dooce?

Anyone every heard of www.dooce.com? I had never heard of the "queen of mommy blogs" until Brent mentioned the New York Time magazine article...

Here's the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/magazine/27armstrong-t.html?pagewanted=all

Former Mormon, almost killed her self because of post-partum depression...great story.

Thoughts?

weekend away

The last month has been a roller coaster of emotions.

1. I am pregnant. The little monster has to eat all the time!
2. My dear father-in-law died unexpectedly.

Since all the drama, I have been instructed to "stop thinking" by Brent. Right. Ok.

My college girl friends spent the weekend with me out at our cabin, www.lostrivermodern.com. It was great to spend time with them. I needed a break. I slept all of Saturday and a lot of Sunday.

But what I could not understand was why they seem so opposed to the new health care law. I tried my best to persuade...but failed. But Brent and I discussed it at home and we both feel Obama failed to explain the new law to the American public. I still can't tell you exactly why I am for the law other than I felt a change, some change, ANY change was needed for the 40 million uninsured Americans out there. As a human being on this planet...a blessed human that is, it is my duty to help others.

It seemed that my girl friends objected to being forced to buy health insurance. Aren't we all already forced to do that? You have to have insurance. I tried to make the analogy with car insurance but that did not seem to work.

I am not really sure what to say. No one liked Social Security when it was passe either...

a long time

This is the longest I have gone without posting since starting the blog...did anyone notice?

Read this new GAO report hot off the presses: Defined Contribution Plans: Key Information on Target Date Funds as Default Investments Should Be Provided to Plan Sponsors and Participants, GAO-11-118, January 31, 2011.

Good times.

Tolstoy's 10 Rules of Life

From Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, via BoingBoing, this list of Tolstoy's "10 Rules of Life." I think this is a pretty good list, well all except for the keep away from women...thoughts?

Get up early (five o'clock)

Go to bed early (nine to ten o'clock)

Eat little and avoid sweets

Try to do everything by yourself

Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for evry minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater

Keep away from women

Kill desire by work

Be good, but try to let no one know it

Always live less expensively than you might

Change nothing in your style of living even if you become ten times richer

even funnier

cake or pie? which do you prefer?

Watch the full episode. See more Mark Twain Prize.

what I have learned in this month

There are other lessons, which I will get to, but right now this is what I have learned:

1. I like people and I like working with people. I need to keep my day job.

2. I like people and I need my friends around. I tend to become a slug without people.

3. San Francisco is too gritty for me.

That's all for now.

hope this helps

cute video

Ishihara - English version from Yoav Brill on Vimeo.

i actually started writing

and it went well today.

good job.

finally.

tomorrow the real deal starts

We have been house sitting and I have felt crappy the last week. Lame. But now I am jumping in. My class starts on Monday and I have lots to do...Game on.

We are settled into our place and it is just lovely. Perfect for this adventure.

we are here

We made it to SF...I got sick on the plane, but other than that things went fine. We are rested up and ready to start writing.

Starting now.

Happy New Year everyone!

packing paralysis

We leave for SF in less than 48 hours for a month and I am not packed. I don’t even know where to start.

A bag.

Ok, I have the bag, but now what?

I pack better under pressure...

Tomorrow.

August G. Beckemeier Conservation Area

Across the street from Gram's house in St. Louis is the August G. Beckemeier Conservation Area. We have driven by it a thousand times and finally on this trip made it across the street. What a nice little conservation area. We were there just before sunset. See more pictures by clicking here.

ghost butter

We got this ghost butter the other day at dinner. It was too cute not to memoralize.

the dream of the 90s: Portland

bike share in dc

Brent and I both joined the new bike share in DC. The bike share has bikes all over the city. A phone application lets you know which stations have bikes available. There is one station two blocks from our house and then another right by my office. I can walk over, get on, ride to work, and park the bike there. Then if I want to ride home, I do the same thing again. The first 30 minutes of any ride is free. You do have to pay a $75 annual fee to join the program, or in the alternative, you can buy a day pass for $5.

The only hassle really is remembering to bring your helmet everywhere in case you want to bike home, etc.

http://www.capitalbikeshare.com/

how Japanese people multiply

This is simply amazing. Love it.

Ok, it is apparently not Japanese but Vedic...Read more by clicking here.

nonprofits and annoying address labels

Dear Nonprofits of the World,

Please stop sending me address labels. I will not give you money if you send them to me. I understand, you see this as a service and a way to guilt me into giving you money. I am stronger than that. I will not feel guilty using the damn labels, even if I don't like the way the look...or the cartoon character on them. I don't want to be wasteful and they are perfectly good labels...I just don't want them.

STOP.

Sincerely,
Nicole

subculture

There is an emerging (maybe) subculture of people who are more interested in living a minimalist lifestyle on their own terms rather than working in a cube. I find this interesting...

Here is a link to one such blog: http://rowdykittens.com/about/our-downsizing-story/

They live in a small apartment in Portland.

Here is another one: http://manvsdebt.com/.

He and his wife sold everything they owned, moved to Australia and New Zealand with their baby....amazing.

This is the blog post that brought this subculture into my brain today:
The Minimalist Guide to Leaving Your Soul-Crushing Day Job.

"The first step to leaving anything is preparation (but not too much of it.)

Written by Everett Bogue

This is the first of a three part series on using minimalism to leave your day job in order to live and work anywhere.

Don’t miss out! Sign up for free updates via email or RSS.

If you’ve been following this blog long, or read The Art of Being Minimalist, you know that I left my job last August in order to launch my minimalist business and live and work from anywhere.

If you’re in a situation like I was a year ago, –the monotonous repetitive days, the future of my creativity rapidly dying,– I imagine you want to do this too.

You want to be like Colin Wright, and country hop every four months. Or like Karol Gajda, making a reasonable living online while crafting a hand-made guitar in India. Maybe you want to be like Tammy Strobel and start a very small writing business to support your car-free lifestyle.

Maybe you want to be like you! That’s even better.

It doesn’t matter what ideal life you imagine, you just need to know that it’s possible.

Before I get started: whenever I write these types of things, I always get comments from two kinds of people who think I’m nuts.

The first is the people with kids, “oh it’s so hard, I could never do that” crowd.

I know, it’s so much easier to quit your job when you’re single and in your twenties, but it’s not impossible to change your life just because you decided to procreate. Leo Babauta started his own business and quit his job through minimalism, and he has six kids! You can too, no excuses!

The other group of people who comment are the ones who claim to love their job.

Great! I’m so happy for you, don’t change anything.

But, if you really love your job, why are you reading a blog post about leaving your job? Go read and comment on something else! …unless you actually secretly hate your job, in which case you need to ask yourself some hard questions. Don’t just deny everything until you wake up one day 15 years down the road and wonder where your life went.

Now then, let’s get to business…

The obstacles of leaving your job.

Quitting your job is never easy. There are a number of obstacles to overcome in order to even think of going out on your own...'

Read more by clicking through.

can you believe this?

Photo: Will Burrard-Lucas

Isn't it cute? It is a mini-Chameleon...Read more about it here. It is only an inch long...

adorable free calendar to download

Check out this fun calendar. You pick the month you want the owl to go with and then you put it together and print it. What a wonderful free gift to give! You can download it by clicking here.

bloomberg's businessweek

We love this "new" magazine. I put it in quotes because Businessweek has been around for years, but it was not until Bloomberg bought it that we started reading it. The magazine strikes the balance between business and cultural information perfectly. You get national and international information in proper size: not too much, not too little, just right. They profile CEOs and small entripenuers. And the graphics are simply amazing. They use the graphics to add to and distill the information presented in the magazine.

Here is a link to the magazine...click here.

the gingerbread party

It was a success again. Check out the pictures here...

interesting

"Wind turbins in America kill between 75,000 and 275,000 birds every year." Who knew? I found this article, from the Wall Street Journal to be so interesting, I posted it in my cube.

Original can be found by clicking here.

Studying the Biases of Bureaucratsby Matt Ridley
The Wall Street Journal

There is a fashionable new science—behavioral economics, they call it—which applies the insights of psychology to how people make economic decisions. It tries to explain, for instance, the herd instinct that led people during the recent bubble to override common sense and believe things about asset values because others did: the "bandwagon effect." And it labels as "hindsight bias" the all-too-common tendency during the recent bust to imagine that past events were more predictable than they were. Behavioral economics has also brought us notions like "loss aversion": how we hate giving up a dollar we have far more than forgoing a dollar we have not yet got.

But while there is a lot of interest in the psychology and neuroscience of markets, there is much less in the psychology and neuroscience of government. Slavisa Tasic, of the University of Kiev, wrote a paper recently for the Istituto Bruno Leoni in Italy about this omission. He argues that market participants are not the only ones who make mistakes, yet he notes drily that "in the mainstream economic literature there is a near complete absence of concern that regulatory design might suffer from lack of competence." Public servants are human, too.

Mr. Tasic identifies five mistakes that government regulators often make: action bias, motivated reasoning, the focusing illusion, the affect heuristic and illusions of competence.

In the last case, psychologists have shown that we systematically overestimate how much we understand about the causes and mechanisms of things we half understand. The Swedish health economist Hans Rosling once gave students a list of five pairs of countries and asked which nation in each pair had the higher infant-mortality rate. The students got 1.8 right out of 5. Mr. Rosling noted that if he gave the test to chimpanzees they would get 2.5 right. So his students' problem was not ignorance, but that they knew with confidence things that were false.

The issue of action bias is better known in England as the "dangerous dogs act," after a previous government, confronted with a couple of cases in which dogs injured or killed people, felt the need to bring in a major piece of clumsy and bureaucratic legislation that worked poorly. Undoubtedly the rash of legislation following the current financial crisis will include some equivalents of dangerous dogs acts. It takes unusual courage for a regulator to stand up and say "something must not be done," lest "something" makes the problem worse.

Motivated reasoning means that we tend to believe what it is convenient for us to believe. If you run an organization called, say, the Asteroid Retargeting Group for Humanity (ARGH) and you are worried about potential cuts to your budget, we should not be surprised to find you overreacting to every space rock that passes by. Regulators rarely argue for deregulation.

The focusing illusion partly stems from the fact that people tend to see the benefits of a policy but not the hidden costs. As French theorist Frédéric Bastiat argued, it's a fallacy to think that breaking a window creates work, because while the glazier's gain of work is visible, the tailor's loss of work caused by the window-owner's loss of money—and consequent decision to delay purchase of a coat—is not. Recent history is full of government interventions with this characteristic.

"Affect heuristic'" is a fancy name for a pretty obvious concept, namely that we discount the drawbacks of things we are emotionally in favor of. For example, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill certainly killed about 1,300 birds, maybe a few more. Wind turbines in America kill between 75,000 and 275,000 birds every year, generally of rarer species, such as eagles. Yet wind companies receive neither the enforcement, nor the opprobrium, that oil companies do.

If lawmakers are to understand how laws get applied in the real world, they need to know and understand the habits of mind of their officials.

—Matt Ridley's many books include, most recently, "The Rational Optimist" and "Francis Crick." His weekly column explores the science of human nature and its implications.