James Surowiecki on procrastination:
Procrastination is driven, in part, by the gap between effort (which is required now) and reward (which you reap only in the future, if ever). So narrowing that gap, by whatever means necessary, helps. Since open-ended tasks with distant deadlines are much easier to postpone than focussed, short-term projects, dividing projects into smaller, more defined sections helps.Aha: granularity!
Charles and David H. Koch are the subjects of a recent New Yorker article by Jane Mayer. The brothers Koch, worth thirty-five billion dollars, are the owners of Koch Industries, ranked, Mayer notes, as “the second-largest private company” in the United States. Here is an excerpt from the article:
The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry — especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies — from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program — that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.Among the Kochs’ political front groups is the faux-grassroots organization Americans for Prosperity (a dark-roots organization, I’d call it). Some of the details in Mayer’s reporting are beyond appalling: see, for instance, Koch Industries’ efforts to block E.P.A. classification of formaldehyde as a human carcinogen, even as David H. donates large sums for cancer research.
This display case sat — for how long? — in an office-supply store that finally surrendered to Staples. The store began in 1935; I would imagine that this case sat there from very early on. It’s now spending its retirement atop a small bookcase in my house. This case suffers from one work-related injury: the grade-B display pencil is missing from its slot. To avoid reflections, I’ve photographed the case without the piece of glass that fits in front of the display. With that piece in, the case is even more attractive.
The 178 pencils that came with this case (from 6B to 9H) are mostly recent production: Berol Turquoises, Faber-Castell Designs and 9000s, General Kimberlys. A few dozen older pencils are mixed in: Eagle Turquoises (unfaded, unlike the display pencils glued to their slots) and A.W. Faber 9000s. In the photograph below, the Turquoises sit in the seventh slot from the left and the fourth and fifth slots from the right, looking rather cerulean.
[This post is the ninth in an occasional series, “From the Museum of Supplies.” The museum is imaginary. The supplies are real. Supplies is my word, and has become my family’s word, for all manner of stationery items. Photographs by Michael Leddy.]
Also from the Museum of Supplies
Dennison’s Gummed Labels No. 27
Fineline erasers
Illinois Central Railroad Pencil
A Mad Men sort of man, sort of
Mongol No. 2 3/8
Real Thin Leads
Rite-Rite Long Leads
Stanley carpenter’s rule
This dopey-looking picture, from the SparkNotes website, may amuse readers of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. In case it’s not obvious, the caption is by SparkNotes.
There are, by the way, no SparkNotes for Infinite Jest. (Good.)
Some Infinite Jest posts
Attention : Description : Loveliness : “Night-noises” : Romance : Sadness : Telephony : Television
Van Dyke Parks and Clare and the Reasons perform “The All Golden,” “Heroes and Villains,” “Pluton/Pluto,” and “You Got Time,” on WNYC-FM’s Spinning on Air. Listen, listen, listen.
Related posts
Van Dyke Parks in Brooklyn
Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (1)
Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (2)
My daughter Rachel passes on the news of a toy kitchen that looks nothing like our kitchen (real or toy):
We designed this upscale wood play kitchen to look like yours! Beautifully crafted, with espresso cabinets, “stainless steel” appliances, and faux granite countertop.(Thanks, Rachel!)
KidKraft Wood Play Kitchen: A Toy Kitchen That Looks Like Yours
Tyke is a happy word in our family: the dependent clause “when you were a tyke” has prefaced various recollections of our children’s early years. Just this morning, I said in an e-mail to my daughter Rachel and son Ben that I wished Chicago’s Puppet Bike had been around when they were tykes. The corporate respelling of tyke has an honored place in our family lore: a piece of videotape from 1988 has Rachel, then all of two and a half, speaking of her dream third-birthday present, a Little Tikes Kitchen:
What’s so special about a Little Tikes Kitchen?I wondered this morning: where does tyke come from? I’m sort of sorry to have found out. The Oxford English Dictionary gives this etymology:
Because I like it.
What do you like about it?
Because it has a telephone.
It has a telephone. What else does it have?
It has a lot of cooking.
ON. tík female dog, bitch (Norw. tik, also she-fox, vixen, Sw. dial. tik, older Da. tig); also MLG. tike bitch.And the word’s oldest meaning (dating to 1400):
A dog; usually in depreciation or contempt, a low-bred or coarse dog, a cur, a mongrel.But as early as 1400, tyke applied to men and women:
Applied opprobriously to a man (rarely with similar force to a woman): A low-bred, lazy, mean, surly, or ill-mannered fellow; a boor.And it later applied to children:
Also said in playful reproof to a child; hence (unreprovingly), a child, esp. a small boy; occas., a young animal (U.S.).I’m reminded now that kid too applied first to an animal, “the young of a goat,” as the OED creepily puts it.
Guitarist John Fahey, from a handwritten lesson on C tuning:
I like to teach guitar to people. People, or students who learn. Nobody likes to teach somebody who does not learn because that is not teaching & not learning.
In order to learn something, some use ofMEMORY
is required. Teaching & learning is not showing somebody the same thing over & over, ad infinitum.
Change in higher education:
Across the country, there is growing evidence that final exams — once considered so important that universities named a week after them — are being abandoned or diminished, replaced by take-home tests, papers, projects, or group presentations.Related posts
Final exams are quietly vanishing from college (Boston Globe)
