Foreign Language Cyclopath Tweet Appears

Cyclopath is tweeted a few times a week, but never before in a foreign language. ig_fahrrad writes:

Klar, den Namen hat sich auch schon wer geschnappt: http://www.cyclopath.org/ #bikeculture @cyclopath

According to Babelfish, that's "Clearly, the names already who snatched itself". Hmm. "Someone's already taken the name"?

Dock

Each cabin at Timber Trail comes with a dock. I'm really proud of this image.

White Ash Cabin

On Saturday the 25th, we moved from Red Pine to White Ash, where we stayed until the end of the honeymoon on July 4th.






(Indeed, the interior shots were taken on a different day than the exterior ones.)

Lupine

Some lupine across the street from Timber Trail, our resort/lodge.

Review: Why We Make Mistakes

I read a truly remarkable book this weekend: Why We Make Mistakes, by Joseph T. Hallinan.

Everyone knows that people make mistakes. But, I hadn't realized how truly and grossly fallible we are. The book contains many easy-to-digest examples, like how doctors' sloppy handwriting kills thousands of people a year (because it leads to mistakes in dispensing drugs).

Here's a good summary quotation, from the conclusion:

There is an emerging consensus among some psychologists human decision making operates on two levels -- one more rational, one more visceral -- and that these two constantly trade off. [...] Many of our mistakes appear to happen when we are operating on one condition but think we are operating in the other. We may think, for instance, that our decision to take out a loan was dictated by financial considerations alone, only to learn that we were influenced by that picture of a pretty woman. [...]

If this emerging view is accurate, it helps explain why some types of error-prone behaviors are so hard to eliminate: we think we're being rational when we're being visceral, and vice versa. When a mistake does happen, we often end up blaming the wrong cause.... We don't learn from experience, because we're not sure which experience to learn from.

To make matters worse, [... often,] when we are right (and let's not forget, we are right a lot of the time), we tend to attribute our rightness to skill in whatever it is we're right about; but when we're wrong -- that we attribute to chance.

Fortunately, the book also offers advice on how you, personally, can reduce your error rate and become more effective at your tasks. Here is a summary:

• "Think small." Minor changes can have major effects.
• Calibrate yourself, to reduce overconfidence. Keep track of your successes and your failures, the things you choose to do and the things you chose not to do. Be aware that you are susceptible to hindsight bias -- i.e., you remember being more right that you actually were.
• "Think negatively." The devil's advocate will help protect you against overconfidence.
• Have uninvolved third parties check your work. People like you or close to the work may be subject to the same biases that you are and may make the same oversights.
  
• Multitasking doesn't work; distraction leads to more errors. Also, multitasking can make each of the multiple tasks go so much slower it would have been faster to simply tackle them sequentially.
  
• Use anecdotes with great care: they are extremely persuasive, much more so than systematically aggregated data, but they are not representative, as well-collected and well-analyzed data are. Thus, if anecdotes are not carefully selected (and perhaps even if they are), people will absorb the wrong lessons from your work.
• "Get some sleep." Insufficient sleep (and a huge fraction of Americans don't get enough sleep), even a modest sleep debt, leads to meaningfully reduced cognitive ability. (See Sleep Thieves, by Stanley Coren.)
  
• Be happy. Happy people are more creative and better problem solvers.
• Financial incentives are ineffective in generating better creative work.
  

The book reinforced the notion that's been growing for me as I acquire more and more education (22 years of it so far, oof): that however knowledgable or skilled I am, there is far, far, far more about which I am ignorant and incompetent, and it's often unclear where the boundaries lie. Thus, it leads to better work when I recognize and plan for the ignorance and incompetence -- when I work around or change my limits when I know where they are (the known unknowns), and work diligently and open-mindedly to discover the limits I may not yet be aware of (the unknown unknowns).

The book has a website and a blog.

Anyway, I strongly recommend that you go out and read this book, right away. It will make you a better person.

Panoramic View from Cabin Dock

This is the view from our 2nd cabin's dock. Saturday was cloudy and drizzly.

Scales poorly in Google Blogger; sorry; click for bigness.

North American Bear Center

On Saturday the 27th we went to the North American Bear Center, just east of Ely. It was awesome. Check out these pix.

Ted is a humongous male bear.

Lucky is a small male bear. Lucky and Ted played together for a long time (it wasn't fierce as this picture might suggest).

Ted has some hairless spots on his behind.

This is where the bears live. That's Honey.

Honey is a humongous female bear.

Ted and Lucky like this patch of mulch.

Honey is extremely fierce round looking.

Ted wants your peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Red Pine Cabin

Our first cabin (Wed-Fri) at Timber Trail was called "Red Pine".

Bunchberry

Bunchberry, a.k.a. Canada Dogwood.

Voyageur Outward Bound School

My sister worked as a wilderness instructor at Voyageur Outward Bound School for ten years. She and my mom were also in northern Minnesota for a few days, so we took a visit for nostalgia and a little canoeing.

This is the Pieh Building (pronounced "pay") which is the main administrative and gathering building.

Ely Parking Regulations Fail

The obscured portion reads "No Parking 2-6 AM" or something similar. From most reasonable angles it is impossible to even see that there's anything there at all.

Review: Gordy's Hi-Hat

Gordy's Hi-Hat in Cloquet, Minnesota is extremely delicious old fashioned fast food and should be a required stop on any of your expeditions up north. I recommend: burgers (bacon cheese and mushroom swiss particularly), shakes (get the small, it's plenty), fries, and fried cheese curds.

How to get there:

1. Take I-35 to Cloquet and exit onto Minnesota 33.
2. Go north a little ways.
3. Gordy's is on the top of the hill after the bridge, on the left.
   

Gordy's web site (appropriately awful) and a map.

Weekend To-Do List

The to-do list is a little late this weekend; sorry.

• Get married
  

Emerald Ash Borer's Come to Town

The emerald ash borer, a nasty invasive insect highly effective at killing ash trees, arrived in Minneapolis and St. Paul a few weeks ago. Above is one of the traps they're using to try to determine how far it's spread.

After Dutch elm disease killed off most of the elm trees in the city, they planted another monoculture, this time ash. Brilliant!

We don't have any ash on our property (anymore -- one rotted out and fell due to other reasons a couple of years ago), so we're not looking at any personal losses. But, they're very common in the neighborhood and all over the city.

We have one apple tree, one buckeye sapling a few years old (planted after the ash fell), and one catalpa sapling one year old. The neighbor has a great big maple which gives us some shade too.

A Dreary Morning

This is all that's left of the Hulk Hogan's Pastamania building and its neighbor to the north. The lots have been seeded with grass, so I suppose there's no plans to build anything in the near future.

Out and About