Erik’s Blog

I enjoy watching soccer. Aside from the occasional beautifully executed maneuver, however, soccer, like all sports, is boring as hell if you don’t care who wins. My biggest problem with soccer is mustering enough energy to care who wins. I did a better job this past year following the Spanish Liga, choosing allegiance with the local team, Racing Santander, even reading the sports newspaper, Marca, in a bar at least once a week. But the effort required to keep up with player trades, injuries, and rumors is more than a little exhausting…all in an attempt to generate some emotional attachment to teams or players.
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Sometimes it seems like parenting is one big series decisions about trading comfort for safety. My child is tall and lanky, so it has taken her forever to reach the magical 9 kg threshold in which the car seat manufacturers say she can face forward in the vehicle. In her rear-facing seat, she looks, and is, horribly uncomfortable. As her tall and lanky father who takes a couple transatlantic flights a year, I sympathize. My daughter, her mother, and I have all been looking forward to when we can flip her around to face forwards.
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Today I went to my bank to pay my Spanish taxes, which, after avoiding double taxation, came to a whopping 4.87€. I had done the taxes on my computer with the downloadable java app and had generated a PDF for myself and one for my wife. However, when I printed them, they came out strangely formatted. I couldn’t understand why, so I loaded the PDFs onto a USB pen drive and took them to the bank along with the poorly printed versions. They said that my printed versions weren’t good enough and agreed to print the ones I had on my pen drive. So I watched as my local banker inserted the pen drive I gave him into his Windows machine and opened and printed the PDFs.
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Recently I’ve been enjoying the genre of popular psychology books. I realized that what I most enjoyed about my college psychology courses were reading about the experiments and studies, especially the ones with seemingly counter-intuitive irrational results. So far in this genre I’ve consumed Predictably Irrational, How We Decide, Outliers and Stumbling on Happiness, which no one took my hint to buy me. One of them, funnily, doesn’t fit that neatly into the genre.

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For years now, I have been listening to the opposition party in Spain complain about every little problem and blame it all on the current governing party. For one, this attitude lead me to my epiphany four years ago that Conservatives Complain More, but it has also lead me to develop a new pet peeve. Complaining about the government is easy. Everyone’s angry about something. If you’re not, you’re either high or stupid. What’s really hard is suggesting a better way to do whatever it is you think the government is bungling. Recently, I’ve made a point of countering complaints with, “How would you do X better if you were in power?” The result is amazing. Most people shut up immediately or ignore the question. The ones that actually have an answer are those that have actually thought through the problem. Those are the people to listen to.
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At the moment I’m reading this fascinating book called Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell (amazon). It’s a fantastic read and I could easily write a few posts about each chapter, but I want to focus specifically on one theory, discussed in Chapter 6, about violence and honor…and goats.
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I took Nora to the doctor today to get weighed and measured. In her first six months she more than doubled in weight, ending up and around 7.4 kg. In her second six months she hasn’t gained any weight at all, remaining consistently around 7.5 kg when we weigh her at bath time (before her dinner). Today, after eating 260 mL of breakfast milk and cereal (which is more dense than water, so that’s more than 0.26 kg right there), she weighed 7.85 kg and measured 75 cm, a full three quarters of a meter. This gives her a body mass index of 14.0, which is literally off the chart. The doctor say she’s just fine, which we knew already. Tall and skinny, but fine.

In the same spirit as last year’s ridiculous linear comparison of food consumption rate, I’ve decided to see what I would be like if my height and weight were at the same ratio as Nora’s (104 g/cm).
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For the longest time, my daughter could only make vowel sounds and diphthongs. Eventually, with the help of her fingers at first, she was able to control her tongue enough to make consonant sounds. Ma, pa, da, and ta were the first. It was her natural progression of learning. Her mother and I didn’t help much beyond repeating what she had already said. Soon, it seemed like she was calling us Mama and Papa.
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Today I stumbled on this awesome speech written and given by Michael Crichton back in 2002 about speculation, and how the media – which he defines as movies, television, internet, books, newspapers, and magazines – is, to a large extent, a gurgling blob of useless drivel. It’s a shame that he probably didn’t get to watch much of the farcical climax of vacuous speculation that was the 2008 US presidential election, as he died on the day Obama got elected. My favorite part of the article is how he talks about the fallacy that we all commit (a recent favorite topic of mine) when we read the newspaper, or receive information from any news source for that matter.
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Recently a small shop in town selling decorative housewares, that had been there for the entire four years we’ve lived here, went out of business. While it was always interesting to look into their shop window, I think I only went in once, and the shopkeeper wasn’t very pleasant, so nothing was purchased. The shop was on a prime corner right in the center of town. I can’t think of a better location for a shop in town. So of course I was pretty curious as to who would jump on that choice piece of real estate. It was empty for a couple weeks, and then the painting started.
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