It’s been a quiet week for me on the blog, but a lot of things are bubbling just under the surface. I’ve been working on a number of posts, but they aren’t quite ready. I’m working on a new audio clip that I hope to make into a limited series of podcasts. I have a couple of different versions of follow ups to my Dale Carnegie post. And I’m working on a post about improv podcasts. I’m trying to finish another book on diet and it’s giving me a new idea about how I could be losing weight, which I may eventually write about.
Author: mullaney
Perseverance is greater than talent
Recently, I finished a fascinating book called, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
by Geoffrey Miller. In it, Miller makes the case that many of the things that make us human are the result of sexual selection, not natural selection. Our capacity for language, music, art, kindness, intelligence and charity are all traits or abilities that made us more attractive to the opposite sex. They did not evolve because they helped us survive better, instead they evolved because they are ways for us to display how fit our genes are. Our minds evolved to be an entertainment center for potential mates. The better we could sing, or tell stories, or make other people laugh, the more attractive we were. This meant we could attract fitter mates and especially in the case of men, have more offspring, ensuring that the next generation would be even better at singing, telling stories and making other people laugh.
It’s an interesting idea. If you are like me and interested in evolution, but haven’t read much about Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, you should take a look. But I’ll leave it Miller to actually lay out the argument. He does a much better job than I could.
Near the end of the book came the following passage. As an artist, this passage jumped off the page.
Among competent professionals in any field, there appears to be a fairly constant probability of success in any given endeavor. (Psychologist Dean Keith) Simonton’s data show that excellent composers do not produce a higher proportion of excellent music than good composers—they simply produce a higher total number of works. People who achieve extreme success in any creative field are almost always extremely prolific. Hans Eysenck became a famous psychologist not because all of his papers were excellent, but because he wrote over a hundred books and a thousand papers, and some of them happened to be excellent. Those who write only ten papers are much less likely to strike gold with any of them. Likewise with Picasso: if you paint 14,000 paintings in your lifetime, some of them are likely to be pretty good, even if most are mediocre. Simonton’s results are surprising. The constant probability of success idea sounds counterintuitive and of course there are exceptions to this generalization. Yet Simonton’s data on creative achievement are the most comprehensive ever collected and in every domain that he studied, creative achievement was a good indicator of the energy, time, and motivation invested in creative activity.
Let that sink in a little bit. No really. Let that sink in. Ponder it for a little bit before you read on.
Synchonize your music folder
I’ve been backing up my MP3 files for a while. I keep a folder on my laptop with all my music. I import that folder to my iTunes and keep that synced with my iPod. A while back I bought a nice USB external drive so that I could keep an extra backup of all my mp3s. This allows me to share music with friends more easily and if something happens to my laptop, I’m not going to lose all those mp3 I’ve collected.
You would think that there would be something built right into Windows that allowed you to sync two folders, one on your hard drive and one on an external drive. Why not just drag the folder from your laptop to the drive? Well, when I do that, it copies everything, even stuff that has been copied before. If you have several gigabytes of music, this can take forever. It would be nice if Windows only made copies of the new stuff since the last backup. It would be even better if it worked both ways, if it also copied new files on the external hard drive to the laptop. But alas it doesn’t work that way. At least I don’t know a way do to it with just Windows XP.
I knew there must be some utility out there that would do this, but I waited until today to go looking. Continue reading “Synchonize your music folder”
It’s not enough to know they are bluffing
After being in Central Illinois for over two years, I finally hosted my first poker game last week. It was a lot of fun. I got a group of relative newcomers together and taught them how to play a Texas hold’em tournament. We had an hour long class where I went over the basics, pretty much following the plan I previously blogged about. Then I had them each chip in a couple bucks and I dealt them their first tournament (I didn’t play).
One hand came up that reminded me of something that happened when I still lived in New York. The hand was pretty straightforward. A few people played the hand, two of them played until the end. There wasn’t much betting, but I remember one player made a small but significant bet on the end. Another player called him. He turned over his two cards to show that he had a pair of sevens, one in his hand, one on the board.
Since this was more or less a practice hand, the other player turned her hand over and said, “Oh damn, I thought you were bluffing.” Her hand consisted of an eight and a three. She did not have a pair. She should not have called. Her hand was too weak to call.
However, she was partially right. Continue reading “It’s not enough to know they are bluffing”
The Invocation
Last week a friend of mine called. He was someone I used to coach in Chicago. He now lives in Minneapolis and wanted some advice about coaching a group who wanted to learn the Invocation. It’s an improv exercise that is sometimes used as an opening for improv forms like Harold. We talked for an hour about the Invocation, about Del Close (the guy who came up with the exercise) and about other similar exercises.
I thought it might make a good journal entry to write down a lot of the things that we went over in the conversation. But before I got too far into the entry, I decided to look it up on the IRC Improv Wiki to see if anyone had written anything about it. It turns out I had already written a pretty comprehensive explanation of the exercise there.
So instead of rewriting that, go over to the IRC Improv Wiki and read about the Invocation there.
Donating by texting – Haiti earthquake relief
UPDATE 8:10PM – There is obviously more to the story, many of these fees are being waved. I’m sifting through what information I can. There is some information on these donations on the Consumerist and Consumer Reports.
Perhaps you have seen this making the rounds on Facebook status updates:
Text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to American Red Cross relief for Haiti.
It seems like a great idea, right? I’ve seen these before for other non-profits, namely various public radio fundraisers. It would seem like a great way to get people to donate. It’s fast and easy, allowing people to give precisely at the moment when their impulse to give is strongest. They don’t have to fire up their computer, find the website, fill out a form with their credit card, etc.
If you have an unlimited texting plan, and want to do this, go for it! But if you pay for each text message you send, keep reading before you donate.
Continue reading “Donating by texting – Haiti earthquake relief”
Haiti Earthquake Relief
The Chris Gethard Show
The Chris Gethard Show is a talk show featuring some of my friends in New York. It runs once a month, Saturday at midnight at the UCB Theatre. I don’t know much about it, but it penetrated my brain this week when I noticed a link that Chris posted on facebook.
I next heard a little bit about it on the January 4th UCBTNY Podcast featuring John Frusciante and Will Hines. Anyway, I thought I would just post something to plug the show and share the video. It’s quite fun. Enjoy.
Teaching poker to absolute beginners
I like teaching and I like poker, although I’ve rarely tried to combine the two. This week, I’m going to give it a shot. I run a meetup group here in Peoria for single people. I have wanted to host some poker games for the group for some time. I finally decided to go ahead and host one this week. It wouldn’t simply be a poker tournament, it would first be a one hour lesson in the basics of Texas Hold’em tournaments. And then we would do an actual one table tournament with me dealing.
I’ve always thought teaching poker to beginners would be a fun thing to do. My goal with the class portion is simple, demonstrate the basics of the game like how the cards are dealt, how betting works, and how the winner is determined for each hand (and for the tournament). I also want them to understand the rules of betting, and various quirks of how poker is typically dealt, so that if they ever want to play in a casino run tournament, they will be able to sit down and play without asking too many questions. If we have time we will also go over some basic strategy ideas.
How to excel at scenework and influence improvisors – part 1
I recently read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie for the first time. It’s the kind of book that I’ve avoided most of my life. Self help books, especially ones with a strong slant towards the business world, usually don’t excite me. However, it had been recommended to me by a couple of people, and I realized that it might be of some use for me.
As I read the book, I wondered about how it might apply to the life of improvisation. On one level, it’s pretty straight forward. The way you build relationships in the worlds of theater and comedy are not that different from the business world. The advice translates pretty directly to how you should treat your fellow improvisors off stage. The advice seems especially well suited for sales, and while many of us in the theatre world loath selling ourselves, it is something that definitely helps us be successful.
Continue reading “How to excel at scenework and influence improvisors – part 1”