we can. I think about Job, the bible's just and honest man, being lifted up high into the heavens so he can see all of God's creation and shrinking painfully away from the sight of "Things too wonderful for me."

    I'm not saying we shouldn't try. And even if we amplify our brains with powerful computers, my hunch is the universe will still outwit us, will still be "too wonderful" to be decoded, because we are, in the end, so much smaller than it is. And that's not a bad thing. To my mind, it's the search that matters, that sharpens us, gives us something noble to do.

    As the physicist Steven Weinberg famously said, "The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy."

    We live to wonder, to ask, to appreciate. Without wonder, why are we here?


    I blame Kathryn Schulz for getting me thinking about all this. She wrote a brilliant, provocative review of Jim Holt's new book Why Does the World Exist? that is so much fun to read, you should run, not walk, to find it here. And then, because the review leaves you no option, you will, zombie-like, find yourself compelled to pick up Jim Holt's book (I'm halfway through and loving every page) which visits with a bunch of very smart scientists, novelists and philosophers and asks them why the universe came to be. They all have answers, but Jim knows — and they know — that nobody really knows. The conversations are sharp and fun and Jim writes well enough that I never felt too stupid to turn the page. That's rare.




    Book Review: Schulz on Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist? -- Vulture

    Book Review: Schulz on Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist?

    Let's take stock of the universe, shall we? From my immediate perspective, there is — well, me, of course. Also: laptop, ear buds, Arcade Fire, coffee. As it happens, I'm on an airplane, so: wing, lift, engine, window, clouds. Below that … where to start? Tides, deserts, Damascus, Dubrovnik, spruce trees, refugee camps, tapestries of unicorns, ice cream, the Internet, home. Beyond that: sun, moon, planets, exoplanets, the starry @ sign of the Milky Way. And then, for most of us, things do get milky, murky—what's out there, exactly? Black holes, red dwarfs, cosmic background radiation, the rest of the universe, other universes, who knows? And I've left out nearly everything: most of creation (human and otherwise), all of time (past and future), all abstract concepts (pi, e, Beauty), and that strange unthinglike thing that is both component and agent of this cosmic inventory: human consciousness.

    Mind, matter, abstract ideas: Where does all this stuff come from? Why is the universe characterized by such abundance and complexity? Why does it exist at all? How did it come into being? Could there have been something else instead? Could there have been nothing else—that is, nothingness—instead? Is the human mind capable of resolving these matters? Can anyone do justice to all this in a 279-page book?

    I can answer only the last of these questions. Yes, someone can: Jim Holt, in Why Does the World Exist? That title echoes a question famously posed by G. W. Leibniz, a brilliant philosopher, groundbreaking mathematician, and incurable optimist. The bit of optimism he's best known for (largely because Voltaire made so much fun of it in Candide) is the claim that we live in the "best of all possible worlds." But Leibniz was also an information optimist: He believed there was an answer to every question. "This principle having been stated," he wrote in 1714, "the first question which we have a right to ask will be, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' "

    Poor Leibniz. He was right about that being a first question, in every sense: primary, fundamental, brilliant. But as for an answer—well, three centuries on, the best we can say is, it's not for lack of trying. The mystery of why the universe exists still intrigues and defies philosophers, theologians, scientists, and pretty much anyone who's ever sprawled in a park and stared at the sky. It's central to the so-called God Wars, in which atheists and believers square off over, among other issues, who owns ontology. It is why some people are at the multiplex this summer watching Prometheus and others are celebrating last week's presumed discovery of the Higgs ­boson, a fundamental particle whose existence helps explain the workings of the universe. It is drastically suprahuman in scale, yet scarily, unnervingly intimate: We, too, came from nothing and are headed back there. In short, it intrigues us all, affects us all, and—alas—confounds us all. As usual, William James put it best. Of the enigma of existence, he wrote, "All of us are beggars here."

    Holt, an essayist and critic whose previous book was about jokes—make of that what you will—is an unlikely candidate to answer Leibniz's question. It's probably wise, then, that except for one brief stab at it, he doesn't even try. Instead, he pools the beggars' assets, or maybe audits them. His book features extended interviews with cosmologists, from Adolph Grünbaum (a philosopher and atheist) to Richard Swinburne (philosopher, theist) to Roger Penrose (mathematician) to Steven Weinberg (Nobel Prize–winning physicist). Holt offers additional thoughts in between, but mostly he serves as messenger and mediator. That structure pays oblique homage to the tradition of philosophical dialogues ("It was a beautiful speech, Agathon … "), but mainly it makes Holt a kind of cosmological Studs Terkel. The voices he records affirm, challenge, refine, mock, and admire each other, and it is this way—conversationally—that Holt brings both complexity and clarity to his subject.

    And Holt's book is conversational in the other sense, too. Why Does the World Exist? unfolds over coffee at Sartre's beloved Café de Flore and booze pretty much anywhere the author can find it, and, like the conversations I like best, it is deep, absorbing, associative, challenging, and makes you laugh, unexpectedly and a lot. It is also lucid: Holt ably explains some of the hardest material ever served up by physics, philosophy, and math. That's an impressive hat trick, but I appreciated just as much his instinct not to explain the grace notes. If you catch that flying reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins (yes) or know what "inspissate" means (no)—well, great. If not, whatever; you and he both have bigger fish to fry. All that unexplicated erudition could feel show-offy or obfuscatory, but it doesn't. It feels somewhere between generous—an act of faith in his readers—and pleasantly oblivious. One gets the happy sense of a smart person writing mostly for himself.

    Why can't we figure out how the universe began? To help answer that question, Holt hauls out the oft-told tale of the cosmological turtle. In case you haven't heard it, the gist is this. A famous professor is giving a lecture about the nature of the universe when an elderly woman stands up and tells him he's talking nonsense: The universe, as everyone knows, rests on the back of an elephant. "Oh?" replies the professor. "And what's the elephant standing on?" "A turtle," the woman explains. "I see," the professor says. "And what's the turtle standing on?" "Another turtle," she replies. "And what's that turtle standing on?" he asks. "Ah, professor." She smiles. "After that, it's turtles all the way down."

    That is the problem of existence in a tortoise shell. An account of the origins of the universe is called a cosmogony—but no cosmogony can be complete, because they all invoke entities that themselves require explanation. If, for instance, you believe in divine creation, you need to explain the existence of the divine. To argue that God needs no explanation or is an uncaused cause doesn't solve the problem; it just assigns the name "God" to the mysterious, unsupported turtle at the base of the ontological heap. Science, too, gets stuck here. "A scientific explanation must involve some sort of physical cause," Holt writes. "But any physical cause is by definition part of the universe to be explained." Philosophy is similarly stumped. "From nothing to being," James wrote, "there is no logical bridge."

    There are, however, a lot of illogical bridges, many of which take recognizable forms. You can say A because B, B because C, C because D—but what explains D? If you say A, your explanation is circular. If you say because E because F because G (H, I, J, K … ), your explanation is an infinite regress: a taller stack of turtles. You might, instead, argue that D is explained by X, where X is some kind of necessary truth, a logical deduction or physical law. But this presents an interesting question: How, exactly, do you get a material universe out of a necessary truth? "Are the laws of physics somehow to inform the Abyss that it is pregnant with Being?" Holt asks. "If so, where do the laws themselves live? Do they hover over the world like the mind of God? … How do they reach out and make a world? How do they force events to obey them?"

    Got me. Got everybody. Try as we might, we can't find a way to tell a sound causal story about the origins of the universe. The absence of an explanation is one thing, but the absence of any imaginable form that an explanation could take is something else, and it has caused many cosmologists to throw up their hands. Swinburne believes we should just accept an "intellectual stopping point." Weinberg thinks "we're permanently doomed to that sense of mystery." And Bertrand Russell—not exactly an intellectual pushover—simply said Uncle: "I should say that the universe is just there, and that is all."

    So we are stuck. Yet the very intractability of the problem turns out to have a salutary (and fun) side effect: All the ordinary kinds of answers being impossible, one begins to think in earnest about the extraordinary ones. This is a book that gets us to take seriously, at least for a few pages, the proposition that the universe was brought into being by the abstract idea of Goodness. (Hey, Plato thought so.) Elsewhere, we get a probabilistic, Bayesian case for the existence of God. We hear Heidegger speculate that nothingness is an agent, that noth-ing is a verb ("Das Nichts nichtet," or "Nothing noths": shades of Hopkins, for whom the self "selves"); perhaps, then, nothing nothed itself, thereby creating Being. We contemplate panpsychism, the theory that consciousness is a fundamental property, irreducible to physical components and pervasive throughout the universe: that, in the words of the astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, "the stuff of the world is mind-stuff."

    The weirdness goes on. We learn—and I am quoting here because my powers to intelligently paraphrase this are limited—that "a tiny bit of energy-filled vacuum could spontaneously 'tunnel' into existence," and then, bang, expand to become the universe. We learn that a hundred-thousandth of a gram of matter would suffice to generate a universe like ours, which means it's conceivable that we were created by some extraterrestrial nerd in an extra-universal lab. We entertain the possibility, favored by some physicists, that "nothingness is unstable," which means something was bound to happen. And we entertain the possibility that everything was bound to happen. That is the principle of fecundity: the idea that all possible worlds are real. Muse on the implications of that one for your personal life—or lives—on your next subway ride home.

    Who knows if we have a fecundity of universes. Clearly, though, we have a fecundity of cosmogonies. How, then, are we supposed to adjudicate among them?

    Listen to Holt give it a go. Of the notion that a tiny bit of vacuum arose spontaneously and expanded into the universe: "I had to confess that my imagination bridled." Of the universe-from-Goodness theory: "I did admire it. But I wasn't quite moved by it." And after talking with Grünbaum, who resolutely refuses to find anything mysterious about the universe, Holt descends into gloom. "Okay, it was a mood, not a philosophical argument," he concedes. "But it filled me with the conviction that Grünbaum's ontological certitude … could not be the last word."

    Imagination bridles; feeling fails; a mood yields a conviction. These are the kinds of judgments a friend of mine jokingly refers to as "introspective empiricism." The joke part is the "empiricism": Surely how an idea feels to us, or makes us feel, should not be taken as evidence for its truth. So why does Holt, plainly a rigorous thinker, succumb to such an iffy strategy? And why do so many of the brilliant cosmologists in his book implicitly or explicitly do the same?

    Because, as it turns out, there's no other kind of empiricism available. The cosmogonies Holt presents are fascinating, illuminating—and, almost without exception, unsupported by evidence. And that's not even their gravest offense. Weinberg, the physicist, notes that the trouble with cosmogony is "not just that we don't have the observational data—we don't even have the theory." He means we do not have a testable hypothesis, let alone one that has withstood the testing.

    This raises questions that have nothing to do with the nature of the universe. Holt's book is, of course, about cosmology. But it is also, covertly, about ­epistemology—about the nature of knowledge, and the scope and limit of the human mind. Why Does the World Exist? is not just concerned with what we know about a possibly unique and unquestionably mysterious event that took place 14 billion years ago. It's also concerned with what we can know about that event, and how we can know it, and what "knowing" even means in this context.

    These answers, too, are up for grabs. The optimistic position on the capacity of the human mind vis-à-vis the cosmos was nicely summed up by Emily Dickinson. "The Brain—is wider than the Sky—," she wrote sometime around 1862, a generation before Einstein was born:

    For—put them side by side—

    The one the other will contain

    With ease—and You—beside—

    With ease, eh? I've always loved those lines, but after reading Holt, they strike me as the Newtonian physics of poetic expression: sufficient to capture everyday experience, quite possibly wrong when applied on any extra-human scale. Contemporary cosmogony is so difficult to fathom that one starts to side, instead, with the biologist J.B.S. Haldane. "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose," he wrote, "but queerer than we can suppose." The sky, in his view, is wider than the brain.

    Who knows which entity will ultimately win out in the capaciousness game? The pleasure of this book is watching the match: the staggeringly inventive human mind slamming its fantastic conjectures over the net, the universe coolly returning every serve. In one sense, at least, it's a game of equals; by broad consensus, the two most enigmatic phenomena around are human consciousness and the origins of the universe. The balance between them—between our curiosity, and the universe's mystery—is, in every sense, a fine one.

    In his epilogue, Holt is in Paris, watching French TV, where a Dominican priest, a Buddhist monk, and a theoretical physicist are debating the origins of the universe. It sounds like the setup to a joke, but we gradually realize it's the setup to the book: He's taking us back to the beginning, showing us why there is this particular something rather than nothing. It's a lovely move, at once serious and prankish. Why does this book exist? Because its author went to a party in Paris, drank some wine, returned home, watched TV. Hey, thanks for the turtles! Where did Paris come from? How do you get a universe from nothing? How do you get a book from a brain?

    Nobody knows. And Holt, to his credit, is comfortable with that. So much of contemporary science writing traffics in the illusion of knowledge; it's quick to close the case, eager to peddle solutions, determined to be useful or profitable to readers. Holt traffics in wonder, a word whose dual meanings—the absence of answers; the experience of awe—strike me as profoundly related. His book is not utilitarian. You can't profit from it, at least not in the narrow sense. Sometimes you can't even understand it. And yet it does what real science writing should: It helps us feel the fullness of the problem. This is a book that ends, literally and figuratively, in opacity and incompleteness. Holt is halfway across a bridge, at night, smoking a cigarette—that tiny artifact of human ingenuity, addictive and glowing. In an act of civic irresponsibility but intellectual bravura, he leans over and lets it drop into the darkness. It falls like one final question: How much will we illuminate, before we are extinguished?     

    Why Does the World Exist?
    By Jim Holt.
    Norton. $27.95.

    Photo: NASA



    Which Is Bigger: A Human Brain Or The Universe? : Krulwich Wonders... : NPR

    Which Is Bigger: A Human Brain Or The Universe?

    This is one of those fun-to-think-about questions. A brain isn't much to look at, after all. It's about the size of your two fists put together, three pounds to hold, but oh my, what it can do.

    Brain with exclamation point
    Robert Krulwich/NPR

    With our brains, we can think backwards, imagine forwards, conjure, create things that don't exist, leap vast distances. For example, suppose I say to you, close your eyes and imagine this:

    ...let's you and I rocket off the Earth and keep going, out past Neptune, then past the nearest star, then on and on across a patch of cold empty space until we reach an interstellar gas cloud glowing pale blue, and when we get there, let's fly to the top, hover near a small baby star softly glowing, and move in closer to see it peeking out from the top of the cloud...

    Can you see this with me? I bet you can. You can fly with me across vast distances, go to impossibly faraway places because you have the tool that lets you — that hunk of flesh in your head.

    Brain cloud
    Robert Krulwich/NPR

    "Our creatures are our thoughts," said the poet John Donne way back in the 1620s, and our thoughts "reach from east to west, from earth to heaven; that do not only bestride all the sea and land, but span the sun and firmament at once; my thoughts reach all, comprehend all."

    If a brain can make crazy leaps across the cosmos and bring extra passengers along (like you when you listen to me), then in a metaphorical way, the brain is bigger than what's around it, wrote 19th century poet Emily Dickinson.

    The brain is wider than the sky,
    For, put them side by side,
    The one the other will include
    With ease, and you beside.

    I like her confidence. The brain reaches where it pleases "with ease," so she figures it's bigger than everything. It can do things the physical universe can't, like go backwards. ("Let me tell you what happened to me yesterday...") And while I agree with Dickinson, the brain is formidable — does it get the crown?

    Brain with crown
    Robert Krulwich/NPR

     

    Well, let's hear from the Universe; As critic Kathryn Schulz wrote recently, if you think of the cosmos the easy way, as a giant expanse with stars, planets and gas clouds, then yes, a mind can imagine all that ("and you beside"). But what if we make it a little harder, and consider the mysteries of dark energy, the space/time continuum, Higgs fields, teeny bits of energy popping up out of nowhere and then vanishing into the smallest imaginable spaces? What if I tell you that the faster you go, the bigger you get, until at the speed of light, your mass increases enormously?

    That's Silly

    "Many people think that this is silly," wrote astronomer Carl Sagan, "and every week or two I get a letter from someone who complains to me about it," but no matter how strange it seems, this happens to be true, experimentally, verifiably true. But truths like these aren't easy to take in. Our minds boggle.

    "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose," said the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, "but queerer than we can suppose." In Haldane's view, the universe is bigger than the brain. There are things we just can't know, or even conjure with the brains we've got.

    There are philosophers and scientists who say we will never understand the universe, we can't fathom the endless details or make good sense of the whole. We can try, but the universe is too big. The writer John Updike once explained the argument this way to reporter Jim Holt:

    "It's beyond our intellectual limits as a species. Put yourself into the position of a dog. A dog is responsive, shows intuition, looks at us with eyes behind which there is intelligence of a sort, and yet a dog must not understand most of the things it sees people doing. It must have no idea how they invented, say, the internal combustion engine. So maybe what we need to do is imagine that we're dogs and that there are realms that go beyond our understanding."

    Our brains are magnificent compared to other creatures here on Earth, but up against the universe, we are pitiful. That's the argument, anyway. So does the universe get the crown?

    Sun behind clouds
    Robert Krulwich/NPR

    I don't know. Carl Sagan thought that we humans are good at finding patterns in nature, and if we know the rules, we can skip the details and understand the outline, the essence. It's not necessary for us to know everything. The problem is we don't know how many rules the cosmos has. How many rules does it take to explain the mystery of non-life becoming life, the finite becoming infinite, matter becoming mind, nothing becoming something? A few? Millions? We don't know.

    Yet the brain has its champions. "Consider the human brain," says physicist Sir Roger Penrose. "If you look at the entire physical cosmos, our brains are a tiny, tiny part of it. But they're the most perfectly organized part. Compared to the complexity of a brain, a galaxy is just an inert lump." Yes, it's small, but the human brain has a power that nothing we know of in all the galaxies can match.

    So which, then? Brain? Universe? Curiosity versus mystery, which is bigger?

    Go Universe!

    Speaking personally, I'm rooting for the universe. I don't need, don't want, don't like the idea of one day knowing all there is to know. I don't think we can. I think about Job, the bible's just and honest man, being lifted up high into the heavens so he can see all of God's creation and shrinking painfully away from the sight of "Things too wonderful for me."

    I'm not saying we shouldn't try. And even if we amplify our brains with powerful computers, my hunch is the universe will still outwit us, will still be "too wonderful" to be decoded, because we are, in the end, so much smaller than it is. And that's not a bad thing. To my mind, it's the search that matters, that sharpens us, gives us something noble to do.

    As the physicist Steven Weinberg famously said, "The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy."

    We live to wonder, to ask, to appreciate. Without wonder, why are we here?


    I blame Kathryn Schulz for getting me thinking about all this. She wrote a brilliant, provocative review of Jim Holt's new book Why Does the World Exist? that is so much fun to read, you should run, not walk, to find it here. And then, because the review leaves you no option, you will, zombie-like, find yourself compelled to pick up Jim Holt's book (I'm halfway through and loving every page) which visits with a bunch of very smart scientists, novelists and philosophers and asks them why the universe came to be. They all have answers, but Jim knows — and they know — that nobody really knows. The conversations are sharp and fun and Jim writes well enough that I never felt too stupid to turn the page. That's rare.