Tools and Toys

A nine year old girl shot and killed an instructor on a gun range in Nevada yesterday.

Here's a picture of my son with the products of his first big date with a plasma arc welder. He's older than nine, of course, but he started using air hammers, drill presses, and hammer drills when he was around eight. He started using a die grinder when he was ten. These tools are useful, but can maim or even kill if handled poorly.

So why does this not feel the same as putting a automatic weapon in a little girl's hands? Yes, an Uzi is a dangerous object with notorious muzzle climb that a small child is inherently going to have trouble controlling. By comparison, a hammer drill has a much more limited potential to get out of hand.

But that's not the salient point. A hammer drill is a tool for making holes in concrete and such. That's what we use it for. I taught my boy to use it so he could do real work with it around the place. An Uzi, in contrast, is a weapon of war. There is no target shooting class you can use an Uzi in, certainly not in full-auto. Blowing through a clip on an Uzi is not a sport. A civilian shooting an Uzi is taking a soldier's tool and treating it like a toy. Part of what seems so wrong about the Nevada shooting is that the little girl wasn't learning the sport of shooting: she was playing the game of war with a real weapon, and the weapon worked as designed.

I'm guessing my mom learned to shoot when she was around nine. I learned when I was a little older than that. I like going to gun ranges and shooting guns. If I didn't have a bad feeling about killing things, I'd probably hunt. So I actually kind of understand why parents would take their nine year old girl to a gun range. Kind of. Maybe twelve would have been better. And I understand that guns are pretty important to them, so in the same way I want my son to know the tools so he can be a maker and make things, they want their girl to be a shooter. I cringe at the idea of putting firearms at the center of your identity, but I can't pick for somebody else.

But treating weapons as toys is a problem, and this incident shows one reason why. There is a little thrill of focussed attention that never goes away when you are handling a dangerous object, but if that thrill becomes the point, and you start needing bigger and bigger hits of it, then your hobby is more than just a hobby. This is so far away from target shooting as a sport. There is no sport here, only playing dangerous games.

Condolences to the survivors of the incident in Nevada.

Why We Run

Bernd Heinrich, Why We Run. Bernd Heinrich had a weird upbringing, became a biologist, and had a serious amateur running career. This book is actually a mashup three books, which could be called: My Weird Life, What Animal Physiology Can Tell Us About the Physiology of Human Running, and How I Set a Long Distance World Record.

All three books are pretty interesting, although I did skip some of the biographical material to get to the physiology and running bits. It's not that Heinrich's life wasn't interesting, it's that he doesn't really explain the most interesting part. He was a little boy in a war zone; it's easy to understand how that would affect one's outlook, and Heinrich explains consequences one might not think of. On the other hand, his successful parents abandoned him for most of his childhood at an orphanage, so they could pursue their careers. This I found frustrating. Most parents could not do this. Why did his parents reach this decision? How did Heinrich feel about this? Considering that the orphanage wasn't a particularly pleasant place, what sort of relationship did he have with his parents as an adult? On this, the author is silent.

The best bits are the running bits, which are well-written and fun, and the physiology bits, which are somewhat scattershot but thought-provoking. The book meanders. I imagine it like sitting by the fire with Heinrich on a cold Vermont evening after a few glasses of wine. It's interesting, but I can't help checking my watch.

So why do we run? Heinrich argues that we're built to run long distances so that we can hunt by running prey to exhaustion. Despite his interest in animal models including migratory birds, Heinrich doesn't consider that being able to cover great distances would be equally useful in foraging and migrating.

Regardless, the idea that humans are built to continuously run distances beyond that of almost all land animals was controversial when this book was published, and less so now. Why We Run is still relevant despite its problems, because its key message is an important idea.

Driven to Run

Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen.

Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Two books I borrowed from Aki.

Drive is about what motivates people, but even more, it's about what demotivates people. The best way to demomotivate? Take something a person does for the joy of it, and pay them to do it. Getting paid a salary isn't inherently demotivating, but things like giving people a bonus for reaching a sales target or giving a kid a candy bar for completing a homework assignment are inherently demotivating.

Author Pink emphasizes that the basis of his argument is not philosophical, but scientific: over and over, the data show that most of what organizations do to motivate people has the opposite effect, and that most bonus and compensation schemes are destructively counterproductive. People give less blood when you pay them for it. Test scores fall when you reward good scores. Sales force performance falls in the face of quarterly targets. Over and over and over. Ouch.

Pink concedes that some jobs just aren't very much fun, and are going to be done by people who don't enjoy them very much, but even here, he suggests that such jobs can be less dreary than typical if attention is paid to what people find satisfaction in.

What's the connection to a book on ultramarathon running and minimalist footwear? Born to Run is about these things, but also why people run ultramarathon distances. McDougall makes an interesting point on motivation: when American marathon sponsorship enabled runners to make a living running marathons, the effect on performance was rapid and dramatic: while world marathon times got significantly better, marathon times by Americans actually got worse. McDougall argues that turning marathon running into a job caused the performance drop. Pink would approve.

McDougall's book is about what supports running, both biomechanically and psychologically. He describes people for whom running is an escape, a salvation, a way of life, or all of these. Mostly, running happened to people who saw themselves as more than only a runner: nurse, farmer, surf bum, writer, and so on.

I have a little experience in amateur endurance sports. The rewards are the satisfaction of doing the thing, and maybe a bit of ribbon. Getting paid to do it would be very strange, perhaps like getting paid to smile, or getting paid to pray.

These books describe a world that is different than many people think they live in, and maybe a world different than many people want to live in. It is perhaps comforting to believe that motivating people is just pushing the right buttons. The evidence is that the human psyche is much slipperier than that. But isn't it more noble to be motivated best by a desire to do a thing well, just for its own sake?

Another way of looking at seasonal weight

The vertical axis is weight in kg. Horizontal axis is days since New Year. Each line represents weight as measured for one year, beginning January 1 of that year.

The data are incomplete, so the apparent weight gain starting in July is mostly an artifact of not having much late summer data.

This shows that in many years, I put on around 5 kg (~10 lb) over the holidays, then work it off in the spring. In 2010, I started working that weight off unusually late, in April, and I paid for it. This year, I had more physical activity earlier in the year than usual, and I made an effort to watch what I ate. The results show above. My scale's crude estimate of BFI is 13%.

MLS Cup

Sven, Aki, Sven's friend Simon, and I all got to see our first national championship: the MLS Cup at Qwest field. This was a birthday present for Sven. It was pretty much uniformly fantastic, and a close-fought, interesting game.

It would have been more fun to cheer the Sounders (and we did cheer them a bit anyway) but it was still a great game, and RSL deserved their win. Obviously the boys had a great time.






Thanks for the great tix, Jane! Happy birthday, Sven.