Eating Strategies

Do you eat the best thing first or save the best for last?  Most people fall into one of these two categories and according to Brian Wansink’s Mindless Eating there is a simple economic explanation.  The people who eat the best thing first tend to have grown up as younger children from large families.  The people who save the best for last are more often first borns.  Need I say more?

Mindless Eating, by the way, masquerades as a diet book but it’s really about research design!  Highly recommended.

Eating Strategies

The most absurd sentence I read today

I am proposing that the Son and the Father Singularities guided the worlds of the multiverse to concentrate the energy of the particles constituting Jesus in our universe into the Jesus of our universe.

That is from Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Christianity.

But wait, there is competition for the honor:

If Jesus indeed rose from the dead using the mechanism described in Chapter 8, namely electroweak tunneling to convert matter into energy, and if indeed this was done with the intention of showing us how to use the same process, then we ourselves should be able to learn how to turn matter into either electromagnetic energy or neutrinos within a few decades.

You choose…

The most absurd sentence I read today

Top Ten Books Scored at MoCCA!

#10: BEM

This is from Iceland by Matti Hagelbergia. The cover delivers, the inside is just as wonky! I love the fact that foreign Indy publishers and comic dealers are setting up at MoCCA. I hope MoCCA encourages more of this, it’s so very kewl.


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#9: ALINE THE ALIEN

T. Motley is one to watch. Strong on concepts and one of the better draftspeople in the Indy scene. He’s committed to comics and moving from Denver to Brooklyn to get deeper into the comics and illustration world. Can’t wait to see what else this guy comes up with!


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#8: WASCO’S WEEKBLAD

Another foreign job. Artsy-fartsy, kinda surreal, a little Chris Ware influence, maybe. More like a sketch book of comic book or magazine covers from, I gather, an imagined publication called Wasco’s Weekblad. Whatever the heck it is I LIKE IT! Lots.


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#7: PROJECT ROMANTIC

I can vicariously pretend I’m a twenty-something Indy comic book artist in love through this one. It’s lots of alternate guys and gals doing this, but the production is superlative and it’s in full color throughout. You can’t go wrong with Adhouse books.


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#6: OUT OF THE WOODS

School of Visual Arts must have some kind of kick-ass cartooning department because I’m way impressed by this student portfolio/comic book, and I’m not easily impressed ;o). I’m actually thinking of contacting some of the artists here when I finally do a “Contemporary Arf”. And don’t you just love that cover with its great lettering? You don’t see much good lettering from the Indy crowd, hell, from the mainstream crowd either. I’m a sucker for hand drawn type this wonderful.


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#5: I SMELL AND REMEMBER

Marianne R. Petit can be counted on for interesting concepts. Here she illustrates friends’ memories that have been touched off by smells. Fascinating stuff and I love the cover with it’s tied-on fold out. This is the kind of stuff you can only find at small press gatherings ike MoCCA.


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#4: Bosko.

John Holmstrom, editor and publisher of Punk magazine, has long cracked me up with his signature character, Bosko. The perfect blend of laugh generating art and story. And, as you might expect from the genius behind Punk, lots of rebellion and anti-social behavior demonstated here. Yeah, baby!


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#3: BLACK GHOST APPLE FACTORY

Heartiest congrats to Top Shelf’s Chris and Brett for their ten exemplorary years. And a tip of the Yoe hat for publishing one of the best Indy cartoonists: Jeremy Tinder. I’m quite taken with Jeremy’s work–I’m a big gushing fan. Jeremy’;s comics are compelling, quirky, full of gentle humor. Totally engaging. I also snagged a terrific mini-painting by Jeremy at the festival, remind me to show it to you, Arf lovers!


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#2: UNATTACHED

Maybe J. P. Coovert is a big part of this scene, I dunno. I was totally unfamiliar with his work. It’s very unassuming, so normally I would have passed it by. But, as the cover hints, the guys a real thinker, willing to take risks with his simple style. And this super simple style makes it easy to get into J.P.’s work and then you find the rewards. You find you’ve been told a nice little story, and experienced some real creativity (I won’t spoil the the delightful surprise format of this little book that is revealed when you turn the last page). This is the one book I read to my wife when I got home and she love it, too. I want more J. P. stuff (and was sad to learn I somehow missed at MoCCA a collaboration comic he did with anothe fantastic Hope Larson).


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#1: ELVIS ROAD

MInd blowing, this book folds out to a full 45 feet to reveal a bizarre panorama of cartooning psychotic madness. Buenaventura Press puts the art in comic art. I thought my “Life is Short, Arf Is Long” book would be the longest book at the festival–boy was I terribly mistaken. Elvis lives and lives and lives in THIS one!


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Another great MoCCA fest, congrats to al the hard working volunteers that made this baby happen! Thanks to all the Arf fans that came by to my table and were effusive in their praise of the Arf books. I had great fun at the Arf talk over at the museum with a great crowd attending. I enjoyed being interviewed by Comicolgy for their teevee show, too. Finally, a big thanks for making the book “Life is Short, Arf is Long” a sell-out. See you next year!

Top Ten Books Scored at MoCCA!

Nelles Maps

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Nelles Maps are the best foldable maps for travelers I’ve seen. I favor them for six reasons: 1) They come at a good practical scale for traveling, fine enough to show most small rural towns. 2) Each map displays shaded physical relief of mountains, highway numbers and even “places of interest” – which are often not listed in guide books. 3) The maps are printed on both sides to maximize coverage. 4) They are printed in a form that folds neatly into a shoulder bag, with cover. 5) They are reasonably priced. 6) Best of all, Nelles seem to keep them very up to date. I haven’t found any Nelles maps in print that are more than a few years old.

These qualities may seem expected, but most maps of third world countries are uselessly vague. Nelles maps shine in particular for Asia and Africa, and remote places where good maps are hard to find. I know from personal experience they have the best ones (in English) for China (in 3 maps, a North, Central and South), for India, and for the Himalayas as a whole. And they have the only useable map for Papua Maluku (Papua New Guinea) that I’ve been able to find. You may be able to find maps that are better for specific countries, but try Nelles (based in Germany) as your first stop.

–KK

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Nelles Maps
$8-$11
Available from Amazon

Manufactured by Nelles Maps


Nelles Maps

Advice for economics grad students

Because, for whatever reason, I’m nervous about entering a world that plays according to different rules than the corporate one I’m used to, I’ve taken to reading and bookmarking a lot of “how to succeed in academia” articles. So as I come across good advice (or at least good advice for me), I’ll post it here.

In 2005, Matthew Pearson wrote a letter for the new graduate economics students at UC Davis. The letter (PDF) has some advice specific to that program, but there’s other good general advice buried in there too.

  • In the first year, it’s “about learning that survival is not all about intelligence, nor passion, but commitment.” Learning the fundamentals can be grueling, you’ll feel like an imposter, but keep going. Pearson says: “Some research in behavioral economics suggests that people are happier with decisions they know are irreversible. Simply putting that decision [to quit] out of the realm of possibility will relieve you of a lot of burden.”
  • Although he talks about preliminary exams at one point, the advice can be generalized: “…[I]t is very important to believe that you have it in you to pass.” Learn from your mistakes, take your grades as indicators of where you may need to adjust and improve. “Freaking out is a waste of your time and energy.”
  • “Begin to develop your strategy to pass early on.” He’s talking about the prelims here, but I’m thinking in terms of my master’s paper I’ll have to write. Ideally, my projects over the next few years will feed into the paper, so that the effort to compile, research, and write will be minimal. (My adviser suggested looking for a subject at my workplace; maximize what I already know well.)
  • I really like this bit of advice. He’s talking about getting the fundamentals of economics in your bones, but again, I’m expanding its purview:

Develop your intuition. I cannot stress this enough. As I mentioned above about studying for understanding and not merely memorizing, you must believe that the intuition is there and that the material will seem much, much easier once you have grasped it…When you aim for this kind of understanding, however, things become so much clearer.

Often the barrier to true understanding is the nagging sense that you have SO MUCH to study, so you really must move on to the next topic. However, grazing over lots of material gathering cursory familiarity can be, at best, far less productive than studying one thing until you really understand it and do not need to depend on memorized content…[Me: Hmmmm.] Repetition [can be] sufficient for understanding less challenging material, but this is no longer the case.

[Me: In my spring information course, I felt bombarded by so many new concepts–RDF, metadata, ontologies, thesauri–that it wasn’t until I was studying for the final that I grokked how they all fit together. Until that time, they were only vocabulary words. Given the pace of the course, and the fact that I was working full-time and taking a second course, there really was no time to do more than keep my head above water. Also, where I’m at now, everything is basic and fundamental. Intuition will only develop for me after I’ve worked with these things some more.]

  • “Develop your student capital.” Learn to ask your classmates, professors, and TAs questions, no matter how silly you might feel. “There is no place for pride when you do not understand.”
  • Develop an effective method for dealing with note-taking and note-studying. “Choose something that addresses your weaknesses effectively.” (Spoken like a true lifehacker.) Pearson takes notes on looseleaf paper, transfers them to a binder, and then makes his own notes on the other side of the page as he goes through them. A nice system. I’m still working out mine. What I did in the spring worked OK, but didn’t encourage revisiting the material and refreshing itself in my mind.
  • Rest effectively–this means time with friends and family, exercising, getting enough sleep. And yes, that means there can be “unproductive rest,” as he calls it, like zoning out in front of the teevee.

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