G-L-O-R-I-A

In no particular order:

I love the Timberwolves. I was going to go to some party thing tonight but instead stayed back to watch the game. Beautiful.

Jamming, Better Luck Tomorrow, three sets of tennis, a play improbably titled Calculus: Newton’s Whores, Appleseed Cast and Cursive live at Bottom of the Hill, birthday dinner for Marianne, working on projects, playing Rat Screw and Spades during office hours.

Gossip Guy is the king (click for vulgar, offensive hilarity).

kejordan made the insightful observation that it’s strange that we find nature beautiful. Many of our likes and dislikes can be explained from an evolutionary perspective: sweet things, ‘beautiful’ people, and so on. But nature, like music and art, really has no “reason” for being liked. It’s strange. I actually have some more thoughts on this but I would rather try to prod Kerry into writing about it as a) she needs to write in her LJ more and b) she is a much better writer than I.

While I’m regurgitating other people’s ideas, my brother has a great theory with which I agree completely. It’s this:

The 80% rule: You can reach 80% of your historical best in any particular activity without much work.

That is, once you’ve developed a skill, you can let it languish and then recover it fairly quickly. So if you were once a pool shark but haven’t played recently, it won’t take you long to start kicking ass again. Same with painting, calculus, piano, video games, public speaking, or whatever. In my experience this is very true. Then we have

Corollary: It is better to get really good at several things serially, in succession, than to attempt to learn them all simultaneously.

When you do a bunch of things at once, you have to spend time maintaining your skills in each of them; it’s much better, therefore, to master one thing and then move on to the next, because by the 80% rule you can always recover most of your skill quite quickly when necessary.

What do you think? Evidence for or against? If it’s really true then it provides some practical advice for living, certainly…

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