by Matthew on December 31, 2011
The Dude & I at the Botanical Gardens
Happy 2012 folks! The photo this week is of “The Dude” & I at the Botanical Gardens here in Atlanta. Fantastic exhibit they have up for the holidays that makes me proud of my hometown. As for this week’s WIR, I have a nice blend of some of my favorite things – technology, human behavior and sport.
The New, New Thing for 2012 – I grew up as a technophile admiring Marc Andreessen since his web browser was my browser of choice. That was back when you actually had to pay for a browser in the early days of the Internet. I was on dial-up and AOL, even using Telnet to chat with my college roomie when he lived in Japan for a semester. When I lived in Silicon Valley my condo was a mile away from Netscape HQ. But I digress. In this interview, Andreesson talks about his predictions for 2012 in technology. Obviously his opinions are influenced (and meant to influence) towards the companies and verticals in which he has financial interests at stake, but there are still opinions of a gentleman who’s more right than wrong.
The Thinker – I got this one from a regular contributor to this column – The Prof – who knows my soft spot for Michael Lewis. In this one, Lewis dives deeper into a unconscious, tangential influence in his bestseller, MoneyBall, discovering that the analytical methods of DePodesta can be traced to a couple of cognitive behaviorialists, one of which has been crowned by the King of Sweden with some Nobel thingy. In this short Lewis excerpt, the author delves deeper into the author of Thinking – Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman and the colleague who influenced Kahneman most, Amos Tversky. As usual Lewis paints a lucid and human portrait of the Kahneman, doing his best to honor Kahneman’s complex ideas without making them trite. After reading the article, I think I know what my next read will be on the old Kindle.
Surprise, Surprise – One of the blogs I follow regularly is The Science of Sport. These blokes from South Africa do a great job in their coverage of endurance sports and they have a soft spot for rugby (not that I’m a rugby fan but I like how they like ‘ball’ sports). In this post they go through several suprise performances of 2011. What I found most compelling in this post wasn’t even a performance from 2011. It was the Sammy Wanjiru clip from the 2010 Chicago Marathon. If you’ve never seen this before, spend the time to watch it. If you can’t be inspired by it, then we need to check your adrenal reserves because this is compelling sport – beautiful in it’s tactical brilliance and determination. The world lost this great talent in 2011 in a sad domestic violence case. His memory lives on in his performances. Most importantly, those performances inspired a transcendent year in marathoning globally. And that is a positive legacy from which we can bid adieu to 2011 and welcome in 2012.
See you next year!
by Matthew on December 12, 2011
The Dude Rides
A little late with this one from last week, so we kick off the new week with a quick WIR. A shot of “The Dude” above figuring out the balance bike while being encouraged by big sis. It’s so much fun to see the “light bulb moment” with a child. It’s even more fun when that child is yours and that moment comes at the behest of an older sibling. Awesome stuff.
On to the content! We have another schmorgasborg of items today, but all with some deep personal meeting this week.
A Rose by Any Other Name – As they do this time of year, the various contributors to Sports Illustrated take to their Internet property, SI.com, and make a case for their Sportsperson of the Year. The winner has since been announced, but I centered in on Lee Jenkins nomination, Derrick Rose. Rose was the point guard his one and only year at the University of Memphis for the 2008 National Finalist team. I happened to be attendance at his “light bulb moment” against the University of Tennessee, a game featuring number one versus number two. Rose kept his team in the game, and finally became the assertive offensive presence the Tigers needed from him to compete against anybody. Though the Tigers lost, they established the chemistry that would take them to within a nanosecond of being the 2008 national champions. This article corroborates many of the stories I had heard about him while he was in Memphis for the short season.
Old School Apple – From the Apple fanboy department, this iPad2 case conjures up memories of playing Oregon Trail during class in grade school. It’s probably a bit much for a mobile device, but I love the classic clean lines and bauhaus styling of the original Mac. Ultimately, it’s a piece of nostalgia which is always nice. If you get one, Tweet at me so I can see what it looks like applied in a real world setting.
My Ten Minutes – Since I’ve become more heavily involved in the sport of back in 2002, the one industry news source that is my “go-to” for all things triathlon has been Slowtwitch. I’m not contributor to their forums, choosing to “lurk” and not get involved in a lot of the destructive things that too frequently define online forums. Despite my passive relationship with the site, I do consider myself part of the Slowtwitch community. I had the fortune of meeting editor-in-chief, Herbert Krabel, on the plane out to Kona this year. At our layover at LAX, Haley Chura and I broke bread with him and got to learn a little more about him – his family, his profession and his interests. We ran into him several times during race week, often taking a minute or two to catch up. By the end of the trip my respect for Slowtwitch had grown even further because their was now a personal tie or a face behind the content. When Herbert reached out to do a quick interview as part of his “Random Age Grouper” column, I was quick to jump on it. For all of the above reasons, it was a genuine honor to do. I’ve Tweeted it, Facebook’ed it, emailed it a hundred times over, but it’s because of the regard for Herbert and his site and both their personal meanings to me. So why not blog it?
