One of the odd features of life in the US is the boasting (either overt or subtle) by professional people about how much they work. They seem to seek bragging rights about who puts in the most hours, as if the more hours you work the more important you must be. My daughter worked for a couple of years in the financial sector and sent me this article that illustrates the mindset of many of the people she encountered in that world. The author highlights a trap that young professionals especially can fall into.

Because fulfilling and engrossing work – the sort that is thought to provide the most intense learning experience – often requires long hours or captivates the imagination for long periods of time, it is easy to slip into the idea that the converse is also true: that just by working long hours, one is also engaging in fulfilling and engrossing work. This leads to the popular fallacy that you can measure the value of your job (and, therefore, the amount you are learning from it) by the amount of time you spend on it. And, incidentally, when a premium is placed on learning rather than earning, people are particularly susceptible to this form of self-deceit.

Thus, whereas in the past, when people in their 20s or 30s spoke disparagingly about nine-to-five jobs it was invariably because they were seen as too routine, too unimaginative, or too bourgeois. Now, it is simply because they don’t contain enough hours.

Young professionals have not suddenly developed a distaste for leisure, but they have solidly bought into the belief that a 45-hour week necessarily signifies an unfulfilling job. Jane, a 29-year-old corporate lawyer who works in the City of London, tells a story about working on a deal with another lawyer, a young man in his early 30s. At about 3am, he leant over the boardroom desk and said: “Isn’t this great? This is when I really love my job.” What most struck her about the remark was that the work was irrelevant (she says it was actually rather boring); her colleague simply liked the idea of working late. “It’s as though he was validated, or making his life important by this,” she says.

Unfortunately, when people can convince themselves that all they need do in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives is to work long hours, they can quickly start to lose reasons for their existence. As they start to think of their employment as a lifestyle, fulfilling and rewarding of itself – and in which the reward is proportional to hours worked – people rapidly begin to substitute work for other aspects of their lives.
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Jane, Michael, Robert and Kathryn grew up as part of a generation with fewer social constraints determining their futures than has been true for probably any other generation in history. They were taught at school that when they grew up they could “do anything”, “be anything”. It was an idea that was reinforced by popular culture, in films, books and television.

The notion that one can do anything is clearly liberating. But life without constraints has also proved a recipe for endless searching, endless questioning of aspirations. It has made this generation obsessed with self-development and determined, for as long as possible, to minimise personal commitments in order to maximise the options open to them. One might see this as a sign of extended adolescence.

Eventually, they will be forced to realise that living is as much about closing possibilities as it is about creating them.

I grew up at a time and in a country where this mindset was not present, so I did not fall prey to this kind of thinking. Also academia is an area where people do work long hours but because the research involves largely self-motivated learning, it does not seem like work, and since there is already a consensus that the work is worthwhile, academics tend not to brag to each other about the hours they put in.

Now of course, I am in the twilight of my work life, approaching the age when retirement becomes a factor to consider. Getting old is no picnic, mainly because your body starts to fall apart. But one of the benefits, if one is able to recognize it as such, is that you realize that because time is running out, many of the options that you once considered are no longer open to you, and so you begin to think of how best to maximize the benefits of the life you have rather than constantly seeking new fields to conquer.

It is not that one has become resigned to one’s lot in life. It is that one sees more clearly what options are realistically available and can then focus on making the most of them.

A recent news report says that football players in Division 1A colleges average about 44.8 hours on that sport and less than 40 on academics.

This is crazy. A full time student is expected to spend a minimum of about 50 hours per week on academics (attending classes and doing out of class work). Assuming they sleep 8 hours per day, that means that they have 17 hours per week, or 2.5 hours per day, for everything else in life. It is ridiculous to think that these athletes are sacrificing all the other things and living the ascetic life of a hermit in order to completely meet their athletic and academic demands.

The NCAA, the governing body, is pretending that this shows the commitment of these students to living up to the ‘student-athlete’ ideal. An NCAA spokesperson Myles brand says, “These young people are very competitive. It’s in their fiber… and they will do everything they can to succeed… Frankly, I’d rather have that student go to sleep early, wake up in the morning and do an extra run than I would (him or her) staying up late and going to the bars… The fact that they choose to balance athletics and academics as a primary activity, I think that’s fine.”

Yeah, right. What is obviously happening is that these student athletes are cutting back on their studies at these big sports schools, which are notorious for finding ways to circumvent academic requirements.

What these students really are are professional athletes masquerading as students, providing income for the schools in return for the small chance of making it in professional sports after they graduate with a worthless degree. Some undoubtedly feel that they are being exploited, hence the periodic scandals involving ‘secret’ benefits and payments to players, with coaches and school administrators pretending not to notice. Ohio State University is the latest school to be found guilty of such infractions and its football coach resigned but he will merely move on to another position and the cycle goes on.

I realized that I have not had a break from blogging for almost two years. Since my daughter will be having a wedding reception this weekend and there will be many friends and family that I will be meeting, I will be taking some time off to enjoy their company.

Regular blogging will return after the Labor Day weekend but I will likely check in from time to time with some short posts and to clean up the spam in the comments.

But until then, here is a photo of Baxter, the Wonder Dog, taking a well-earned rest.

I am constantly amazed at the kinds of things that get made into serious competitions.

In this video, Schuyler Towne explains what this particular sport is and how it is done (via Boing Boing).

The son of a friend of is very good at solving the Rubik’s cube and takes part in the annual national contest to see who is the best in the US. In successive years he has come in 3rd, 2nd, 4th and 5th, but frustratingly has never won.

Here is a video of someone solving it in competition in 6.77 seconds.

What I learned recently is that the contest also has a category where people are required to solve the puzzle with their feet! Here is someone solving it in 31.56 seconds.

Being somewhat of a klutz myself with quite poor small motor skills, I find this amazing.

You have to be a bit cautious about YouTube videos of people claiming to be able to solve the puzzle quickly with their feet or hands. Some of them are hoaxes where they start out with an ordered cube, make it disordered while filming it, and then run the video in reverse. Make sure there is a lot of background stuff going on which unambiguously indicate forward time, and that there are no cuts.

Recently Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters, speaking about the Tea Party, said: “They called our bluff and we blinked. We should have made them walk the plank.”

Similarly President Obama said to Eric Cantor during the debt ceiling discussions: “Eric, don’t call my bluff. I’m going to the American people on this.”

In both these cases, the speakers implied that they possessed the stronger hand so it does not make sense to say “Don’t call my bluff”. In such situations, you either call your opponents’ bluff or you want your opponent to think you are bluffing and call you on it. To say that you are bluffing and then warn them not to call you on it does not make any sense.

It seems like in both cases the speakers meant to say “Don’t think I am bluffing because I am not.” In other words, the people who are saying “Don’t call my bluff” should really be saying “I am calling your bluff.”

NPR had a story about people who get lost, stranded, and even die in Death Valley because their GPS devices led them astray. After repeated instances like this, a Death Valley Ranger investigated and discovered that the devices were using old maps with roads that had long since disappeared. People following the GPS devices ended up on dirt roads that led nowhere.

I have written before at how surprised I am that people put their faith implicitly in technology. I find it incredible that anyone would even go to a place like Death Valley without at least some backup plan in case the GPS failed. Apart from errors, what would they do if the device started obviously malfunctioning or stopped working?

Just recently I had to go to someone’s home. Their address was on Shaker Boulevard, which is a very long street with a wide grassy median with few crossover points, so I put their street number into Google Maps to get a rough idea of where the house was. I was surprised to find that the location given was two towns away from mine, since I was pretty sure that they lived in my own suburb. So I tried MapQuest and sure enough, it was very near my home. Google Maps had made an error. My habit of being skeptical and checking saved me from wasting time.

I also recently drove to a distant town for a wedding party and as is my practice before I left got directions from Google Maps or MapQuest and compared it with a physical map. But when I got to that town, construction had closed off many of the streets that I was supposed to go on. This did not bother me because I had a map and quickly found an alternate route to my hotel.

I don’t have GPS but was wondering what it would do in situations where its directions cannot be followed due to various reasons. For example, for people traveling in Death Valley, if they sense that the dirt road they are asked to go on is a mistake, what options do they have? Does anyone know?

This week marked the 40th anniversary of the infamous experiment that showed how quickly people can turn into brutes when given unchecked power over someone else.

The video in the link is worth watching for its interviews with some of the original participants.

One of the most sickening cases of recent times was that of a Pennsylvania judge getting bribes from a builder of juvenile prisons, in exchange for which the judge sent thousands of children, many of them first-time offenders convicted of minor crimes and some as young as 10, to the private jails.

About 4,000 of those convictions have now been tossed aside because he violated the constitutional rights of the accused, including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea. The judge was portrayed as not only corrupt but as “vicious and mean-spirited” who “verbally abused and cruelly mocked” the children whom he sent to jail.

His trial has ended with the judge being sentenced to 28 years in prison.

Another judge accused of a similar crime has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing.

Some of you may have read about a study that supposedly showed that people who used Internet Explore had lower IQs than those who use other web browsers. The hoax fooled many major news outlets like the BBC, which picked up and reported on it.

The hoax’s perpetrators explain why they did it and their surprise that so many people did not seem to question the results, as if it were fairly common knowledge that IE users were stupid. They listed eight things that should have quickly indicated to people, especially reporters, that the story was fake.

Christopher Budd explores what the widespread and uncritical acceptance of this hoax story might tell us about ourselves and the media.