My white whale (full disclosure: I’ve never read Moby Dick)

Well over a year ago, I wrote about how I wanted to read more books and fewer blogs. My rationale was that the long form of books allows me to fully absorb their subjects, whereas I don’t live with blog posts long enough for them to leave a lasting impression.

I’m pretty sure Nicholas Carr talked about this in his article Is Google Making Us Stupid?. I’m not sure because I haven’t read the article because it’s too long; I plan to hold out on reading it to maintain this irony.

More recently, Robin Sloan artfully illuminated how the economic concept of “stock and flow” applies to writing; the idea being that writers benefit by producing little bits of ephemeral content continually (flow) while simultaneously working on larger, more permanent, works. I think the metaphor applies to content consumption as well as production.

I haven’t kept track of my efforts to read more books, but I know that I still want to read more books and fewer blogs. To that end, here are 12 books that I want to read this year. This is a New Year’s resolution for my brain, while my other New Year’s resolution is for my body.

I hope that writing them down and publicly announcing my goal will encourage me to put the iPhone down and pick them up.

These aren’t in any kind of order.

1. The Organization Man — William H. Whyte Jr.

   This was a landmark book when it was published in 1965, and I’m hoping it’s still good. I put it on my Amazon wish list on a whim, and my mom gave me a first edition printing of it for Christmas as a result. I love her.

   I’ve become very interested in organizations (particularly the creative destruction of organizations) since grad school, and I’m curious to learn about how post WWII organizations were perceived as they came about. Also, check out Whyte’s steez.

   Update, 31 Dec 2010: I totally forgot about this book and didn’t read it.

2. Nudge — Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

   This is tangentially related to my interest in organizations and policy making, as it examines the most vexing component of organizations: the rational human being.

   I’m a few chapters in. It’s a fun book. It’d go nicely with some Camus.

   Finished on Feb 10th. Overlong and sometimes boring, but very worthwhile. Its ideas are settling in nicely.

3. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

   Finished sometime mid January

4. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
5. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
6. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

   J.K. Rowling deserves every penny she’s earned. I’m glad Shan convinced me to read these books. I love them.

   Update, 31 Dec 2010: I read all of these pretty early on in the year and then I was sad that I couldn’t read any more.

7. Information Dashboard Design — Stephen Few

   Marti Hearst recommended this to me. I don’t expect anyone to want to read it with me, but Few deserves credit for the cheeky intro to the book’s acknowledgements:

   Without a doubt I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to the many software vendors who have done so much to make this book necessary by failing to address or even contemplate the visual design need of their dashboards. Their kind disregard for visual design has given me focus, ignited my passion, and guaranteed my livelihood for years to come.

   Ha!

   Update, 31 Dec 2010: I finished this sometime around May. It’s exactly what it’s supposed to be and I’m now a disciple of Few. He’s a great advocate for doing good, pragmatic, meaningful work.

8. The Ownership of Enterprise — Henry Hansmann

   This was a suggested text from a class I took in grad school called, simply, Organizations. I didn’t buy it until over a year after graduation, when I realized that I continued to think about Organizations more than any other class I’d taken.

   Hansmann “explains why different industries and different national economies exhibit different patterns of ownership forms.” I’m especially interested in (finally) reading this because the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded for similar research.

   Update, 31 Dec 2010: Didn’t even open this during 2010, but I still plan on reading it. I’m more interested in learning about different ownership structures than ever.

9. Let My People Go Surfing — Yvon Chouinard

   A memoir by the founder and owner of Patagonia, the company. I like surfing, I like business, and I admire Patagonia—both the place and the company.

   Finished on Feb 20th. A major surprise. I expected it to be a fluffy memoir, but this is a serious book about business, craft, the environment, and morality. Very inspiring. Highly recommended.

10. Started: Understanding Comics — Scott McCloud

    A comic about how comics work. I’m 50 pages in, and it’s one of the most enlightening books I’ve ever read (no hyperbole).

    Update, 31 Dec 2010: The best non-fiction book I read this year and the one I recommend most highly to everyone interested in communication, writing, art, narrative, teaching, learning, etc.

11. Here Comes Everybody — Clay Shirky

    I tend to think of Shirky as an Internet media guy, but I’m approaching this thinking of him has an Internet organizations guy.

    Update, 31 Dec 2010: Shirky is a great organizations guy and this is a great book about organizations, but reading it felt like a chore sometimes. I was surprised by how long it took me to read.

12. The Design of Everyday Things — Donald A. Norman

    This has been on my stack for years. It’s time I developed a theoretical basis to support (and occasionally quell) my design instincts.

    Update, 31 Dec 2010: I tried to read this and made it about as far in as when I first tried a few years ago. It’s a very good and very dense book. I already use some of the concepts in it, but I need to try to read it again. Maybe in 2011.

PS – You should read some of these books with me.

My pants don’t fit. I finally admitted this sometime around Christmas. This won’t do, so I’m going to lose some weight. I’m about six feet tall and I’ve weighed somewhere around 185 pounds for about the last seven years. As I write this, I weigh 203.

2010 has brought the realization that I can’t take my health for granted. I officially need to start paying serious attention to my lifestyle—indeed, I’ve joined the group of people who resolve to lose weight at the beginning of the year.

This doesn’t mean that I can’t also make the same high minded resolutions I have for the past two years. I’m still trying to do those enlightened things, but I want to do something measurable, too.

I want to weigh 180 pounds or less on my 32nd birthday in May, so I’m going to lose a little over a pound a week between now and then.

Here’s how I plan to do it.

Eat well

I’m not a believer in diets designed to shed pounds quickly (what Rafe Colburn calls “metabolism hacks“). I’m a believer in consistently eating the right amounts of the right things, but I’m in the habit of eating some combination of the wrong amounts of the wrong things. What I consider to be “right” is summed up in these two adages:

• Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. This comes from Pollan’s 2007 article Unhappy Meals, which has influenced my thinking about food more than any other writing. I highly recommend it. When Pollan says food, he mean things that humans have eaten because they encounter them in nature—things that our bodies are designed (by evolution) to ingest. Skip to the end of the article for further explanation of what he means by “food.”
• Treats should be treats, meaning that I should only eat things like cookies and ice cream on special occasions. I’m extending it to apply to eating out as well. I’m pretty sure I came up with this one myself, but Pollan has some insight on this one too:
  

  When we let corporations do the cooking, they’re bound to go heavy on sugar, fat and salt; these are three tastes we’re hard-wired to like, which happen to be dirt cheap to add and do a good job masking the shortcomings of processed food. And if you make special-occasion foods cheap and easy enough to eat every day, we will eat them every day. The time and work involved in cooking, as well as the delay in gratification built into the process, served as an important check on our appetite. Now that check is gone, and we’re struggling to deal with the consequences.
  — From Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch

Exercise

I was very good about exercising in grad school, especially whenever I felt pressured by coursework. I was convinced that my brain and overall happiness would be better off if I took care of my body. I seem to have forgotten that. Just as good food should be part of my life, so should exercise.

My plan for the coming months:

• I’ll be running the Carlsbad half marathon on the 24th of this month. I will run the La Jolla half on April 25th and the America’s Finest City half on August 25th, completing San Diego’s half marathon Triple Crown. Registering for these events motivates me to run regularly. I’m aiming to run six days a week. Join me if you want.
• Thanks to Shan, I’ve been working with a trainer once a week. I’ll keep doing that.
• When I’m not seeing the trainer or taking my weekly day off, I will go to yoga or complete the daily workout on the Workout of the Day iPhone app—none of these workouts requires a gym or weights and they’re extremely effective.
• I also have vague plans to go on a long backpacking trip on the Teton Crest trail sometime in the fall. And as always, I want to surf more often (although surfing isn’t great exercise other than the paddling).

Track my progress

This part is inspired by Rafe Colburn’s post on “the line diet”, which simply requires people to plot their daily weight on a chart over time. This gives the dieter timely feedback on how he should adjust his diet and behavior. I’m going to plot my weight weekly rather than daily. Shan has convinced me that weekly weigh-ins are better. I want to change my behavior broadly, and daily weigh-ins may foster ad hoc adjustments rather than general adjustments.

The main point here is the acknowledgement that I’m trying to lose a particular amount of weight rather than simply “eat better” or “exercise more.”

My progress can be seen in the chart at the top of this post, and will be updated continually over the next few months. I’ll revisit my goal on my birthday, deciding then if I should keep shedding pounds or maintain.

Apply social pressure

As if publicly embarrassing myself with this post weren’t enough, here’s how you can guilt me into keeping at this help me reach my goal:

I’ve created a campaign at The Point in which I’ve pledged to donate $100 to San Diego Roots, an organization that works to “educate, cultivate and empower sustainable food communities in San Diego County.” I will not actually donate the money unless I reach my goal.

If you’d like to encourage me to reach my goal, you can also pledge money to San Diego Roots through by joining the campaign. Your money will not be donated unless I reach my goal. That is, if I don’t reach my goal, I will effectively withhold your charity from this noble community group. I don’t want that on my conscience. Beth Kanter came up with this idea a few years ago; I’m happy to take it from her.

Let’s hope I never have to post something like this again.

USA.gov launched “Your Voice Matters” this week. It’s a “public dialog” asking people “What do you think of USA.gov?” It’s a surprisingly blunt question, and it’s getting a wide variety of answers, entered as comments on the dialog website.

I’m answering the question here because my thoughts won’t fit well into a single comment, and I want to provide plenty of links to the thinkers who have inspired me and informed these thoughts. That said, if you have thoughts about USA.gov, I strongly encourage you to share them on the dialog website.

In the interest of openness and transparency (and because they asked), it’s time to say what I really think about USA.gov. As a government contractor, I feel like I occupy an awkward space between public servant and taxpayer—not as noble as a real public servant, and not qualified to be an indignant taxpayer because I’m paid with tax dollars. Nonetheless, I am inclined to public service (I’m just extremely disinclined to living in DC), and I can’t help being indignant.

USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov, here are five things I think about you. This is from the heart, by which I mean the opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent those of my employer. Also, when I say USA.gov, I mean “USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov.”

I think USA.gov needs to recognize its inherent value #

Every way I look at it, USA.gov—as an organization, as a domain, and as a brand—is poised to be immensely successful. What stands out to me:

• Its staff is skilled, passionate, and recognized across government for its leadership and knowledge.
• USA.gov is probably the best URL on the Internet. I’m serious. USA.gov is:
• Easy to say, spell and remember
• Authoritative (.gov!)
• Descriptive
• Flexible (extends nicely to GobiernoUSA.gov)
• Intuitive (worldwide)
• Short
• It represents the government as it exists in most people’s minds—that is, as “the government” rather than a series of agencies and individual governments (This is a common assumption, and I have no research to back it; if anyone can support or refute this statement, please let me know)
• PageRank of 10 (for what it’s worth)

I think USA.gov should stop being a portal #

Despite all of the above, USA.gov risks becoming irrelevant because of its insistence on being a portal. It’s structured to work as a citizen’s starting point to find government information online. This is problematic because it assumes that people will look to the government as the best source of the information they need. That is, if a person is trying to figure out how to buy a house, we hope he will go to USA.gov before asking his parents, searching Google, or asking friends on Twitter. That’s unrealistic.

Andrea DiMaio announced the irrelevance of government portals back in 2001, recognizing that people do not interact with the government very often and that they are more likely to look to commercial portals that include “government” information alongside other services and information. Why would you look for swine flu info at USA.gov, when you can get it from Yahoo! and get the 411 on celeb tattoos at the same time?

The viability of a government portal is further eroded as people continue to look to social media outlets as their primary source of information. Betaworks’ Andrew Weissman has astutely observed that real time social distribution is conditioning people to assume that “if something is important, it will find me.”

I think USA.gov should embrace search #

Confession: I rarely use USA.gov. I almost always use Google. I spend several hours each month looking for useful government information to distribute through USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. I Google “[search term] site:.gov” and instantaneously get a list of quality .gov resources in return, complete with descriptive blurbs.

The preface to Marti Heart’s Search User Interfaces says that search engines are the second most frequently used online computer application, behind email. There’s a reason for this: they work. Search engines work so well that they’re obviating almost every earlier system designed to organize information—including USA.gov’s system of compiling, categorizing, and organizing lists of links. Josh Levy told me to read Everything Is Miscellaneous to grasp the significance of this.

Because it’s so convenient, search is undermining the government’s attempts to create an online mirror of its byzantine structure (~24,000 .gov URLs and counting) and USA.gov’s attempts to explain that structure.

For USA.gov to compete with the convenience of Google, its links would need to lead to the Internet’s most awesome websites that are unavailable through Google. Furthermore, unlike on search engine result pages, most links on USA.gov do not include descriptions or any clues about where they lead, creating an uncertain browsing experience.

One solution to this is to turn USA.gov into a content site, making it more likely for people to visit it via search engines. Which brings me to my next point…

I think USA.gov should be a content site #

Currently, visitors to USA.gov are guided through lists of links until they’re handed off to another site, where we hope they find what they were looking for. This precludes us from finding out if our visitors found anything useful where we sent them—we can’t ask them to come back and tell us if we guided them to the right spot. The way around this is to create useful content on USA.gov.

USA.gov lists 10 topics that its visitors search for most frequently on the What’s on Americans’ Minds page. Here’s the list as I write this:

• Grants
• House Resolutions
• Green Card
• Passports
• Jobs
• Taxes
• Public Records
• Unclaimed Assets
• Unemployment
• Energy

These top topics don’t change very often. We should start by creating a pilot content strategy and write a brief series of explanatory articles for these topics. They should be written in plain language. They should be search engine optimized. They should each have a distinct URL, which will make them easy to share on Facebook, or Twitter, or IM, or email, etc. None of them will require mashups or anything fancy.

We should include opportunities for users to provide actionable feedback on these articles using a tool like 4Q (which is free). And we should continually optimize and refine those articles until we’re getting consistently positive feedback.

This doesn’t have to be a big thing (I just offended all my content strategist friends). There’s no need for a public dialog to enhance these articles. Rather, invite users to complete a brief survey specifically about the content they’ve encountered, and make sure someone is tasked to analyze and act upon the results of the survey. We could start piloting this in a month (as long as we dutifully ignore the Paperwork Reduction Act and existing cookie policy). If we’re successful, we could add more articles.

For a more in depth look at this approach, read Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics Success Measurement For Government Websites.

Candi Harrison’s post Time for a Re-Think of USA.gov argues the need to create content as well. Candi goes further and recognizes that this is an opportunity to “start downsizing the inventory of government websites and consolidating government web content.”

There’s a chance that this effort would displace traffic from other government sites. That would be great. Competition for traffic among sites could foster the creation of better content, or a successful USA.gov may free up agencies to focus on their missions rather than maintaining duplicative websites.

I think USA.gov should put citizens first, zealously #

Google’s first article of faith is “Focus on the user and all else will follow.” The Federal Web Managers Council echoed this sentiment when they published a white paper titled Putting Citizens First: Transforming Online Government (pdf) last November. If any team within government is poised to create the bold vision outlined in Putting Citizens First, it’s the team at USA.gov.

Every initiative carried out under the USA.gov name should be created with the interests of citizens in mind, based on what we know about them from research. In some instances, this will require writing in clearer language. In others, it will mean not creating a mashup just to create a mashup or starting a blog just to start a blog. This should be governed, as Putting Citizens First recommends, by USA.gov’s editor in chief.

I often feel like government agencies are caught in an arms race to have the glossiest blog, the most fans or followers (Mark Drapeau wrote a great piece on why focusing on fan numbers is misguided), or the most engaging transparent streaming citizen feed widget. This competition has created an explosion of opportunities to interact with the government online. This is probably a good thing, but it’s becoming overwhelming and I often feel that the average citizen (who Andrea DiMaio calls Joe Smith) is forgotten in all the excitement.

USA.gov has an opportunity to drop out of (or rise above) the arms race and be the sensemaking arm of government—the brand citizens recognize as the best source of official government information that matters to them, that makes sense, and that they can apply to their lives. I believe that if we can do that, all else will follow.

Foreign Policy posted the following statistics on their blog last week in a post titled Food for Thought (I’ve added the source information):

• Percentage of Americans who believe in angels: 55 (Washington Times article)
  Source: Baylor University “survey of 1,648 adults, who were asked 350 questions on their religious practices [in fall of 2007].”
• Percentage of Americans who believe in evolution: 39 (U.S. News & World Report article)
  Source: Gallup poll “based on telephone interviews with 1,018 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted Feb. 6-7, 2009.”
• Percentage of Americans who believe in anthropogenic global warming: 36 (Guardian UK article)
  Source: Pew poll “conducted Sept. 30-Oct. 4 among 1,500 adults reached on cell phones and landlines.”
• Percentage of Americans who believe in ghosts: 34 (MSNBC article)
  Source: Associate Press poll, “conducted Oct. 16-18, involved telephone interviews with 1,013 adults”
• Percentage of Americans who believe in UFOs: 34 (same MSNBC article as above)
  Source: Same as above

Most of the responses to the post I’ve encountered across the web have involved some variation of alarm or disgust at how stupid these Americans are. Some people are ashamed. Others are scared!

Come on.

My take: no one can comprehend the entirety of the human experience and not everyone is convinced by empiricism.

These are cosmic topics—difficult for almost anyone to grasp. Because I haven’t dedicated years of scholarship to evolution or anthropogenic global warming, my belief in them is buoyed mostly by faith in the scientific community. I’m ok with that. There’s plenty of evidence for me to trust science (like the computer I’m using to write this).

Other people place faith in other communities—perhaps ones that believe in angels or are skeptical of global warming. I’m ok with that too, even though I think they’re probably mistaken.

There’s value in considering how much these people want to believe in angels, and how much they want to believe that they’re not destroying the planet by living the way they always have. I say there’s value in this because it helps us understand a bit more about why people believe what they do. This understanding is essential if you’re interested in making policy and persuading people to support it.

This is, ultimately, my problem with the elitist responses to Foreign Policy’s post: scoffing at people who disagree with you will not help you win them over. It seems defeatist (if not dogmatic)—if you care about global warming, you should think seriously about how to persuade people to change their behavior. It’s hard—much harder than scoffing.

Also, I really want to believe in UFOs.

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Bonus reading:

Scientific American published a great little article by Michael Shermer in May called Why People Believe Invisible Agents Control the World that posits that the human mind may be predisposed to believe in supernatural forces like angels or “the government.”

You really should read the article, but the idea is summed up in two parts:

1. Humans often identify patterns where there are none. Shermer calls this “patternicity,” and he explains it’s origins like this:
   

   The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.

2. Humans also tend to assume that the patterns we observe (whether real or not) are the result of some intentional action. Shermer calls this “agenticity:”

   As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a theory of mind—the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others—we infer agency behind the patterns we observe in a practice I call “agenticity”: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. We believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness). Together patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.

Foreign Policy’s statistics reveal how patternicity and agenticity may be problematic for policymakers who try to base their decisions on empiricism—particularly in a democracy.

It’s also fun to watch parties on both sides of the global warming debate create “agents” out of each other—i.e. how the skeptics decry “the scientists” while global warming defenders fret about “the rubes,” as if either group were a cohesive and intentional entity.

Also, Nudge is a very fun book that examines why humans make poor decisions in the face of evidence and even past experience.

Destroyer at the Fun Fun Fun Fest on 7 Nov 2009

Shannon and I visited Austin last week to go to the Fun Fun Fun Fest with our friends Paige, Kevin, Michael, and Chris.

Destroyer (Dan Bejar) headlined the “Yellow” stage on the first night of the festival. He performed unaccompanied—singing and playing an acoustic guitar while hospital helicopters flew overhead. I interviewed him after the set:

What is your favorite Destroyer song?#

Bejar: I’m fond of “Certain Things You Ought to Know”

What is your favorite city?#

Bejar: …Lisbon is an amazing city.

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Big thanks to Paige for getting us into the fest.

Listen to “Certain Things You Ought to Know.”