The full title here is Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, and between them the two authors, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, can claim a substantial amount of expertise in psychology, economics, law, and public policy. The stated goal of the book is to take lessons from these four areas and squish them into a concept that the authors dub "libertarian paternalism." The idea is that as libertarians the two believe in free information and free choice in all things public and private, but as students of behavioral economics and psychology they know that most people, most of the time, simply make bad decisions on account of our human nature. This is a book about how to fix that. Or at least improve things relative to the status quo.

Specifically, Thaler and Sunstein propose a series of "nudges" that spring from the way that choices are presented, framed, and informed. Early on they give the example of Carolyn, a fictional director of food services for a public school. Carlyn wants the students at her school to eat healthy, but she has limited control over menus so she can't just ban unhealthy food --nor does she necessarily think she should. But what she can do is nudge children into making healthier choices by changing how food is presented and what information kids are given about their choices. Putting carrots at eye level while chips are relegated to the bottom shelf, for example, would translate to more carrots being eaten. Or including milk with the value meal by default, even if kids can request to substitute soda for free. It's not a matter of forcing (read: legislating) students to eat their damn carrots, but rather creating what the authors call a helpful choice architecture that encourages the students to make better decisions on their own by side stepping (or even capitalizing on) well known foibles in human decision-making.

After a few introductory chapters to explore these foibles (think anchoring, framing, availability heuristic, loss aversion, status quo bias, etc.), Thaler and Sunstein run with the idea by showing how to create choice architectures that favor their libertarian paternalism approach to public policy and personal choices in everyday life. Specifically, they show how to nudge people into saving more money for retirement, investing money better, choosing a better prescription drug plan, increasing organ donation, protecting the environment, choosing the right school for their kids, and more. I have to admit that I enjoyed the early chapters on psychology and behavioral economics more than the later chapters, which became more nakedly political, but there are a lot of really solid ideas in here, even if they are of varying levels of practicality.

The authors also have a great style. They keep things friendly, funny, and engaging, with the occasional vignette, figure, or photograph to illustrate their points as needed. I was rarely bored, even when talk turned to traditionally tiresome subjects like 401(k) savings, prescription drug plans, and fuel economy. And the book is full of thoughtful insights on how human psychology plays into everyday decisions and, more importantly, how to avoid those kinks in the human brain that often lead to poor decisions about things that really matter.

Okay, back on track and trending in the right direction. I had been worrying that this would be another bad weigh in.

Graph:

And here's a picture. Happy St. Patrick's Day. God, why are my pants hitched halfway up to my armpits?

I noticed something about the graph. Notice how it regularly spikes. Those spikes? Seven days apart. Every Monday. Every one of those spikes is a Monday weigh-in. The implication is pretty clear: I do fine when I'm at work and I have little choice but to eat what I packed. I could go out or go to a vending machine, but that's kind of a pain. At home on the weekends, though, I'm more likely to snack and eat bigger meals at breakfast and lunch. Apparently.

So, here's my new mini-goal: No spike come this Monday. I'm counting every calorie again to help make this happen, but I want to see that green line smoothed out next Thursday.

As you may be able to see from the picture above, Sam's latest mania is Batman, fueled by our semi-regular evening sessions of Lego Batman. Like any good geek, she immediately clued into the fact that the best part of the whole Batman thing is the rogue's gallery. Pictured above, from left to right, are Catwoman, The Riddler, and Man-Bat. She had also drawn Joker, Clayface, Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn, Two-Face, and Killer Moth, and Mad Hatter. The Poison Ivy one was actually really elaborate, with plants, flowers, and stuff.

Mandy's new obsession, you can see, is scribbling on her own face with magic marker and then saying "ROWR! I'M A CAT!" Which make Sam mad, because she always wants to be Catwoman.

Gearbox's Borderlands is kind of a weird bird as far as first person shooters go. In some ways it smacks of a game that wasn't quite 100% finished, and you get the inkling that its publisher just jettisoned it out into the wild, knowing full well that it might flop to the ground and die. It's supposed to have role-playing elements like quests and NPCs, but the world of Pandora seems anemic and sterile, lacking in people to talk to, things to interact with, and stuff to do that's not shooting bandits or local fauna until they die. There are NPCs standing around, but they're soulless and by and large don't do anything other than utter the same stock phrase. Most of the "quests" involve murdering bandits or collecting Pandora's equivalent of Goretusk livers. The nifty sci-fi meets wild West vibe aside, it's not very engaging.

And yet, somehow, Borderlands manages to be a ton of fun, due in part to funny writing but mostly thanks to the gameplay. The combat mechanics of aiming, shooting, and triggering special abilities just feels right, and it took a long time before it got to feeling old. The leveling up mechanic and 4 character classes also gave you some fun tactical choices to make, with different buildouts and class choices giving you many options on how to approach shooting things in the face (I myself played a soldier with emphasis on building up my deployable Scorpio turret). The "bajillions of guns" loot mechanic where the game randomly cobbles together weapons by combining different attributes is a bit oversold (I found it too mentally taxing to evaluate slight differences in weapons across so many factors), but it does add a nice incentive to keep checking treasure chests and an occasional payoff when you score something clearly better than what you've currently got.

One other design philosophy that I feel compelled to comment on is that Gearbox apparently started with a goal of making everything player friendly and then sprinted past that goal line into "crazy" territory. But crazy in a good way. There's ample fast travel options, for example, and vending machines are conveniently if absurdly stationed in the wilds wherever you need them. Even getting gunned down by your foes barely rates as a minor annoyance, as you just respawn nearby and only have to take a small hit to a bank account that grows to obscene balances early in the game. It's not very challenging, but it is FUN, and I'm all on board for that.

Feh. Bad week, not sure what else to say. The culprit is, as usual, diet. I really need to rein that in and see what I can do over the next 7 days.

Graph.

I was running late this morning, so I didn't grab a picture yet. I'll try to snap one tonight and update this post. If not, just use your imagination

And now, I'm going to get ready to head to the gym.

The girls dug into one of the cabinets the other day and decided to ROCK OUT. And in this case, "rocking out" involved Sam's bellowing songs about princesses and Batman while Mandy beat the ever living daylights out of a tiny toy piano. Rolling Stone has been notified.

Two pounds down and 5-day average weight down a pound. Hopefully, this is the end of my plateau. Getting under 175 pounds is a big psychological milestone for me, since that's the weight I was when back in grad school when I was lifting weights A LOT and was probably the most fit I've ever been. Only admittedly a lot less of my current weight is from muscle. Alas. Up next: college weight!

Graph!

Picture! I need to learn to smile in these things.

I really upped the intensity of my workouts this week in addition to tightening up diet. I'm trying to do 10k treadmill runs three times a week, with eliptical workouts in between to let my legs recover. This has meant getting up early enough to get into work by 7:30 so I can leave at 4:00 and have a 60 minute workout instead of a 30 minute one. I wish my gym offered a spinning class or something at a time that worked for me; the "Cardio Blast" stuff they offer would probably indeed blast me, but just doesn't look like it's for me.

The diet part of the eqation has been helped out by the fact that Geralyn has committed to giving up candy for Lent, and is herself dieting and abstaining from baking cookies, cakes, pies, muffins, cupcakes, breads, or other such hidiously delicious things with which she usually keeps our kitchen stocked. So we have all been snacking either better or not at all. The price of progress.

Slow week this time. We're all ready for Spring so that I can usher the kids outdoors and they can do something more physical than playing Lego Batman. The kids are so starved for exercise that they ask me to "play chase" just about every evening, which usually involves me pretending to be a villain from Lego Batman and chasing them around the living room. Only Mandy occasionally latches on to the fact that Batman does not flee from his foes, and she'll run straight up to me and punch me as hard as she can in the crotch. And with that, Mr. Freeze or the Joker goes down. It's all very America's Funniest Home Videos.

Meh. I seem to have hit a plateau already, as my weight isn't any different than what it was 7 days ago (though my running 5-day average did go down by over a pound). Valentine's day treats probably didn't help. Well, in my experience the thing to do with plateaus is to keep on grinding until you get past them, so that's what I'll do.

Graph!

Picture!

One thing I have been doing really well with is my workouts, which makes the plateau kind of aggravating. I've been running on the treadmill, trying to get ready to run a 5K run this April. I don't think it's going to be a problem, as on Monday I surprised myself by running, nonstop, for 10 kilometers (about 6.2 miles) with a pace of 5:30 per kilometer. According to my calculations, that 10k run ate up 844 calories which is like HALF my daily calorie goal. Two days later I ran again and hit 8 kilometers before having to cut it short and go home because I was already late for dinner. I can't wait for the weather to warm up so that I can try my hand (foot?) at running outdoors on the ground.

I could tell myself that maybe I'm putting on muscles in my legs and that's accounting for the plateau in weight loss. ...If that didn't sound like something that someone trying to fool himself would say.

Boy, some delightful behavior out of my girls this week. Geralyn made a big batch of chocolate-covered strawberries for Valentine's Day and the leftovers were put in a large tupperware container for future enjoyment. That evening after we had retired to the basement I went upstairs to investigate suspicious pitter-pattering. I had just made it to the base of the stairs leading to the top floor of the house when I heard a thunk and saw out of the corner of my eye a pink flash going from the landing up the rest of the steps.

The thunk, it turns out, was the entire tupperware of a dozen or more chocolate covered strawberries, with which Mandy was trying to abscond to her room before she decided to dump her stolen cargo and make a run for it. I can only imagine Geralyn's apoplectic reaction if I had been just a few seconds later and it wasn't until the next morning that Mandy was discovered, in bed but smeared with chocolate and surrounded by sticky strawberry stems.

Then the next night Sam did her part by taking what seemed to be several gallons of bath water and relocating them to the bathroom floor with the aid of a bucket. I discovered the ensuing quagmire about the same time that Geralyn was freaking out in the basement on account of all the water following the laws of gravity and pouring out of the downstairs air ducts.

Of course, I shouldn't sell the girls short. For every bit of facepalm-worthy mischief they manufacture, they do something else really sweet. Sam has gotten to where she picks up her toys every night without being asked and will toss out "I love you" comments out of the blue. And the other night after I had turned the TV off and played with both of them for an hour or so Mandy looked up at me and said "That was fun playing blocks with you. You're a really good daddy."

And folks, it doesn't get much better than that.

Pretty unimpressive week. I either lost half a pound or no weight at all, depending on if you look at this morning's weight or the 5-day running average. I had a bad weekend involving Chex cereal mix and the dreaded "Donut Sunday." The latter is our church's monthly, free all-you-can-eat donut bonanza. Not to go all "Cathy" on you, but donuts are my favorite food. I won't say anything as untruthful as "I can't help myself" but the fact is that if you set a platter of them down in front of me, I don't want to help myself. I'll eat them until I literally feel ill and at the time I'll think it the best of all possible situations. Alas.

Chart!

You can see how much I'm bouncing around, but at least there's a downward trend there. If you squint and kind of tilt your head. I'll make next week a better one. Thank God that Donut Sunday is only once a month.

And picture!

Half a pound doesn't show up much in pictures. So for comparison's sake, here is an average six year old girl who insisted on trying out the camera's remote control:

I think she weighs like four pounds. Five tops. Wait, that just makes me look heavier, doesn't it?

I have to say, I'm thinking about bringing this whole series of parenting updates to a close. There doesn't seem to be much energy in them, and at least Sam is getting old enough that while I've long ago passed the point of etching all kinds of embarrassing things about her on the Inernet's gleaming surface, it's still starting to feel a little rude to blog about her.

Which isn't to say that I wouldn't want to do some semi-regular blogging about parenting and my kids. And honestly I still think it would be totally cool to continue to photograph my kids at least once a week every week until they're grown up. You could make a hell of a photo album for each of them as high school graduation gifts and it would be priceless. But I may change the format a bit. I dunno. I'm going to think about it.

Ah, back on pace. I've lost 4.5 pounds in the last week, which makes up for last week's gain and then some. And not only that, it takes me past the "10 pounds lost" milestone after just 5 weeks. Apparently working out regularly and not snacking on calorie-dense foods is important to weight loss. Who knew?

Chart!

Very squiggly. And here's me this morning:

So, let's talk about weighing. People sometimes tell me that you shouldn't weight yourself every day because your weight fluctuates naturally and you can get depressed when you stay the same or even gain weight the morning after what you considered a good day. Poppycock. It's true that your weight fluctuates (look at the green line in that graph above), but the regular feedback motivates me more than it demotivates, and if I have a bad (or a particularly good) weigh-in I remember that the orange, 5-day average line up there is what matters more.

I weigh myself every morning. I stumble into the bathroom, use the toilet, get nekkid, and then step on the scale. Same conditions every morning, which removes many sources of random error variance, such as what you're wearing and how full your bladder or stomach is. Sure, it doesn't eliminate the variance in your weight not attributable to diet and exercise, but it gets close enough. Heck, one dieting hack I've started doing is weighing myself in the evening after dinner, thinking "Okay, if I don't snack on anything else for the rest of the night, the laws of physics demand that I will weigh no more --and maybe less-- than this in the morning." It works.

Unlike Outliers, The Tipping Point, or Blink, Malcom Gladwell's newest book What the Dog Saw isn't an examination of one topic cut from whole cloth, but rather an eclectic mix of articles that originally appeared in The New Yorker. In it he examines everything from why it's impossible to improve on Ketchup, why Enron's failure was a mystery but not a puzzle, what makes for a good dog trainer, and what FBI criminal profilers have in common with psychics. It's good stuff.

The format of What the Dog Saw actually highlights one of the things I really like about Gladwell's style: he takes a single interesting idea and then dives really deep with it, meticulously building towards a conclusion by snapping together what at first appear to be wholly disparate elements but by the end form a strong pattern. What do homeless people in Reno have to do with the Rodney King Riots? What does the song "Last Christmas" by Wham! have to do with accusations of plagiarism on Broadway? What do the late John F. Kennedy Jr. and (almost) tennis superstar Jana Novatna have in common? Gladwell pulls them together and makes it riveting despite the fact that the language and tone he uses in his writing is usually pretty tame and without a whole lot of personality.

This is not to say, however, that Gladwell isn't completely without his shortcomings, and indeed his habit of fitting pieces together can sometimes be revealed to be a flaw in his writing if you're after a complete picture. Specifically, he seems to sometimes selectively pick what research he reports on and who he talks to, possibly in the service of forming a coherent and simplified story. This only really became evident to me when I a story on one of the topics where I somewhat approach being an expert: the use of general intelligence to predict job performance. Not only does Gladwell conflate intelligence with "talent" (a term that probably has different meanings to different people), he sells cognitive ability short by deriding its small (in absolute terms) relationship with job performance without giving consideration to the piles of research saying that while the correlation isn't a perfect 1.0, it's still really high relative to other predictors like emotional intelligence.

On the other hand, Gladwell's excellent essay on the benefits of structured interviews should be required reading for all HR managers and anyone involved in interviews. Go read it here. If you liked it, you'll probably like the rest of the book as well.

Not much happening this week. I did get to spend some one-on-one time with Mandy thanks to some overscheduling of Daddy-Daughter classes, and Yoga. We went to the former. This is nice because I often feel like I didn't get the same foundation with her that I got with Sam when she was the only sibling. It's also odd how Mandy is often a different person when it's just the two of us. She's much more affectionate with me and more likely to engage with me in play instead of doing her faux snob routine. That she apparently reserves for everyone else. And getting her bathed and ready for bed is SO much easier when Sam isn't there to suggest "Hey, let's pretend we're dogs and TOTALLY FREAK OUT!"

Sam is doing really well with her reading, which now includes words like "Hunt's Tomato Ketchup" and "Press OK to see a list of recorded shows." The other night she read three books to me. On the one hand, this was nice, because I just had to lie there and I think I may have dozed off a little. On the other hand, it takes about five times as long as my reading to her. But I suspect she'll pick up the pace. The unexpected consequence of teaching her to read, though, is that she is learning how to navigate things like the DVR to bring up her own shows. Only sometimes she decides to check out our shows as well. I came down on Saturday morning to find her and Mandy watching the decidedly NON kid friendly show Caprica, the prequel to the recent Battlestar Galactica remake.

"It's a show about a girl who has a robot for a friend!" Sam exclaimed when I asked her what the heck she was watching. "Only she's not really a robot. She's like a ghost or something."

This kind of pissed me off, because I hadn't watched the show yet and she hadn't given me a spoiler warning. Time to figure out the parental controls on the new DVR.