Chris Worfolk's Blog

I expressed some of my concerns about Malcolm Gladwell’s writing in my review of The Tipping Point. This included his analysis of the 10,000 hours rule (which is almost certainly wrong) which features in this book. It was still an interesting read however.

Outliers: The Story of Success looks both at some of the most successful people, but also how we think of success. He begins by talking about the Matthew effect. This is where sports have cut off date, say 1 January, and so kids born in January are competing against kids almost a year younger than them (kids born in December). The result is that kids in January look better, thus are put in a higher ability stream, get extra coaching and thus become world-class athletes.

According to the research Gladwell points to, this has a huge effect. Almost all sports stars are born in the first three months and almost none after September. When there is ability setting in school, September births outperform August births by a big margin too.

He then goes on to talk about the 10,000 hours rule, and finally goes on to talk about success is a result of opportunity. Take Bill Gates for example. At 13 years old, his high school got access to a computer system and so by the time he got to founding Microsoft in 1975 he had done more programming than basically anyone else in the world at his age.

This is where the book makes a great point. Gladwell uses the term opportunity, which is a combination of luck and privilege. Bill Gates worked incredibly hard, but he also had an opportunity that almost nobody else in the world had in that he spent his childhood, from 1968-1975, programming.

He is an excellent storyteller. I had the same kind of epiphany that I had when reading Michael Lewis’s Boomerang. They are both such good storytellers that they a) write excellent books and b) make us less critical because of it.

In summary, Outliers is a very engaging book, but that does not make it true. Gladwell is known for over-simplifying problems and he does it equally frequently in this book. If the message you take away is that success is more a product of opportunity than being a meritocracy of hard-work though, the book has probably been of some benefit.

As a final footnote, I had the audiobook edition and one of the things I found quite annoying was what happens with quotes. Gladwell reads it himself and goes into quotes without changing his voice or indicating it. So he will read something out and then say something like “says John Smith” and then you have to try and backtrack to where the quote starts from.

If you’re going to mark on double yellow lines, at least get it near the curb. Or consider turning your wipers off when it is not raining.

I am pretty sure this is how horror movies start…

You’re never too old to run out of bread.

Last month we went to see Alan Davies at Leeds Town Hall. We were quite looking forward to it because he is very toned down on QI, so it should have been a good chance to see him a bit more raw. Elina noted that the mature middle-class audience of QI watchers that surrounded us might be in a bit of a shock.

Unfortunately, it didn’t turn up. Davies has got old and started doing dad jokes. That is jokes about being a dad. I couldn’t really relate to them. He was pretty funny, but I think a lot of the humour was probably lost on me.

I recently had to upgrade my iPad because a lot of the apps have stopped working on it. It has had a good four years, but that is all you get out of a tablet, so I felt like I was forced to upgrade something I didn’t really want to upgrade.

This was also my first experience of iOS 8 (until then everything was running iOS 6).

I do not think it is Apple’s finest release. Getting started on it was a pain. I was prompted for my iCloud password at start-up but it refused to accept it (even though I could log on to icloud.com with the same password repeatedly). Therefore I had to turn iCloud off at first and then re-enable it once I was up-and-running. Except it then prompted me for the password over and over again.

It then prompted me for the passwords to all my email accounts and worse, wouldn’t let me switch out to 1password to copy and paste it in. I had to open 1password on my phone and manually copy the passwords in, which is a massive pain when you use log and complicated ones.

After that the App Store kept insisting it had 11 updates even though I had updated everything, and most of the apps, including Apple’s own settings app rapidly crashed.

Apple are having a bad year. One bad release you could overlook, but Yosemite, the new version of OS X is preforming very poorly too. It took me 8 hours to complete the upgrade and since then I have found my Mac has crashed numerous times and there is a bug which causes file dialogues to continually grow so big they disappear off the screen that Apple does not seem to have any plans to fix.

The hardware on the iPad Air 2 is quite nice. It is a lot lighter than my old iPad 2 and I do really like the touch ID.

Google Chrome is not the only application struggling with OS X Yosemite’s file dialog. When saving files in Coda, the dialog will continually fall off the bottom of the screen.

Currently the only known workaround for the issue is to switch to the simple view by clicking the up arrow next to the file name box, and then click it again to re-expand the dialog and then it will be probably sized again. However, you need to do this every time you save a file.

Huffington Post recently commission Survation to conduct a survey on religion in Britain. The results were quite promising for the humanist community. Here are the highlights:

• 60% of people described themselves as non-religious
• Over half believe that religion does more harm than good
• 13% of people said atheists were likely to be more moral, compared with 8% who said atheists were likely to be less moral

Read more in the Huffington Post article and the BHA press release.

The Abbey Dash is 10km race that takes place in Leeds each year. It is in aid of Age UK and you literally run out to Kirkstall Abbey and back. It is also older than I am – just. This was the 19th annual dash.

I decided it would be less depressing to start right at the back this time and found it easier than the Run For All. I had enough energy to pick up the base for the last kilometre or two, rather than wondering whether I would live to see tomorrow.

That said, I came in at a slightly slower time of 01:07:36, which put me 8,459 out of a field of 10,000. Mostly retired women in my speed category. I don’t know how everyone else does it…