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It is tiring to forever follow the mess in DC, so today is politics free day! First, our favorite from the NY Times, John Tierney as he tells us how we might manage our new year’s resolutions better.
IT’S still early in 2012, so let’s be optimistic. Let’s assume you have made a New Year’s resolution and have not yet broken it. Based on studies of past resolutions, here are some uplifting predictions:
1) Whatever you hope for this year — to lose weight, to exercise more, to spend less money — you’re much more likely to make improvements than someone who hasn’t made a formal resolution.
2) If you can make it through the rest of January, you have a good chance of lasting a lot longer.
3) With a few relatively painless strategies and new digital tools, you can significantly boost your odds of success.
Now for a not-so-uplifting prediction: Most people are not going to keep their resolutions all year long. They’ll start out with the best of intentions but the worst of strategies, expecting that they’ll somehow find the willpower to resist temptation after temptation. By the end of January, a third will have broken their resolutions, and by July more than half will have lapsed.
They’ll fail because they’ll eventually run out of willpower, which social scientists no longer regard as simply a metaphor. They’ve recently reported that willpower is a real form of mental energy, powered by glucose in the bloodstream, which is used up as you exert self-control.
The result is “ego depletion,” as this state of mental fatigue was named by Roy F. Baumeister, a social psychologist at Florida State University (and my co-author of a book on willpower). He and many of his colleagues have concluded that the way to keep a New Year’s resolution is to anticipate the limits of your willpower.
One of their newest studies, published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, tracked people’s reactions to temptations throughout the day. The study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann of the University of Chicago, showed that the people with the best self-control, paradoxically, are the ones who use their willpower less often. Instead of fending off one urge after another, these people set up their lives to minimize temptations. They play offense, not defense, using their willpower in advance so that they avoid crises, conserve their energy and outsource as much self-control as they can.
These strategies are particularly important if you’re trying to lose weight, which is the most typical New Year’s resolution as well as the most difficult. …
Believe it or not, the iPhone is now five years old. Wired has the story of how it has changed in just that short period of time.
Gadget fans may be focused on the CES trade show this week, but there’s something else notable going on today: It’s the iPhone’s fifth birthday.
Five years ago today, Apple unveiled the original iPhone to the world. It wasn’t a tightly kept secret, shrouded in mystery and speculation like more recent Apple announcements, but it was arguably the world’s most anticipated gadget launch.
Although its form factor — a capacitive touchscreen candy bar — hasn’t dramatically changed over the years, each iteration of the iPhone has yielded important improvements. Let’s take a look back at how the iPhone revolutionized what we thought a phone could be.
The iPhone Is Revealed
“An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator,” Jobs said when preparing to introduce the iPhone in January 2007. “An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator…. These are not three separate devices!” …
Wired also tells us drones now make up one third of our country’s military aircraft.
Remember when the military actually put human beings in the cockpits of its planes? They still do, but in far fewer numbers. According to a new congressional report acquired by Danger Room, drones now account for 31 percent of all military aircraft.
To be fair, lots of those drones are tiny flying spies, like the Army’s Raven, that could never accommodate even the most diminutive pilot. (Specifically, the Army has 5,346 Ravens, making it the most numerous military drone by far.) But in 2005, only five percent of military aircraft were robots, a report by the Congressional Research Service notes. Barely seven years later, the military has 7,494 drones. Total number of old school, manned aircraft: 10,767 planes.
A small sliver of those nearly 7,500 drones gets all of the attention. The military owns 161 Predators — the iconic flying strike drone used over Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere — and Reapers, the Predator’s bigger, better-armed brother.
But even as the military’s bought a ton of drones in the past few years, the Pentagon spends much, much more money on planes with people in them. Manned aircraft still get 92 percent of the Pentagon’s aircraft procurement money. Still, since 2001, the military has spent $26 billion on drones, the report — our Document of the Day — finds.
The drones are also getting safer. …
Dilbert’s Scott Adams just got addicted to golf. He tries to understand why.
I have a hypothesis that the things we do for recreation are usually metaphors that allow us to express our caveman instincts in socially appropriate ways. The nearer an activity is to our basic hunting and gathering nature, the more we like it.
Consider golf. Until recently, I had never golfed, and was baffled by its appeal. On the surface, the game is nothing but random rules about the proper way to put a round object in a hole in the ground. I have a good imagination, but prior to taking up golf, I couldn’t imagine enjoying the so-called sport. That said, as part of my “Year of Trying New Things” (more on that another day), I leapt into golf with both feet. Result: Instant addiction.
What the hell??? How could such a bizarre activity be so appealing? I needed to understand this thing. I started by mapping the components of golf to their caveman origins:
Using clubs (Okay, that one is obvious. Humans are tool users.)
Problem solving (Every hole is different.)
Hunting (Locate your ball)
Killing (Whack the ball when you find it.) …
Popular Science tells how 100 year old Scotch was created from Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic stash.
In 1907, Ernest Shackleton and crew set out on the ship Nimrod to visit Antarctica and, they hoped, the South Pole. The good news was, the entire party survived the trip, thanks in part to the Rare Old Highland Whisky they brought to the frozen continent. But the expedition was forced to evacuate in 1909, some 100 miles short of the Pole they sought. And, as winter ice encroached and the men hurried home, they left behind three cases of the choice whisky.
In 2007, just about a century later, the whisky was found, intact, at the expedition’s hut at Cape Royds in Antarctica.
The stuff was made by Mackinlay & Co at the Glen Mhor distillery in 1896 or thereabouts. Mackinlay hasn’t been an active brand for a while now, but the current owner of the Mackinlay name, Whyte and Mackay, obtained a few of the precious bottles and set out to do what any right-thinking Scot would do: first, taste the whisky; and second, attempt to analyze and re-create it. The result, a product called Mackinlay’s Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky, is, as of this writing, buyable in stores.
How was the re-creation carried out? Dr. James Pryde, chief chemist at Whyte and Mackay, subjected the samples to a comprehensive chemical analysis, in conjunction with a rigorous sensory analysis (that is, sniffing and tasting). Firstly, it was established that the alcoholic strength of the whisky was high enough that it very likely never froze over the years it spent interred in Antarctica. In winter, the hut reached a minimum temperature of -32.5°C, but, at 47 percent alcohol, the whisky remained liquid down to a couple of degrees cooler than that extreme. This eliminated what had been a significant source of concern about the quality of the sample, that decades of freezing and thawing had altered or ruined it. Carbon dating verified that the whisky did indeed date from the Shackleton era. …
We learn from Entertainment Weekly Lily on ‘Modern Family’ will drop the F-bomb in next week’s episode.
On next week’s Modern Family, toddler Lily is going to use one of the worst of George Carlin’s famous Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.
The adopted two-and-a-half year-old character somehow picks up the profanity “f–k.” This naturally horrifies her parents, Cam and Mitchell, who in particular fear she’ll blurt it at an upcoming wedding. Lily is shown saying the word, but it’s not audible to the viewer. The episode’s title: “Little Bo Bleep.”
It might be the first time in a scripted family broadcast TV series where a child has said the f-word. …
That was fun! Tomorrow we’ll get back to finding ways to save our country by ridding ourselves of Valerie Jarrett’s Washington stooge.