Talent vs Hard Work

Posted on April 29, 2016 by admin

The surest route to financial success is well known. But since most people aren’t positioned to inherit great wealth, they must rely on less reliable expedients such as talent and hard work.

Talent is sexy, and it’s swell for getting noticed, and it’s generally easier on the practitioner than labor. Hard work is about learning the ropes, and building character, and git’n ‘er done. Talent goes into business with Nature. Hard work is a hostile takeover. Both have been used to amass fortunes, but neither needs to ask for directions to the bankruptcy court. For the young tycoon just setting out on the road to empire, it would be helpful to know which of those attributes offers the better return.

“Talent is unfair and undemocratic; it’s also inarguable.” Tricia Tunstall

“Motivation will almost always beat mere talent,.” Norman Ralph Augustine

The talented say you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. They say they’re better by design, and that the cream always rises to the top. The diligent say good things happen to those who sweat, and that nothing worth having comes easy. No pain, no gain.

But then, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Fact is, dull and idle armchair philosophers have spent uncounted and unproductive years debating the relative merits of talent and hard work instead of actually trying to find out which one is better for getting ahead. Thanks to their consummate lack of useful effort, the question remains as fresh today as it was when Socrates first observed that “He is richest who is content with the least.”

In the United States, where anybody and their Super PAC can grow up to be President, the sympathetic favorite is hard work. The American storybook is filled with rags-to-riches accounts of our national character, the Self-made Man. On the other hand, there’s no denying that most – but by no means all – of the country’s most admired and best remunerated personalities in everything from cooking and crooning to fine art and football possess a talent for their craft. If the question has an answer, those persons talented in science must provide it.

A few years ago, a pair of Vanderbilt University researchers took a shot at the problem by tracking the educational and professional attainments of some 2,000 students, each of whom had been identified through standardized testing to be “gifted” at a young age. If that method sounds a little slanted toward the academically talented, it’s because the research model presumed that talent in any field, from physics to football, presupposes a certain mental alacrity. Since “working memory” capacity is the foundational element of intelligence as we understand it, they reasoned that those possessing the most of it would eventually rise the highest. Their findings were reported by professors David Hambrick and Elizabeth Meinz in the New York Times.

“Compared with the participants who were ‘only’ in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile – the profoundly gifted – were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work.”

In other words, even a relatively small edge in talent can translate into large gains down the road. Likewise, the Vanderbilt study cited their work with pianists, finding that “working memory” easily trumped practice when it came to sight-reading, the musician’s bread and butter.

“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” Albert Einstein

The “practice makes perfect” crowd will be pleased to know that there have also been scholarly studies sympathetic to their cause. Groundbreaking research by psychologist Anders Ericsson, for example, determined that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice, more or less, to become “expert” at something. “This applies most obviously to music and sports,” says productivity expert Laura Stack, “but it also extends to mundane activities like business skills, learning to write well, driving, even housework.” Lest we forget, little Tiger Woods played golf almost every day for 16 years before winning his first tournament at the age of 18, and Albert Einstein was lackluster student who rose to great intellectual heights quite late in life and with not much else to recommend him.

Merriam-Websters defines “talent” as a “natural aptitude or skill.” It defines an “expert” as a “person who has a comprehensive knowledge or skill in a particular area.” One needn’t be talented at language to see that the words share a great deal of meaning, and by Ericsson’s line of reasoning it’s easy to believe that 10,000 hours of hard work could effectively render a person “talented.” What’s more, additional studies suggest that people willing to invest the hard work and practice it takes to overcome a lack of natural aptitude emerge not only consummate in their field, but can, and frequently do, use that upward momentum to rise higher – and emerge richer – than their naturally talented counterparts. “We are told that talent creates its own opportunities,” observed American philosopher Eric Hoffer. “But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.”

Fact is, all those parlor room pundits should stop setting talent and hard work at odds and come to realized that they’re actually natural allies. No amount of talent will make the lazy succeed, and the capacity for hard work may be the most valuable talent there is.

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” Stephen King

Say ‘Cheese’

Posted on March 25, 2016 by admin

When something is hard, we don’t do it much. When something’s easy, we do it much more. The question many social observers are asking is: How much is too much?

Not very long ago, taking pictures was hard. You’d spend several dollars on a roll of film which had to be hand-loaded into a cumbersome 35mm camera that you wore slung about your neck in the manner of a medieval penitent. When you’d burned through your scant 24 frames, you removed the film and drove it to the drug store, which made you wait days before charging you several more dollars to find out you had two dozen over-exposed photographs of your thumb. Okay, it wasn’t the trials of Job, but it was inconvenient enough, and expensive enough, that most folks gave a thought before tripping the shutter.

Amateur photography got a lot easier in the late 1990s as affordable digital cameras started pouring onto the market and unfocused pictures of thumbs started flooding the Internet. Point, shoot, download and post. And that lavish feast of cheap, easy and instantaneous imagery is increasing exponentially as the rise of the camera-phone gives a new species of over-sharer the ability to showcase their every mundane daily experience on a global stage. Hip cultural taxonomers have dubbed this pernicious creature the “phoneographer”, and evidence of its curious habits is piling up like guano in the Big Room at Carlsbad Caverns.

According to industry number-crunchers, about 30,000 photographs are uploaded to Instagram every 60 seconds, which sounds like a lot until you consider the 240,000 photos (and about 100 hours of bandwidth-hungry HD video) that get posted on Facebook during the same minute. Add to that the relentless tide of off-center coffee-foam art, blurry windshield snaps and look-alike pet photos drowning the servers of photo-sharing sites like Flickr, Shutterfly and SmugMug with every tick of the clock and one begins to appreciate just how much there is to look at. Experts expect that about one trillion digital photographs will be taken in 2016, and that almost 80 percent of them will be taken with a camera phone.

It’s an irresistible temptation for statistically-engaged persons to contrive dramatic, if unlikely, real-world comparisons by which they can communicate the wonder they find in dry numbers with those of more representational turn of mind. A favorite device is the hypothetical laying of things end to end, in which scenario those trillion snaps, rendered as 4 x 6-inch prints and arranged in linear fashion, would stretch more than 200 million miles. Another popular gimmick is expressing numerical information in astronomical terms, by which we learn that 200 million miles is more than twice the distance between the earth and the sun.

While only a fortunate few of those phoneographed wrought-iron lamp posts, dew-beaded daisies and Thanksgiving table-shots will ever find a mass audience, they all have to be kept somewhere. At the moment there are something like 3 trillion digital photographs in cyber-storage, and with the pace of phoneography increasing at a shade over 16 percent annually, the trove of trivial tableaus should break the 5 trillion mark sometime before the last drunken photo-bomb of New Year’s Eve, 2017.

And what’s wrong with that? Ones and zeroes are non-perishable and easy to pack, and folks who want to photographically commemorate their every encounter from sun-up to lights-out are certainly within their rights to do so. Still, some contend that the unrestrained spread of phoneography is choking out more beneficial strains of expression, and possibly even stifling the flower of human creativity.

Topping the list of the aggrieved are professional photographers. Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian quotes award-winning Mexican photographer Antonio Olmos thusly: “It’s really weird. Photography has never been so popular, but it’s getting destroyed. There have never been so many photographs taken, but photography is dying.”

Granted, there’ll likely always be an honorable place for the righteous photograph, the well-composed plate, the artful union of life and lens. But with an inexhaustible reservoir of dirt-cheap images on sites like Photobucket and 123rf at their fingertips, more and more individuals and publishers are satisfied to make do with the marginal amateur snap they can get for a song rather than purchasing the real deal at market price. If earning a living wage with a camera has never been easy, it’s fast becoming impossible.

Other digital critics are more concerned about the high sentimental price that cheap pictures can exact from the free-clicking phoneographer, a phenomenon psychologists have recently identified as the “photo-taking impairment effect.” Simply put, when we take a picture of something, we are less likely to remember it, and the more pictures we take the fewer memories we’ll have backing them up on our mental hard drives.

“When people rely on technology to remember for them,” psychologist Linda Henkel of Fairfield University in Connecticut tells The Guardian, “counting on the camera to record the event and thus not needing to attend to it fully themselves, it can have a negative impact on how well they remember their experiences.”

That’s a real shame, because at some point – probably sooner rather than later – your friends will get tired of looking at the pictures of your dream-trip to Paris and you’ll put them away and all you’ll have left are the snapshots of your own distracted recollection, grainy and indistinct because you saw most of the Eternal City on a 3 x 5-inch screen.

“People taking photographs of their food in a restaurant instead of eating it,” Olmos laments. “People taking photographs of the Mona Lisa instead of looking at it. I think the iPhone is taking people away from their experiences.”

And just possibly robbing whatever dilute experiences remain of consequence. Lucinda Rosenfeld wrote all about it for the New York Times in a column titled “Many More Images, Much Less Meaning”

“With effort and cost excised from the equation, photos have become too plentiful,” contends Rosenfeld. “As more and more pictures are taken on smartphones, ‘shared’ on social media if at all, then lost to the cacophony of the digital universe, meaningful images have become too scarce. I can’t help wondering whether — with every digital image we casually take and delete from our iPhones or Androids — we’re stripping photography of its awesome powers to keep the past in our sights.”

Heavy stuff, but likely moot. The seductive genie of phoneography is out of the bottle and we’d best learn to live with it. Fact is, any number of pictures is probably too many if it obscures our view of genuine artistry, or dims cherished memory, or clouds meaningful experience. Perhaps the best way to defend ourselves against the digital onslaught is the simple way. The old way. The 35mm way.

Ask yourself:

Is this pic really necessary?

Dogs in the News

Posted on January 29, 2016 by admin

“To his dog, every man is Napoleon, hence the constant popularity of dogs.”

Aldous Huxley

Near as we can figure it, Homo sapiens sapiens and Canis lupus familiaris have been bffs for about 35,000 years.

After sampling the genomes of wolves and dogs from hither and yon, scientists now believe the unique and intimate association between Man and Dog began at least 15,000 year earlier than previous supposed somewhere in Southeast Asia with the domestication of the Taimyr wolf. Given the long stretch of time since then, you’d think we’d have learned just about everything there is to know about our four-legged besties. In fact, until very recently our understanding of humankind’s closest animal companion has been remarkably superficial, a two-dimensional portrait more closely resembling ourselves than our pets.

True, humans quickly became adept at dog-handling. They used their animals to guard the camp and to bring down the mighty mammoth. They taught the doting beasts to watch the flock and fight by their side in battle. And they carefully and patiently bred their dogs to satisfy specific human needs and tastes, resulting in the more than 300 breeds that exist today. One thing people never did, though, is give any serious thought to what their dogs thought about it all.

“Dogs have been used as tools, and they’ve been kept as pets, but there’s been very little study of what makes them tick,” explains canine clinician Jean Weller. “We know a lot about what they do, but not why they do it. It’s only in the last 25 years that there’s been any real scientific research into the emotional and cognitive characteristics of dogs.”

Considering the bone-deep affinity that exists between peeps and pups, it’s hardly surprising that we tend to ascribe human motivations to our pets. For example, most dog-lovers assume that their beloved beagle wags its tail when it sees them because it loves them right back. Scientifically speaking, that’s taking a lot on faith. Is your dog really glad to see you? Or is it just excited because it’s almost supper time and you’re the only one who can operate the can opener?

While standard observation has softened the rigid “alpha” pecking order into a more flexible canine social hierarchy, neither has much to do with you and your dog. Behavioral research increasingly suggests that the relationship between person and pet is less leader-to-follower or peer-to-peer, and more akin to the bond between parent and toddler. To cite just one example, when frightened or distressed a dog will always and instantly run to its owner for reassurance. Dogs are also prone to jealousy. Studies indicate that when a dog’s owner showers undue attention on a third party, be they man or beast, more than 60 percent of the time the dog will find some quiet, sneaky way to disrupt that interaction and redirect its master’s interest back where it belongs.

Probably the most intriguing discovery on the canine front is that dogs can infer. It’s a simple thing, inference, and incredibly useful. Merriam-Webster defines it as the ability to “deduce or conclude from evidence and reasoning rather than from explicit statements.” Humans infer a thousand times a day without consciously thinking about it. And yet our closest evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees, can’t infer. Of all creatures, only people and dogs are able to predict an event or circumstance based purely on observation. It’s how your dog knows when the mailman is coming. It’s how it can tell you’re hiding a snack behind your back. And it’s why, even though you take your dog to the park every day at 2 o’clock, you can’t get it into the car for a 2 o’clock veterinarian appointment.

Curiously enough, dogs also have a well-developed sense of fairness. Austrian researchers devised a scenario whereby two dogs were made to perform the same trick, but only one was rewarded for it. The un-rewarded dog invariably began scratching and licking itself in frustration until the account was balanced. Interestingly, the quality of the belated reward didn’t appear to matter. Even if the first dog received sausage, the second was perfectly satisfied to be given bread. It was, it seems, the principle of the thing.

Three hundred and fifty centuries later and we’re only now finding out that our dogs know when they’re getting the shaft. There’s still a world of work to do, but early results paint a far richer, nuanced and loveable picture of Man’s Best Friend than the one we’ve been looking at since Paleolithic times. On the other hand, not every discovery has come as a surprise.

Neuro-imaging studies conducted by animal cognition researchers at Emory University have learned that the scent of its human master lights up the “reward center” of a dog’s brain, just as the appearance of a loved one does in ours. What’s more, canine MRI results suggest that, of all the complex universe of odors packed into their daily experience, dogs prioritize human scent above all others.

Those big floppy ears aren’t for nothing, either. Scientists at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest find that dogs are equally attuned to human vocal signals. Just as in people, “happy” sounds spark a pleasurable commotion in a dog’s auditory cortex, while negative noise tends to depress. And when your dog cocks its head to one side, it’s not doing it just to be cute. Dogs, we now know, are keenly sensitive to our every stance and movement. When in doubt of your emotional status, your pup will shift its head to remove its snout from its line of vision, allowing it to examine nonverbal cues from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. Taking these findings together, scientists conclude that dogs aren’t merely skilled at perceiving and responding to your every temper and emotion, they’re biologically hard-wired to do so.

In other words, your dog really is glad to see you.

“I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.”

John Steinbeck

Ancient Humor

Posted on January 15, 2016 by admin

Funny?

Q: What occupies the last six pages of the Lada User’s Manual?

A: The bus and train timetables.

This little chestnut used to have them rolling in the meat lines back in jolly olde Petrograd. Or take this timeless tittle from far Cathay.

Q: Why don’t airplanes run into the stars?

A: Because the stars can dodge.

An essential ingredient of humor is context. It’s hard to know why Kimye is funny if you don’t get TMZ, and tech-support gags fall flat if you’ve never been crushed by it. Unless you’ve been disappointed by Soviet industrial incompetence, or understand the nuances of Mandarin Chinese, jokes generated thereby might not seem particularly humorous. On the other hand, we’ve all driven a lemon at one time or another, and jokes about airline food are an important part of our collective social diet. Even if we don’t get the specific gag, we know where it’s coming from.

But can the same be said of humor that predates the Pacer? Jokes coined before stewardesses? Jests made in an Internet-free vacuum? If there’s a commonality to humor, a binding thread that transcends language, culture and time, to find it we’ll have to look back a-ways, to an age as foreign to Carrot Top as it is to Yakov Smirnov and TJ Jin. To find the Mother Cell of humor, we must start at the beginning.

From the ancient soil of Sumer, in what is now southern Iraq, those merry madcaps of the science world, archaeologists, pulled a 3,900-year-old clay tablet inscribed with the world’s oldest known joke.

Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.

A familiar theme, if not reassuringly so. And wags of the Fertile Crescent bequeathed to history plenty of other low-brow quips. Consider this proto-riddle left to us on a Babylonian student’s work-tablet.

Q: In your mouth and your teeth, constantly staring at you, the measuring vessel of your lord. What is it?

A: Beer.

It seems the Cradle of Civilization leaned more to Judd Apatow than Dick Cavett, and the otherwise sophisticated Egyptians weren’t much better. Ponder this gem committed to papyrus around 1,600 BC.

Q: How do you entertain a bored pharaoh?

A: You sail a boatload of women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.

It would be another thousand years before deep-thinking Plato, who may have been the first person ever to invest serious brain-time in the mechanics of comedy, dreamed up the Superiority Theory of humor which says that people will laugh at anything involving the foibles and misfortunes of somebody else. This, then, from the same penetrating minds that gave us Antigone, Democracy and the Parthenon…

Wishing to teach his donkey not to eat, the man did not offer him any food. When the donkey died of hunger, he said “I’ve had a great loss! Just when he had learned not to eat, he died!

The Superiority Theory of humor was alive and well in 250 A.D. when Roman scholars Hierokles and Philagrios took quills to parchment and came up with the earliest known joke book. Titled “Philogelos” (“The Laughter Lover”), it’s a misfortune-loving treasury of 265 foible-filled anecdotes numbered and sorted with Roman efficiency into categories like “Intellectuals”;

No. 43: When an intellectual was told by someone, “Your beard is now coming in,” he went to the rear-entrance and waited for it. Another intellectual saw this and said “I’m not surprised that people say we lack common sense. How do you know that it’s not coming in by the other gate?”

“Misogynists”;

No. 246: A misogynist stood in the marketplace and announced: “I’m putting my wife up for sale, tax-free!” When people asked him why, he said: “So the authorities will impound her.”

and “People with Bad Breath”;

No. 234: A man with bad breath asked his wife “Madame, why do you hate me?” And she said in reply “Because you love me.”

Sigmund Freud thought to out-think Plato with what he called the Relief Theory of humor. According to Freud, jokes are a kind of release valve for secret desires. Take a guess what secret desire is hinted at in this riddle from the 10^th-century Codex Exoniensis, a compendium of Anglo-Saxon poetry enshrined within Exeter Cathedral.

Q: What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before?

A: A key.

But not all ancient humorists assigned profound significance to their craft. Take 12^th-century Italian scholar Poggio Braciolini, author of “Facetiae” and the Middle Ages’ most popular comedy writer. “It is proper, and almost a matter of necessity commended by philosophers,” Poggio wrote, “that our mind, weighed down by a variety of cares and anxieties, should now and then enjoy relaxation from its constant labour, and be incited to cheerfulness and mirth by some humorous recreation.” Braciolini incites cheerfulness and mirth thusly:

Several persons were conversing in Florence, and each was wishing for something that would make him happy. One would have liked to be the Pope, another a king, a third something else, when a talkative child, who happened to be there, said, “I wish I were a melon.” “And for what reason?” they asked. “Because everyone would smell my bottom.” It was usual for those who want to buy a melon to apply their noses underneath.

While none of those antique rib-ticklers might strike the modern mind as knee-slapping, it’s easy to perceive the underlying comical construction of each. They all adhere, in their way, to what latter-day joke-meisters Victor Raskin of Purdue University and Texas A&M’s Salvatore Attardo pioneered as the not-at-all-funny-sounding “Script-based Semantic Theory of Verbal Humor” and later refined into the grandiose “General Theory of Verbal Humor.” As Raskin explained to the New Yorker just last year, “The idea is that every joke is based on a juxtaposition of two scripts. The punch line triggers the switch from one script to the other. It is a universal theory.”

And it appears that some contexts are universal, too. Some scripts, however, may be more universal than others.

No. 51: A doctor was talking to a patient. “Doctor,” the patient says, “Whenever I get up after a sleep, I feel dizzy for half an hour, then I’m all right.” “Then wait for half an hour before getting up,” said the doctor.

Winter Forecasts are all Knee Deep

Posted on January 1, 2016 by admin

The trouble with weather forecasting is that it’s right too often for us to ignore it, and wrong too often for us to rely on it. – Patrick Young

Here’s a funny thing we like to say about Colorado.

“If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.”

Ha-ha! That’s a good one. No wonder it’s also a funny thing people like to say about Oregon, and Ocala, and just every other county and commonwealth between the Gulf and the Great White North. Weather is weird wherever you are, and second-guessing it is, more often than not, a fool’s errand.

Trying to read the world’s atmospheric mind has been a popular pursuit since earliest times, and simple observation can sometimes yield reasonably accurate short-term forecasts. True, the ancient mariner’s warning that a red sky in the morning foretells foul weather afoot is an unwitting recognition that a ship is entering a low pressure area where heavy weather is more likely. Conversely, a red sky at night (“sailor’s delight”) may indicate the vessel is entering a high pressure zone and should encounter calm seas. How many sailed through a crimson sunset and straight into Davy Jones’ Locker will never be known.

Woolly mullein, aka “Miner’s Candle”

While government and industry spend billions annually trying to get the drop on Mother Nature, local amateur forecasters make confident pronouncements based on how the trout are biting, where the elk are feeding, what the marmots are stashing, when the pippets are leaving, the current height of Miner’s Candle and the relative wooliness of the woolly bear caterpillar. But, whether meteorologist or mook, the fact is that they’re all just guessing.

Even short-term weather predictions are chancy, at best. The seven-day forecast, a staple of television news, may be marginally better than licking your finger and holding it out the window, but you still schedule a tee-time at your own risk. Nationally, weather forecasters trying to prophesy the temperature within a 10-degree margin of error have a success rate lingering on the shady side of 50 percent. Still, short-term weather prediction is a rock-solid certainty compared to long-range forecasting.

In ancient times, a herdsman trying to divine the character of the coming season would look for clues in nature. He might observe the behavior of his animals, and study the movements of wild creatures. He could find signs in the taste of the wind, or the patterns of clouds, or the appearance of prairie grasses. After accumulating and digesting the whole of his environment, he would decide whether the life-giving rains would come, or whether his small band must journey on to more hospitable regions. Dead wrong, he and the better part of his clan would perish and the survivors would curse his name unto seven generations. This demonstrates the reassuring historical consistency of long-range weather forecasting. In modern times, a constellation of satellites provides a detailed global portrait for skilled technicians to examine before reaching erroneous conclusions.

Those who have knowledge don’t predict. Those who predict don’t have knowledge. – Lao Tzu

Take the Boulder-based National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, for example. Drawing on information collected by a host of satellites, buoys, advanced radar imaging systems and atmospheric testing stations around the planet, the scientists at NOAA labor mightily the calendar ‘round trying to predict weather trends. Loaded to the gunnels with physical and statistical data, sophisticated computers churn out complex weather models describing what the weather will be doing tonight, tomorrow, next week, next month and so forth. It’s important to know that those same painstakingly devised computer models, exhaustively fed all available data, can rarely be coaxed into correctly predicting weather that has already happened, much less what’s coming down the pike. Worse, the only real ally those high-tech shamans have in their corner is a famously ambiguous oracle who speaks in an as-yet untranslatable tongue. Who is this muffle-mouthed mystic? It’s El Nino, of course, the befuddled forecaster’s best friend and favorite climatological hobgoblin.

The forecaster’s friend

“El Nino,” testifies NOAA scientist Klaus Weckman, “is the only thing that makes long-range forecasting even remotely possible.”

By closely monitoring the temperature and movement of the warm-water phenomenon as it builds in the Pacific Ocean, and because weather in North America tends to move in from the west, experts are occasionally moved to make cautiously vague predictions about the affect El Nino might have on points east. Despairing NOAA researchers doomed to anticipate Colorado’s long-range winter outlook must first drag themselves through a vertigo-inducing wilderness of dry statistics and labyrinthine diagrams, the pockets of their white lab coats stuffed with tear-stained tissues and Tylenol No. 4. Those who survive the journey put on a clean tie and issue a tepid statement that carefully discounts its own conclusions.

“According to the latest experimental forecasts for January-March,” reads one masterful example of the dissembler’s art, “the odds for above-normal precipitation reach significant levels over the north-central mountains of Colorado. This forecast precipitation pattern should be viewed with more caution than usual, as historical analogue cases for an El Nino event like the current one do not support strong tilts in the odds over Colorado.”

Put another way, after examining everything from Sonoran heat signatures to monsoon patterns in far Ceylon, those hyper-educated climatons at NOAA can announce with absolute conviction that we’re in for generally wintry weather characterized by non-specific winter-like conditions, but you didn’t hear it from us.

Considering the immense impact weather has on civilization and commerce, it’s kind of surprising that we don’t know more about it. Thousands of years of accumulated human knowledge can’t tell us if we should throw the chains in the trunk. The finest minds, employing the most wondrous technologies, don’t know what the slopes will look on Valentine’s Day weekend.

Dressed for it

And the woolly bear caterpillar ain’t talking.

A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water. – Carl Reiner

THINKING IS HARD

Let me ease your burden

Category Archives: Serenity Snacks