I am pleased to announce that I will be returning to academics. I have accepted a position as an economics professor at a local college. To celebrate, I decided to take this "Breakfast Club"-style photo at a local football field. The original scene is below for reference.
It will be good to teach again. I've missed it, and I've missed being in a college environment. It seems to keep you young. I start next week!
The basement flooded a bit, so I had to move the computer upstairs to safety. I will probably be offline for a few days until things get situated.
I am in the process of starting a new job, so my energies are being directed there right now. Right now, I am a busy bee, but things should hopefully ease up soon. Speaking of bees, here's a Paleolithic cave painting of honey gathering:
Finally, I'm on vacation for a few days. I haven't had a real day off since I moved cross-country last year. It's good to have a chance to relax for a few days.
Hopefully, I'll be able to get a few posts in, but right now I'm content to just lounge around and take it easy.
I think one of the biggest disappointments in reaching adulthood is realizing that getting older does not give a person some special wisdom. For example, when I was a kid, I always thought those old guys smoking cigars at the bowling alley were pretty cool. Now I realize they were just... old guys at the bowling alley smoking cigars. Men who may or may not have had family problems, substance problems, etc.
Unfortunately, neither getting older, getting married, or even having kids automatically injects wisdom into a person. But I guess if adults told kids that, then it would probably create some problems in the social order. Instead, kids are told about how great things will be when they grow up.
If anything, I see people getting worse as they get older, not better. Less creative, less flexible, and less athletic. There are exceptions of course, and everyone would like to be one of these exceptions, but in general I see a trend for people to get worse.
Except for rational thinking, it seems like almost all other qualities are amplified in youth and then gradually fade away during aging. People usually become better at solving day-to-day problems as they age, but this is more due to experience than anything else. In evolutionary terms, the mating sweepstakes is in the younger years, so it makes sense that this is when certain qualities would be at their peak.
I absolutely love papers like this one(pdf), which shows how female mate choice is influenced by male sports participation. The paper seeks to validate the common idea that male athletes are more successful at mating than non-athletes. The study finds this to be true, but it takes things a step further. It goes on to show that male athletes who are successful in team sports do even better than male athletes in solo sports.
Why so? The authors believe that team sports showcase other qualities besides pure athletic ability, like leadership, teamwork, and role acceptance. It is thought that these characteristics would carry over to real-life, producing men who are better providers and parents. Interesting!
The paper also briefly mentions how this may drive the crazy behavior you see among the parents of some young athletes. If better athletic performance increases mating opportunities, then in an evolutionary sense the parents actually benefit (in terms of inclusive fitness) if they can propel their male sons to greater athletic heights. Of course, all this is not really going on at the conscious level, but it is being driven by underlying evolutionary mechanisms.
I've been meaning to post about this funny incident I had at the gym recently. I was doing some squats and I ended up working in with a few athletes from the local university. I think they are on the basketball team, though I'm not sure.
They had brought along a friend who was obviously new to lifting - he wasn't in shape and didn't really seem to know what was going on. When it was his turn to squat, one guy loaded up the bar with weight for him, then said, "don't fall down," and walked away. That was the sum of his guidance.
Of course, this new guy almost bit the dust on the first rep. I thought I'd have to step in and bail this guy out, because his friends weren't even paying attention to what was happening. The new guy managed a few reps with minimal depth and then racked the bar.
I don't think these friends will win any "personal trainer of the year" awards!
Sometimes I wonder how far you can go with a website. I enjoy blogging and hopefully others enjoy the site, but it seems limited at times. For myself, I really only check a few other websites on a regular basis. So I shouldn't somehow expect that everyone is going to always drop what they're doing and race to my website.
Part of the issue is content. You can post information, and that's all well and good, but that doesn't always drive interest. I can provide lots of information about eating Paleo and exercising, but again I'm just not sure if that's the highest thing on a reader's priorities list.
So what do people want the most? Inspiration? Motivation? Pictures and videos are always more exciting than just plain text, so that can help things. But it seems like there should be a way to turn a website into something bigger, something more valuable. How to do this, I haven't quite figured out yet.
I have been reading up on the subject of investing. I think the subject is interesting, and I have been trying to learn more about it. I have read a few books on "value investing", and they immediately clicked with me. This school of thought started with Benjamin Graham, and continued on with Warren Buffett and others.
The first thing I learned is that if you don't know how to play the game, you're better off just putting your money in an index fund like Vanguard and hitting the snooze button for a few decades. It's boring, but it's the right strategy if you don't know what you're doing.
For the more ambitious, value investing lays out the principles of buying good stocks at cheap prices and then holding them for the long-term. Again, this isn't necessarily exciting, but academic studies shows it beats the other strategies over the long run.
I think a lot of the short-term stock trading is just gambling. People like to gamble, and the stock market gives people another way to do it. I read stories about people who blew their whole savings on a stock tip from some self-proclaimed expert. I am just in awe of this.
You would have to pry a dollar from my cold, dead hand to get it into a stock chosen by one of these "expert investors". Most of these guys appear to be crooks who are just peddling books and nonsense, or trying to make money off of commissions. I'll take my chances with thinking for myself.
