An explanation if you're new here. For some reason I do these 1-second-every-day videos every month. And I set aside a few hours every month to make a piece of music, which I stick on top. This, slightly late, is June's. And the track is called Believes.
Should you wish to examine my entire oeuvre you can listen on bandcamp or spotify.
July 12, 2021 | Permalink
"Knowledge, the young Bielsa learned, was something to be treasured; information something to be collected and categorised. ‘I am a student of football,’ he said. ‘I watch videos, read, analyse, but beneath all my technical talk the great principle is not to concede too much space.’ He subscribes to ‘over forty’ international sports magazines. He has a collection of thousands of videos and DVDs. When he turned up for his interview with Vélez Sarsfield in 1997, he brought fifty-one videos with him to explain his ideas to the club’s directors. When he took the job there, he insisted on an office with a computer with the capacity to take screenshots from videos – something that was revolutionary at the time. Once, when asked how he planned to spend the Christmas and New Year holiday, Bielsa explained that he intended to do two hours of physical exercise each day and spend fourteen hours watching videos."
"When he took the Argentina job in 1998, he decided, based on his experience in Mexico with Club América, a team owned by TV executives, that he would give no one-on-one interviews. He wanted the smallest provincial paper to have the same access as the biggest multinational television station and so decided to deal with the media only through press conferences. Given he would take questions from anybody and would answer in great and labyrinthine detail, his press conferences often went on for several hours but, having reached his conclusion as to what was fair, he maintained the practice."
"His philosophy, he said, could be broken down to four terms: ‘concentración permanente, movilidad, rotación y repenitización’. The first three are relatively easy to translate – permanent focus, mobility and rotation; the fourth, though, is a classic Bielsa term. In music, repenitización means the playing of a piece without having practised it first: it’s not extemporisation as such in that it involves sight-reading, and yet in football it clearly has some sense of improvisation. It carries a note of urgency, too. In a sense it’s the key to the whole Bielsa philosophy: it demands players repeatedly do things for the first time, a paradox that perhaps suggests the glorious futility of what he is trying to achieve. ‘The possible is already done,’ Bielsa said during his time at Newell’s. ‘We are doing the impossible.’"
"‘In the pause,’ the columnist Ezequiel Fernández Moores wrote in La Nacion, quoting a phrase common in the blues tradition of Argentina, ‘there is no music, but the pause helps to make the music.’"
(This, by the way, is backed up by science:
During communication, electric fish occasionally pause electric signal production
Pauses allow sensory neurons to recover from short-term synaptic depression
Pauses allow receiving fish to recover from behavioral habituation
Pauses increase sensitivity to communication signals that follow the pause)
"He went on to recount an anecdote about Charles Mingus walking into a bar to see an impetuous young drummer attempting a frenetic solo. ‘No,’ Mingus said, ‘it’s not like that. You have to go slowly. You have to say hello to people, introduce yourself. You never enter a room shouting. The same is true of music.’"
"‘That Ajax team always gave me the impression that they tried to and could do all of the following: play, sacrifice themselves as a team, shine individually and win games,’ Guardiola said. ‘All the players of different quality, without exception, were aware of their mission on the field of play. They demonstrated a tactical discipline and enormous capacity to apply all of that at just the right time.’"
"The essence of Guardiola’s philosophy was simple. ‘In the world of football there is only one secret: I’ve got the ball or I haven’t,’ he said. ‘Barcelona have opted for having the ball although it is legitimate for others not to want it. And when we haven’t got the ball we have to get it back because we need it.’"
"It is a truth – hinted at by Menotti’s dictum that the point of training is to increase the speed at which a team can be precise – that seems written in the internal rhythms of football: each new form is developed and modified, made faster, until it reaches a maximum pace at which a new innovation arises to replace it."
July 11, 2021 | Permalink
"The politics of Curtis's films do not bother me because his work does not display the consistent, perceptible act of choice that constitutes political engagement. If his movies were presented as some kind of fever dream collage, I might like them. Curtis vexes me because of his paranoid writing, introduces a soft and acidic coagulant method that a soft and acidic coagulant into any discussion. His commentaries destroy the cellular structure of ideas with a terminal vagueness that lulls me into a fitful sleep."
"Curtis reduces the viewer to a kind of flustered traffic cop, constantly yelling, "Wait!" His narration constantly leaps from a minor detail to a wide claim that sweeps everything off the table."
"Théorie Communiste's recent essay on conspiracism help us frame what Curtis is doing. "Just as anti-Semitism was the socialism of fools," the collective's authors write, “conspiracism is the class struggle of experts who are not situated anywhere in particular, not in society, nor along a politico-ideological spectrum.”"
July 10, 2021 | Permalink
"Warhol had a passion for perfume. In his memoir, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975), he describes how he switched perfumes all the time to preserve memories attached to each scent. If I’ve been wearing one perfume for three months, I force myself to give it up, even if I still feel like wearing it, so whenever I smell it again it will always remind me of those three months. I never go back to wearing it again; it becomes part of my permanent smell collection"
"Last year, I bought two bottles of bubbly for each employee at the Happiness Research Institute and asked them to write down which milestones they would have to pass in order to open them. So far, we have toasted weddings, finished reports and surpassing our arch-enemy think tank in terms of followers on social media."
"HAPPY MEMORY TIP: COLLECT OBJECTS THAT ARE A MANIFESTATION OF YOUR STORIES"
"In 1996, Arthur Aron, professor in psychology at Stony Brook University, New York, came up with thirty-six questions that create intimacy between strangers – questions that would make people fall in love. Several of the questions revolve around our memories: What is your most treasured memory? What is your most terrible memory? Tell your life story in as much detail as possible in four minutes … What is the greatest accomplishment of your life? If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be? Share an embarrassing moment in your life … Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s childhood?"
"According to the inventor of the questions, ‘one key pattern associated with the development of close relationships among peers is sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personal self-disclosure’."
July 09, 2021 | Permalink
"He got his scholarship to Haberdashers’ Aske’s. His well-thumbed brochure boasted a twenty per cent Oxbridge acceptance rate. But what it takes to get there isn’t what you need once you’ve arrived."
Natasha Brown. Assembly
July 08, 2021 | Permalink
I listened to this podcast: an interview about Electrifying the home, and America, with Saul Griffiths and Arch Rao.
Griffiths has a great ability to speak in rules of thumb. Averages. Things that give you a sense of scale, of orders of magnitude.
I've realised that, although I've worked in energy for a while, I don't naturally think in those kinds of rules of thumb.
I'm also trying to insulate/electrify an old, leaky house in the East Midlands. Working out how best to do it. Should I get solar? Should I get heat pumps? Should I get cavity wall insulation? Do my walls have cavities?
This it turns out, is not easy. And some of that is because everyone is an expert in their own little field but very few people are good at putting it in context or explaining it to non-experts.
Here, from the podcast, is the kind of things Griffiths says / knows :
"The average US household today has two cars in the garage that burn petrol or gasoline or diesel, and it has natural gas heating and it uses about 25 kWh per day of electrical energy. If you electrify both of the vehicles in that household you'll add about another 25 kWh per day to the load of that house. And if electrify the heat you'll add about another 20 kWh again. For the majority of US homes, and this is true around the world in fact, when we electrify...you're going to double or triple the loads in that house."
"Rooftop solar is now providing 5 cent per kWh electricity in Australia"
So, I'm trying to research for myself, and document here, equivalent rules of thumb for the UK. I suspect looking it up and working it out will help me remember and understand.
Here's a start:
Ovo have a handy post that says "the average household uses 3,731 kWh per year". That's based on BEIS data. (From this page, I think). They then immediately start caveating about averages and types of home and all that, which is fair enough. But I'm going to stick at the higher level, because I just want a sense of things. And because, conveniently, 3,731 kWh per year equates to, roughly, 10 kWh per day.
(As a quick check, if you Google "how much electricity does a uk house use per day" the snippet you get says 8 - 10 kWh. There's a lot of SEOing going on in this answer. And lots of people re-using / re-writing the same content. But this seems to be an acceptable rule of thumb.)
If you want help visualising that, Arcadia have a good page, 1 kWh is enough to operate two desktop computers (or six laptops) during a standard workday. Or, if you do 65mph on a motorway, you can drive about 5 miles on 1 kWh.
According to BEIS (and everyone in SEOland) the average cost for 1 kWh of electricity was 17.2p in 2020.
And, according to this page, apparently, the fuel mix of the UK grid means that 1 kWh of electricity produces 0.233 kg of CO2e. That's about the weight of a hamster or two blueberry muffins.
So, rules of thumb:
UK households use about 10 kWH of electricity per day.
That's enough to drive about 50 miles in an EV
It'll cost you about £2.
And produce about 2kg of CO2e.
Obviously if I've got all this horribly wrong, please let me know.
July 07, 2021 | Permalink
"In Arabic, there are 12 levels of friendship. Most of our 'friends' are level 5 or below, and many of us don't have a single level 12 friend "
"A simple thing that makes teams better: "psychological safety," the feeling that I should speak up on my team, even if people disagree. It is linked to innovative team success at all levels. Plus, it is something that leaders can instill. Here's a guide"
July 06, 2021 | Permalink
"Every time his wonky Zoom connection freezes, I worry he'll find something more interesting to do - a hazard of footballer interviews. But each time he returns engaged, his eyes darting. Footballers who want to talk are wonderful interviewees. They fizz with energy and are fascinated by what they do."
July 05, 2021 | Permalink
(This is what I've just sent to people who clicked on the 'subscribe by email link above. Posted for a sense of completeness.)
hello,
As a reminder (again) you’re receiving this (probably) because you clicked on a link on my blog marked ‘Subscribe by email’. And then, mostly, nothing happened.
Because I didn’t write many posts and I very rarely thought they were worth emailing to anyone.
This is a warning about what to expect now.
I’m trying to create more order and regularity in my content production. I’ve convinced myself that this will make me write more, because when there’s a ‘plan’ it will feel like I have less choice. I’m doing this because:
a) I enjoy blogging
b) It seems I’ve got a book coming out in November and I’m terrified of negative reaction on social media so I’m thinking of closing all my accounts and for promotional reasons there probably has to be something instead. (I’m not worried because it’s some vile polemic, just because it’s a thing in the world and therefore some people won’t like it and will feel obliged to tell me.)
The plan is this: I’ll do a post everyday. They will often be tiny and inconsequential. Just a link or a picture or something. Like in the old days. Once a week, probably on a Sunday, I will combine them all into an email and send them to you. At that point you’ll throw your hands in the air and unsubscribe. That is the correct response. Especially if you don’t want to buy a book about PowerPoint.
ADMINISTRATIVE NOTE: In case you want to get all your unsubscribing in at once I also have another newsletter. I’m not sure why. That goes out on the first Sunday or every month. It contains 5 short things that might be interesting.
(I’m also going to put all this on my blog, but I won’t email it to you again, that would start to get annoyingly fractal.)
I’ll start all this next week.
That’s it. What a wild ride.
July 04, 2021 | Permalink