As I biked the last five miles of the thirty that I did on Saturday, I thought about what people’s motivations are for following through, on anything.

Well, actually no.

At that point, I was thinking more about whether to go home or to an emergency medical clinic, because I wasn’t sure if my legs would fall off.  But after I regained limb sensation, I really did think about what made people successful.

A year ago, even five months ago, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.  In fact, when I went bike riding for the first time with my parents last spring,  I barely made it 10 miles:

Internal dialogue here: I hate life.

But more importantly, I didn’t want to.  I went along because my parents asked me to, but I wasn’t really into it. I wasn’t interested in riding bikes and nothing could make me interested until I decided it was something I wanted to do for myself.

This spring, I  started to seriously work out again, exhausted and frustrated at my post-wedding weight gain (wherein post-wedding means almost two years by this point) and my inability to get back in shape.

I still don’t have healthy eating down, and haven’t lost more than five pounds, and even that fluctuates up and down.  But I do feel better and have possibly gained muscle as a result of running 2-3 times a week, training for 5ks, and every other weekend or so, biking. And people have remarked that I do look like I’ve lost weight, so maybe I have.

from the Mount Vernon Trail this past Saturday.
The beautiful post-storm Potomac River, swollen with rains and toxic runoff.

So, how do you make someone want to do something? You can’t.  You can never motivate someone unless they are self-motivated.  Basic economics even has an axiom that economists use as a base: people are motivated by self-interest.   As a rule-of-thumb, it works.

How does someone become self-motivated?  The key for me is the willpower muscle. Magazines and psychological studies often tell us that we are motivated by rewards, such as a manicure after a week of weight loss or a trip to Starbucks after the gym. Or water and rest breaks halfway through a workout or study session.   But none of that works for me.  I lose all of my concentration and focus on the reward instead of the process of obtaining it.  I really have to just do it.

And once I just do it, it becomes easier and easier.  It’s hard to describe what the willpower muscle feels like, but if you’ve ever gritted your teeth and accomplished something without distractions, you know.  For me, it’s a firm, empty feeling in my gut which nothing can get past. There is no motivation to follow it except that it’s there and the more I push against it, the stronger it becomes and allows me to do what I need to get done.

This muscle used to be crazy  in college when I was up until 12 doing homework and then had three events to organize for my various groups the next day.  It’s  been in hiding for the past couple of years since I haven’t applied to grad school yet and spend many a night watching Jersey Shore instead of, say, thumbing through higher math books.  But this biking thing, this running thing, is putting it back into shape.

And I have to say, I’m really glad to have it back because it’s one of the things that makes me, me.

Biking past the marshes in Alexandria.
Grasses as far as the eye can see.
Also, probably polluted runoff the eye can’t see.

Almost every day that I walk to the Metro, I see this guy:

And he always is in such a hurry to get to work, like he is power walking instead of just walking to the Metro at 8:00 am.   And I can never figure out if he’s genuinely that enthusiastic about his work, or if he’s rushing because he’s caught up in the frenetic worry of his job.

On the one hand, I think it’s exciting to love your job so much.  On the other, if he is of the latter variety, it’s really sad.  I hope that when I’m his age, I’m more excited about my family than my job.  While my career is definitely a priority for me and something that is important to my sanity and well-being, it will never be something for which I sacrifice my leisure and family time.

For example, while I enjoy working hard and being challenged,  I would never want a job that had me traveling 100% of the time, or one where I had to work overtime 50 weeks of the year, because by the time I’m his age and look back at my life, I don’t want a world of Mondays, e-mails, and conference meetings to be what I take out of it.  I want it to be these and these and these and these and these things.

Is there a balance, especially for women?  Yes, but it is almost as much work as the work itself.

After our 5k last weekend. She will outrun a bear.

Mr. B’s mom was casually rolling meat into little balls for kebab on Saturday as she asked me, “You write a lot, right?”

I told her that, sure, I wrote, if writing delusioned novel drafts and blog posts about Nutella counted.

“Well, I’ve been thinking about a problem that needs some public awareness.”

“So, the other day, I was in the bathroom and I heard some noises from the person in the stall next to me.  First it was just mumbling, then it was more like laughing and yelling.  When we both came out, it turned out that she was on a cell phone.  Naturally, as she was gesticulating, she didn’t have enough coordination to wash her hands.  And it’s not the first time something like this has happened.  I’ve heard people take conference calls in there..”

“Well, I work from home usually, and so do some of my coworkers,” my mom chimed in, “and I hear babies, dogs, everything in the background on calls from time to time.  It’s not as bad, but it’s still funny.”

Other various people mentioned that they had heard, among other things, toilets flushing during interviews, car stereos, and, on one occasion, a horse.

It’s not the other things so much as phone calls in the bathroom that bother Mr. B’s mom.

Her question is:  why do people [according to a study last year (the validity of which I almost immediately question) 42% of American adults] do this?

Note: Book for review kindly provided by HarperCollins.

I first heard about this book from Nathan of Flowing Data (a data visualization blog I read semi-religiously) and I knew I had to read it.  I love data displayed in any form, and in fact, part of my job at work is helping people to visualize data in a way that makes sense to them (although I don’t get to play around with pretty graphics as much.)

David writes a blog called Information is Beautiful from whence some of the data for the book emerged.  The book is truly beautiful, and it is obvious, and not just from his website, that the author put his life into it. The colors are as amazing as the cover looks and some of the concepts are ones I would never think about blending together to provide images.  Some of my favorites were the spouses of dictators, food colorings linked to unpleasant health defects, and a timeline of global media scare stories, which contrasts how much media attention the story got with how many people they actually killed (ex: Swine Flu.) And, I love the title. I am also thrilled that McCandless included the software he used in compiling the book so that I can play around with it in a similar manner for data display.

Brazil's rainforest in 30 years

That being said,  I take issue with a couple of things in the book, aside from the printing errors in this current edition.  One is that, after a year, many of these topics will become irrelevant.  For example, he has a list of internet virals that goes up until 2008, many of which I don’t even know, even though I practically live online.  Will he have to update this edition next year to include a fresh list of internet virals? Will internet virals even still be relevant next year?  I often like to judge a book by how relevant it will still be 5 years from now, and unfortunately, this doesn’t pass the test, although it is internet-centric, which maybe says that I shouldn’t hold it up to this metric.

McCandless also tends to belay his political leanings, as shown in this image out of the book below, which completely simplifies both left and right wing beliefs, and a chart he has later on in the book about how much land in the West Bank remains Israeli/Palestinian, as well as numerous, numerous charts about climate change, the hot topic of the day.  There is also a table about the good things that happened during Bush’s two terms in office with the title “The good of Bush: Stuff that improved under Dubya.” I think, many times, not having been accustomed to his work before, I’ve become very guarded and cynical when he comes across as playful in what is, to me, supposed to be an objective presentation of data.  Although, as many will tell you, even solid data is hard to present objectively.

Overall, brilliant eye candy, but remain alert.

Related on the Blog:
Jon Stewart, America’s Most-Trusted Newscaster
Scenster, Hipster, Hippie
My Own Attempts at Data Visualization (are awful)

Vicki’s note: I decided to take down the previous post I had because, upon reflection, it wasn’t consistent with my website content and additionally, I can see it leading to long discussions of the type that I don’t necessarily want to have on this blog.

As an analyst, I sometimes look at code, be it in SAS or SQL, from projects past.  What I’ve found to be most indicative of good code (and  actually any past project even unrelated to programming) is, most importantly, documentation of past tasks. This is 100 times more important if you are leading global warming studies that could be the cause of billions of dollars spent in policy implementations.  I know little about Fortran, but I still think this is an interesting take on the scandal that most news people don’t talk about (and not just because Mr. B peels oranges for me on a daily basis.)

CC azrainman via Flickr

You might have heard about the big Climate Gate scandal of CRU’s emails and software being leaked to the public over the past two weeks. Everyone, from John Stewart to Fox News, is highlighting passages from these emails and pointing out damning quotes which seem to show that global warming is a myth.

However what most people don’t hear about is the software that crunched the temperature data to actually give the climate models that scientist use to make their predictions. This software is written in an almost-defunct programming language called Fortran- and it shows.

Fortran is a general purpose programming language designed by IBM in 1950, for mathematical computations. It became the language of choice of many fields such as engineering, scientific research, and economic research. This was a great leap forward in innovation and allowed many computations on a scale that was never feasible before by other means.

If it’s so great, why isn’t it used now?

FORTRAN—the “infantile disorder”—, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use. — Edsger W. Dijkstra

FORTRAN’s tragic fate has been its wide acceptance, mentally chaining thousands and thousands of programmers to our past mistakes. — Edsger W. Dijkstra

This type of thinking is bad for each new generation of economists and scientists.

Why was the climate study data written in Fortran? Probably because whoever wrote it, knew it and was too lazy to learn something new, by using the reasoning from (1) (2) and (3) as an excuse.

The second issue is not only that Fortran is inefficient, the code also lies.   Here is some actual code from the project.

The moral of the story is, if you have important code that affects how people will live their
lives by basing their decisions on it, make sure it is easy to understand and allows you to concentrate on the problem you’re trying to answer instead of it fighting you and your colleagues with technical issues not related ot the goal. Additionally, make sure you don’t lie about it.